For the last 22 years, Colorado Springs-based singer/songwriter Edie Carey has been working as a full-time performing songwriter, touring rigorously to promote her award-winning records, which now include Come Close, her 2002 live CD, When I Was Made (2004), Another Kind of Fire (2006), itsgonnabegreat (a 2008 collaboration with Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Rose Cousins), 2010′s Bring The Sea, 2014’s award-winning ’Til The Morning: Lullabies and Songs of Comfort (a duo album with Sarah Sample), and most recently, paper rings: 8 love stories, her 2016 collection of love songs commissioned by her fans. Looking back, Carey has to wonder if she’s accidentally ended up exactly where she was supposed to be.
Her second single “The Old Me” from her album The Veil was written during a Tuesday songwriting group. Capturing the changes in her life after becoming a parent, Carey’s voice carries wisdom, warmth, and even a pang of regret. That complexity is a through line in her music, as our interview shows.
Who are some of your musical influences?
I listened to (and made up a LOT of embarrassing dances to) a whole lot of 80’s pop growing up, but my dad listened to a ton of singer-songwriters: James Taylor, Carole King, Karla Bonoff, early Bruce Springsteen. I was getting steeped in that music just by virtue of his playing them regularly in the house. But it wasn’t until I heard Shawn Colvin when I was 15 that I became totally obsessed with folk-singer-songwriters. I lived abroad in Italy my junior year of college and went to see the Crash Test Dummies play in a tiny little village and they had this then-totally-unknown opener named Sarah McClachlan. I listened to her non-stop after that. I think of Bonnie Raitt, Aretha Franklin, Ani DiFranco, The Indigo Girls, Jonatha Brooke and her band The Story as my unwitting voice and songwriting teachers.
Name a perfect song and tell us why you feel that way.
I think Shawn Colvin’s “Diamond in the Rough” is an absolutely perfect song. The story is so compelling and haunting and confessional — and her percussive, plaintive, open-tuning guitar part is just undeniable. It’s the perfect marriage of lyrics, mood and groove.
Explain the title of your album, The Veil. Does it have an overarching theme?
The album title comes from the title track “The Veil” which I wrote in January of 2020, a week after my kids and I were in a serious car accident and about two months before COVID closed down the world. In one verse of that song the veil refers to the thin shroud of security we want to believe we have between us and danger, and how disturbing it is when that shroud is suddenly torn away. I soon noticed other forms the veil theme took in songs I had already written and ones I wrote as the pandemic carried on: the wedding veil and the intricacies of a marriage, the painfully thin barrier between life and death, the blind spots which keep us from seeing ourselves and others clearly, and the opaque space between who we are now and who we’ve been. The veil “thread” runs through every song on the record.
Who would you love to collaborate with? why?
I’ve always loved Peter Gabriel’s soulful voice and his rich, eclectic, and often massive production. (“In Your Eyes” is another truly perfect song.) I’ve done so much stripped down production on my past records, but on a number of the songs on The Veil, producer Scott Wiley and I loved creating more of a wall of sound. I’d love to see what the next step in that production direction could look like with Peter Gabriel at the board.