At the end of 2002, Edith Frost all but vanished from the music world. In six years she’d put out three albums, two singles, and an EP of sad, dreamy folk pop, and the last of those releases, the 2001 full-length Wonder Wonder (Drag City), sold roughly 15,000 copies–more than any of the others. But after finishing a European tour to promote it, Frost abruptly stopped playing shows. She stopped writing songs, stopped recording, and hardly even touched her guitar. Holed up in her apartment, she became, in her words, a “total hermit.”
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Rian Murphy, Drag City’s head of staff and Frost’s longtime producer, thinks bad timing had a lot to do with her self-imposed hiatus. The first of her two American tours to support Wonder Wonder began in early September 2001 and reached New York less than two weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, and she went to Europe at a time when Drag City had no licensing arrangements there–fans could only find her albums as imports. “She would go over there and bust her ass for nothing,” Murphy says, “just to try and get a foothold somehow. She worked really hard for a year, and then after that I think she was just like, ‘Fuck it!’”
Frost didn’t abandon all her creative outlets: she kept writing in her blog at edithfrost.com, which she’s maintained since 1995. Its thousands of entries include photos from as far back as her christening in 1964; she covers her college years, details her marriage and divorce, and delves into the minutiae of her day-to-day life, describing everything from the perils of bathing her kitten to breakups with long-term boyfriends. (After a recent split she consoled herself with the fact that she had “69 friendsters, if not 69 actual friends.”)
Early in 2004 Frost started going through old home tapes from her time in New York City in the mid-90s, and in May she made 11 of those songs available as a free downloadable album called Demos. (It’s on a net-only label called Comfort Stand that a friend of hers runs in Seattle.) Murphy wrote an online introduction to the disc, comparing the tunes to the first batch of unsolicited material Frost sent to Drag City–the stuff that got her signed to the label and ended up on her self-titled debut EP in 1996. Though Frost’s later recordings used a slew of backing musicians, her voice and guitar are front and center on Demos; Murphy calls it “pure Edith,” with a sound that’s “lonesome and unadorned.” Nine of the tracks here eventually made it onto various Frost LPs in more polished versions, but the album’s two slow-burning country covers–Floyd Tillman’s “I Get the Craziest Feeling” and Lefty Frizzell’s “Look What Thoughts Will Do”–are previously unreleased.
When: Sat 12/11, 10 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
