Bleu Edmondson Breaks it All Down on 'Lost Boy'

May 11, 2008
By Jennifer Litz
Special to LIVE!

Bleu Edmondson’s Lost Boy CD is THE top seller on popular Web site, LoneStarMusic.com. The Texas Music Chart has single “Last Last Time” that notched pretty boy Jack Ingram’s and just a few slots below sultry Miranda Lambert’s, who just finished crooning for the Country Music Awards. The new album has been long-awaited but well-received by critics and fans alike. Nobody deserves it more than self-effacing Edmondson, who alternates from the brooding introspection you’d expect from the author of nostalgic “The Echo” to a regular guy who just doesn’t want to overthink things.

Take, for instance, his album cover. Is Bleu in front of Gruene Hall? He does claim to love nearby San Antonio. But it’s deeper than that. Kind of.

“It’s sort of a collage,” Edmondson says. “It’s kind of symbolic. Some are bombed-out Eastern European buildings from the 1800s, and some are just some places in Austin and Dallas. There’s some significance in there, and some things I just thought looked cool.”

You see the same sort of fluid genius from the musician when he plays live. These days, Edmondson is prone to slipping in a few more intimate acoustic sets after his high-energy rock show, if time permits. “With the band, it’s loud, and real rocking. It should be a two or three-hour trip for people who pay their good money,” he says. “That’s really exciting for me. But with acoustic, I get to play songs I wouldn’t play with the band live, ‘cause they don’t fit into the show. And I get to play a lot more covers in the acoustic show, so I may do a stripped-down version of my songs, and then two Springsteen songs. Or Guy Clark, whatever. So that’s really fun. It’s really personal.”

Edmondson does get really personal on this new album. He says he had a four-year stint of tough times, and plenty of time to sit down and get perspective on it. It’s not that he had harder times than anyone else, he says, just that the pressures of his particular job invite professional scrutiny and personal hardship.

“The whole record, the title of it, that’s pretty autobiographical,” he says. “It’s funny, when it all came together, how there’s a recurring theme of faith, which was never intended. I didn’t see it until we put all the songs on the record. But ultimately that’s how it was—and as I’ve said before, it’s not an indictment of faith, and I’m not trying to promote it.” Edmondson says “Jesus is Crying” is one of his favorite songs, because it reflects his inability to make good decisions, something to which many can relate—even if they aren’t rock stars.

“It’s a fun job, but it’s also real scary sometimes,” Edmondson says. “Doesn’t matter how successful you are—ultimately if you do what I do, you’re inviting people into judge you. Which is a scary thing for musicians or entertainers period. Because most of the time we do this because we’re starved weirdos that want acceptance in some way. So it’s a scary thing for me to get up there and sing this song, and people could say, ‘that’s really stupid,’ or ‘that’s really great.’ In terms of that, it’s kind of demanding. On the other side, in terms of my personal life, this job does not make it easy at all. I have a lot of trust issues anyway—I mean, no girl is gonna get with me for being rich, cause I’m not rich, but I played 240 shows last year. I’m gone three weeks out of every month. So it’s a lot of separation, I gotta have a lot of trust and faith in whoever I decide to be with. But it’s no different than anyone else. It’s the same thing if you work down the street from each other, I guess.”

The album may have a heavier tone than his fans are used to. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Edmondson also points out that this record has more love songs than any of his others. And that “Resurrection,” for example, was co-written with Wade Bowen while they were messing around (with music) on a tour bus. (Edmondson isn’t the biggest fan of co-writing songs, though he got his input from his producer, Dwight Baker, a professional songwriter, for a few of them. He sums his proclivity for penning songs alone: “This is how Bleu is feeling, not him and four of his friends.”)

And he wasn’t in a funk the entire time he was writing it. “For me, most of time it [the songwriting process] starts with a line—a line will pop into my head, and I’ll jot it down.” He can come back to it: “I don’t necessarily have to be sad in one moment to write a sad song. I remember how many times I’ve been shit on in my life,” he says.

“It just happens that first record has ‘$50 and a Flask of Crown’ on it, and I wrote all those songs when I was 21—that’s the world I was living in. Then you grow up and kick around, and ask, ‘Where’s my place?’ I think I’ve found it. It’s dark, but I think it’s dark in a bad way.”

Will the next album be any brighter? Edmondson doesn’t know until he has time to write it.

“How it started is I picked up a guitar in college, taught myself to play, and started writing songs,” he says. “It all kinda snowballed from there. I don’t know what the end result or endgame is supposed to be. I didn’t say, ‘I should go start a band.’ It really was that quick and willy-nilly. Who knows? I could be a janitor in a year, or I could be blinging on MTV.”

To review all of Bleu Edmondson's music, get it on iTunes. (Click Here).