{"id":10937,"date":"2015-08-28T12:55:58","date_gmt":"2015-08-28T16:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=10937"},"modified":"2015-08-28T12:55:58","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T16:55:58","slug":"a-man-in-full","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/a-man-in-full\/","title":{"rendered":"A Man In Full"},"content":{"rendered":"

September 2015 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Singer songwriter Jonathan Edwards makes his home in Maine.<\/span><\/h3>\n

Interview by Colin W. Sargent<\/span><\/p>\n

\"A-Man-in-Full-Sept15\"It\u2019s a crisp afternoon in the Spurwink section on the Cape Elizabeth coast. What invisible hand is conducting us inland from Route 77 and the Spurwink Meeting House, only to slow to a stop in front of an understated sage-green ranch house in broad daylight?<\/span><\/p>\n

Surprise: Jonathan Edwards, the folk star who brought us \u201cSunshine\u201d during the darkest days of the Vietnam War, lives here. With an Ed Harris intensity to his eyes, he welcomes us at the door and leads us barefoot downstairs to his studio through a maze of photos and awards to a comfortable leather couch. Like a shadow, his dog Holly, jumps up beside him. Through the windows, in squares of green, are the raised beds of the Victory garden we\u2019ve heard he prizes out back. First impression: He doesn\u2019t look like a marathon runner who\u2019s just finished a race. He\u2019s about to start one.<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019re from Northern Minnesota. Can you show me something in this house that proves that?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

He gets up and returns with a haunting black-and-white photo of a young woman in the late 1940s holding a guitar.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This is from Minnesota. It\u2019s a picture of my [birth] mom. I was adopted when I was nine months old. This other snapshot is me. It was taken the day I was adopted. It\u2019s the cover of my new album, Tomorrow\u2019s Child<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Edwards, seated on his kiddie seat with the furious seriousness of the very young, extends both hands toward the viewer, searching. Produced by Darrell Scott and accompanied by Nashville cats Vince Gill, Jerry Douglas, Shawn Colvin, and Alison Krauss, the album is Edwards\u2019s springboard to live performances that will zigzag across venues vast and intimate: Stonington Opera House in Maine; Birchmere, in Alexandria, Virginia; Timberline Lodge Amphitheater, in Government Camp, Oregon; and One Longfellow Square in Portland, September 9 and 10.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Searching seems to be a motif in Tomorrow\u2019s Child<\/em>.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. Everything I do comes to bear on what I do and what I write.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the striking songs on your new CD is \u201cI Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground,\u201d written and recorded in 1928 by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. It tunnels into your memory, has North Carolina roots, is gently subversive. Is that what attracted you to it?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I wish I was a mole in the ground<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, I wish I was a mole in the ground<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

If I\u2019s a mole in the ground I\u2019d root that mountain down<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

And I wish I was a mole in the ground.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This song just spoke to me. Joe Walsh, who lives in Portland, is on the board at One Longfellow Square and teaches at Berklee [College of Music in Boston], suggested he arrange it and I record it. It\u2019s about heartbreak, sadness, and defiance.<\/span><\/p>\n

When James Taylor\u2019s new album was released this summer, it topped the Billboard 200. It was hard not to think, they\u2019re looking for a new Tony Bennett.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I enjoy the audiences, period. Sometimes I\u2019ll look out and say, \u201cI see a lot of old people in the audience.\u201d Then I\u2019ll speak to the new members. \u201cThanks very much for bringing your parents.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Jonathan\u2019s fianc\u00e9e, Sandy Owen, says:<\/em> \u201cThis is a good time to mention Jonathan\u2019s album is number one on the folk charts.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Sandy is a Kennebunk native; they met during a concert in Blue Hill, at an old club called The Left Bank. Edwards says, \u201cI saw her in the crowd.\u201d They talked after the concert, grew closer upon further meetings after years passed. She seems already in deep harmony with him; there\u2019s a rhythm to their motions. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Edwards:<\/em> I had to decide I was ready for this. I take better care of myself than I ever did. There\u2019s going to be a lot of touring this year.<\/span><\/p>\n

A colleague saw you perform in Newport, Rhode Island, decades ago. Take us there.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

It was a little tiny club twice the size of this room. It was right across from the harbor. I totally felt at home there. I met Cheryl Wheeler there. She\u2019s a friend. Also in Newport, I played aboard a ship, the Black Pearl<\/em>. I was there for a week. That\u2019s where I got sailing in my blood, after I met<\/span> Barclay Warburton.<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you have a boat now?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

No time to dream of doing that.<\/span><\/p>\n

If there were a cocktail called the Jonathan Edwards, how would a 21st century mixologist shake you up? Some folk, a dash of balladeer, some bitters?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

(A quick smile<\/em>.) I\u2019m not so sure about bitters. I\u2019m not preaching the horrors, not me.<\/span><\/p>\n

So you share nothing with the scary Calvinistic theologian of the same name?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dark rum then, for the drink called the Jonathan Edwards?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

No dark rum. In the late 1970s I used to live in St. Croix, where they serve light rum. I got used to it.<\/span><\/p>\n

What do you like about playing at Jonathan\u2019s in Ogunquit?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Everything about the venue I like. I\u2019ve been 20 years playing there. Jonathan West is a dear friend.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to urban legend, you almost didn\u2019t get to record your monster hit single.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

It was late one night, in the early a.m. We were recording an album, and the sound engineer and I were the only ones in the studio. Recording [with magnetic tapes] was very young then. He inadvertently recorded over one of the songs he\u2019d spent the afternoon recording. He looked for it everywhere, everywhere. Ironically, the song was called \u201cPlease Find Me.\u201d Finally he gave up and said, Do you have something else that\u2019s three minutes long? I said, yeah. A last-minute substitution. I recorded it with the bass, came back and added the track with my 12-string, then a third track with drums. It was \u201cSunshine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What are your 30 best seconds in show business?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m standing at the foot of the Washington Monument in 1971, at a huge anti-war rally. It was a rose-colored dawn in the Potomac River Valley. I had just written \u201cSunshine.\u201d People had just started hearing it. [He waits two beats.] That song was the perfect song to play that morning.<\/span><\/p>\n

What are your worst 30 seconds in show business?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I was opening for Pat Sky at Boston University or BC. As I neared the stage, a guy in the audience yelled, You suck<\/em>. What to do? You do the best you can. At the microphone I said, Thank you very much. Usually they don\u2019t say that until I\u2019ve played three or four songs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tell us one time you were forced to play \u201cSunshine\u201d when you didn\u2019t want to.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s never been a time. I have always been one-hundred-percent grateful. If I had never had another song, I\u2019d be thrilled to leave this world remembered for that one song.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sandy Owen hands Edwards a glass of water. (This is a good sign, because it means he\u2019s going to sing, right here in the basement studio of his home in Cape Elizabeth.)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

He slings the guitar around his neck and sings it stunningly it like he just wrote it for five people. Better than the first time anybody ever heard it. The day before, he\u2019d sung live on NPR\u2019s <\/em>World Cafe. Some guys have all the talent.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

You know so many fellow musicians. How about Paul McCartney?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t met him, but I want him to hear my version of \u201cShe Loves You.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Can we hear it?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

It seems impossible, to cover that song. The Mt. Everest of cover challenges. How could he possibly make it his own? Then Edwards starts singing, and it\u2019s so wistful and lonely the way he plays it, it makes your hair stand on end. It\u2019s track number five on his album <\/em>My Love Will Keep (2011). To hear it, visit https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=z9075lmLck8.<\/em> <\/span><\/p>\n

Where\u2019d you go after you lived in Boston?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1973, I lived in Nova Scotia, farming 680 acres. I lived there for eight years. My daughter Grace was born at the top of a hill in our cabin in 1976. One day, I got a phone call. It was Emmylou Harris, calling from L.A., calling me out of this farm. She said, What are you doing up there? She asked me to sing with her on her Elite Hotel<\/em> album.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two years ago, I took Grace back to see where she was born. When we pulled in, I caught sight of a neighbor behind a team of horses pulling a manure spreader. When he recognized me, he brightened. \u2018Jon, get out of that car and spread some manure for me.\u2019<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

As we talk, he and Sandy take us out to show us the garden, and this isn\u2019t a haphazard garden. It is in perfect tune, in raised beds, with fall\u2019s first monarch butterfly floating by: basil, cilantro, parsley, borage, lacinato kale, countless tomato plants, blackberries, and raspberries.<\/em><\/p>\n

What\u2019s musical about a garden?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The fertility. The order. The sense it makes to me, across the seasons, months.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are ocean views everywhere in Cape Elizabeth. You didn\u2019t choose one. Is there a hidden part of you, or do you carry your own shore with you?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

We are very near the beach. We can ride our bikes there. I can listen here. I listen to the guy next door get up and go to work.<\/span><\/p>\n

In your hit \u201cDon\u2019t Cry Blue,\u201d you write, I\u2019ve got to know the feel of every mile<\/em>. How does this mile feel, out here in Cape Elizabeth, now that it\u2019s been your home?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

For five years. I\u2019m feeling it really intimately and really well. When we leave, I tell my neighbors, Please, there\u2019s no way I can pick these vegetables in the garden. Take anything you can, and they watch it for me. A few times a year some friends visit and we play outdoors. Anyone who wants to stops by.<\/span><\/p>\n

Balancing global and local, do your neighbors think of you as the performer or the guy with the garden?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

All of that.<\/span><\/p>\n

What are your favorite haunts here?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

We like to go to David\u2019s in South Portland, and Local 188. I never saw the<\/em> Bob Marley. But I love Maine\u2019s Bob Marley.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tell us about your first trip to Maine.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Our band, Headstone Circus [they also played under names like St. James Doorknob, and Finite Minds] had a gig at Loring Air Force Base, in way-the-hell northern Maine. At the NCOs club, not the officers club. I was wearing my vest with the stars from the American flag on it. We imagined going up on stage: Who were these hippies? It took forever to drive there the night before. Along the way, a crazy guy (I can say that because he would say it himself) in our band, Joe Dolce, acquired this rutabaga, the biggest I\u2019ve ever seen. The night got darker and darker until we saw the giant runway lights wincing back and forth in white. (He waves his hands slowly.) Shhhh, shhhh. The lights were frightening, mind-splitting. Joe told us to pull over at the base of the lights, with the runway spilling out in front of us. He jumped out with his rutabaga. In our headlights he out walked toward the lights, holding the mystical rutabaga over his head. Poof. The lights went out, the sky went black. We looked at each other. Whoaaaaaa.<\/span><\/p>\n

Okay, why did you really come here?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Maine: It doesn\u2019t burn, shake, or fall into the sea. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

September 2015
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