Somewhere on the tour supporting her 2012 album Voyageur, Kathleen Edwards sang herself ragged. Her natural vocal talent, all airy defiance, grew strained under the relentless performance pace. “I sang like shit every night and ended up canceling shows,” she told the New Yorker in 2020. “It was a horrible episode.” Edwards needed to reevaluate how she worked with her primary instrument, a doctor advised, so she wasn’t “gripping so hard every night.” What she relinquished was her grip on music, putting it down for nearly a decade before returning with the poised Total Freedom in 2020. On the follow-up, Billionaire, the relationship she’s been developing with her voice cracks wide open.
Across the album, a polished update of the rough-edged alt-country and folk rock that informed her first three LPs, Edwards’ voice elevates the storytelling, revealing characters, colors, and context with the slightest inflection. That narrative quality lies in her rose-colored vocal resonance on the chorus of “Little Red Ranger,” where she reunites with an Ontarian childhood friend who moved to Los Angeles, and in the way her natural vibrato curves toward nostalgia on “FLA,” a lively paean to the Sunshine State in which a trip south transports her to younger days, when music was still a dream. What a delight to hear Edwards age into the power of her voice, taking on a magnetism reminiscent of k.d. lang or Mary Chapin Carpenter.
That growth is most evident on the atmospheric title track, an almost hymnal reflection on the magnitude of loss, and the idea that the immense love you carry after someone passes is a kind of legacy in absentia. Edwards’ voice climbs the chorus like a creeping vine seeking the memory of sunlight: “If this feeling/Were a currency/I would be/A billionaire,” she sings, tiptoeing over the initial phrasing before releasing herself into the declaration. On the bridge, electric guitar (from Jason Isbell, who co-produced the album with Gena Johnson), violin, and viola rush alongside the cascading current of her voice, nudging her closer to the type of emotional cliff Brandi Carlile regularly dives off. This kind of arrangement, thick with sentiment, could easily derail into schmaltzy abandon, but the ache of her voice ushers everything closer to catharsis.
Unlike the composed Total Freedom, Billionaire feels more lived in. Isbell’s electric guitar widens each song’s trajectory—his ponderous solos push “Say Goodbye, Tell No One” and “Need a Ride” past the six-minute mark—and proves a formidable foil for Edwards’ voice. (Previously, the two collaborated on a fragile rendition of his Southeastern song “Traveling Alone” for the covers album Edwards released earlier in 2025.) Even in quieter moments like “Little Pink Door,” recorded live in one take, Isbell knows how to sashay close without stealing her light.
Edwards’ best writing comes from a place of bracing honesty. But she hedges on Billionaire. Twangy opener “Save Your Soul” appears lobbed at the rise-and-grinders and teems with stale warnings about investing in the wrong thing. (Compare that to the biting “Fools Ride,” from Total Freedom, where she quips, “Love is blind/Whoever bought that line must be a real sucker.”) On “Need a Ride,” she turns strident, taking aim at the hypocrisy lurking behind people’s escalating proclivity for offense. The song trades the possibility of substance for surface-level symbolism, reducing the examples it lists to mere metonymy. “People get worked up about a uniform/They’ve never had to wear before,” she sings, disdain seeping from her delivery. But it’s hard to side with Edwards without further particulars. She’s been far more successful when she loads a song with detail, as on “Six O’Clock News,” the opening track on her debut, Failer. The verses recount the antagonist’s troubles—crucial background to explain not only why he ended up a headline but why listeners should care. Billionaire may showcase the curling intricacy of her voice, but her songwriting seems less invested in striving for a similar complexity.
