Got it covered: Kathleen Edwards tackles songs from icons like Prine, Petty and Springsteen​on February 12, 2025 at 1:47 pm

More than a decade ago, Kathleen Edwards recorded a stripped-down version of Bruce Springsteen’s 1993 song Human Touch. It was for practical reasons. A friend of Edwards who did music supervision for film and television had told her the industry was always looking for songs “with an interesting twist for television.”

So she recruited Afie Jurvanen, who performs under the name Bahamas, and the two recorded the song in one pass.

“It was one take, off-the-floor, him and I singing,” says Edwards. “We were each on a microphone, and he played guitar. Then, we added a little bit of piano and a little bit of strings to the bridge. But it was one pass. We never got it mixed. So it just fell into a vault of things that I never put out.”

Which is where it stayed for nearly 12 years. Edwards and Jurvanen recorded the song not long before Edwards decided to quit music. By 2014, she was running a coffee shop named Quitters in the suburbs of her hometown of Ottawa. She returned to music in 2020 and released Total Freedom, her fifth album and her first record of new material in eight years. Unfortunately, this was also when the pandemic hit. It derailed what should have been a triumphant relaunch of her career. Edwards did eventually tour the record and was on the road up until 2023 as “a DIY artist” without management. She signed with a new team and was convinced to record an interim project while working on a follow-up to Total Freedom.

Covers is now available for purchase online on vinyl and will be released in its entirety on streaming services later this year. It finds the singer interpreting songs by Tom Petty, Jason Isbell, Supertramp, R.E.M., Paul Westerberg, John Prine and the Flaming Lips.

Again, there were pragmatic reasons for the project. Five of the eight songs have been released digitally as singles so far.

“The Covers record was an idea to just wet the whistle of – this is going to sound terribly crude – the algorithm,” Edwards says. “I basically quit music right as streaming became an entity, so I really had not been active on a platform that basically is how everyone hears music these days.”

Edwards went into the studio with Jim Scott, an American audio engineer and producer who has worked with Wilco, Tom Petty and Robbie Robertson. Seven tracks were recorded in 10 days. But Edwards also remembered that abandoned Springsteen cover.

“When I listened to it again, I just thought, ‘This was as good as it was the day we recorded it,’ ” she says. “It made sense to put it on the Covers record. To try and chase and do a new version would just be a useless endeavour.”

Listening to it now, it seems unbelievable that Edwards’ version of Human Touch almost didn’t see the light of day. While it could hardly be classified as a Springsteen deep cut – it was a Top 20 hit and was even nominated for a Grammy – it’s certainly not a favourite in the Springsteen canon and seems sorely underappreciated these days. As with all the tracks on Covers, Edwards makes the song uniquely her own, turning the soaring 1990s pop original into a delicate hymn about the need for connection. While talk about algorithms and streaming platforms may suggest a certain mercenary thrust to the project, there is no denying the power of Edwards’ interpretations on Covers.