EF: It went well. It was hard because it was the longest tour I've ever done. It was longer than I ever want to do again -- 21 shows in 25 days on the road. It was a real, total pleasure to tour with Lullaby [for the Working Class]. They're all great guys, and it was great playing with them. They ended up helping me on my set. (The tour) was mostly (to) places I had never been before, so there were a lot of weird scenarios. You just walk into some place you've never been, and there were some kind of stinky shows. There were a lot of great ones, like Portland and Seattle, San Francisco. Playing Tuscan was amazing, with Vic Chestnut. We opened and he was backed by Calexico. It was at the Hotel Congress -- you play downstairs in the club, and as a musician, they give you a free room. You can get totally drunk and just waddle up to your room. That was just a really great night. It's this old-timey hotel. I paid $15 extra and got my own room. It was so cool.

Splendid: You produced the new album, Telescopic, with Royal Trux?

EF: Neil Haggerty produced that. I'm not on the production credits. I just kind of did, "Ok, Mr Haggerty." But he was the producer on that. It's credited to Adam and Eve, but it's really him. Jennifer was out of town at the time. I keep reading in reviews, "Neil and Jennifer produced it," but really it was him. But let the legend grow larger. There are all these mistakes in the press -- I really laugh. That's why it's cool to have a website because I can put up caveats. Sometimes it's embarrassing though because I'll go back later and be like, "That was ultra-sensitive of me," and take it off. But during this last tour, I forget in what town, they did a write-up for the tour -- "She's touring with ex husband Ryan Hembrey" -- which is so wrong. We were boyfriend and girlfriend and I have an ex husband, but he's in New York and he's not Ryan Hembrey.

Splendid: How long have you had your website (edithfrost.com)?

EF: O, God, I've had it in different mutations since the beginning of '95. Early '95. I had a cowgirl website for about a year with bios on different cowgirl people. And I had a Palace website for awhile. At one point I had three sites, one kind of about myself, one about the cowgirls and one about Palace, but finally I axed those -- it was all Edith, all the time.

I keep moving it. It's been on a lot of different services since I keep moving myself. I've had something up for 3 or 4 years.

EF: I wanted to put it [the URL] on Calling Over Time, but I didn't have edithfrost.com yet. I had already been on like 6 different services, so we really couldn't print it then. Now edith.com is just a link to wherever I'm at now. Right now it's Tripod. Plus I don't think the guys at Drag City think -- it's like: "Come on, let me do it." "No website address, that's so uncool to put on a record cover." It's just an aesthetic thing. But I made them do [for Telescopic].

Splendid: It's interesting to find an artist who does (her) own site.

EF: Well, I keep trying to find other people to do my work for me, but nobody has stepped out to say they will. It would be cool to have 5 different fan sites about you, but nobody ever does.

Splendid: Do you think it's maybe because your site is so thorough?

EF: I go through things like "I don't want to do this anymore, screw this. I'm gonna go off-line, take it all down and just let other people do it if they want to." But I never do. It's never the way I really want it to be. I never have enough time to devote to screwing with it. I keep piling stuff on it. It needs a lot of pruning. I'll chop whole sections off and say screw that, and then I'll add to other sections. I like to do it, but it's kind of a pain in the ass too.

Splendid: How did you get into computers?

EF: I've had a computer since right out of high school. My dad gave me an old Apple II Plus - this is '82. I even had a modem for that, it was a 300 baud modem. O' my God, I really got into that right away. I had friends who had Commodores and stuff, but it took me a little longer to get into it. It was finally when I got one through my dad. Then he got me an IBM. It was a hand-me-down from his office. It was a really old one. And then I didn't use it for a time, until me and my boyfriend at the time, when I was living in Austin, started using it again. Bill was really into computers and he ended up using it for programming music stuff. This was even a year or two before MIDI. They had a sequencer program you could use on an Apple II plus. Then for a long time, after we broke up, I let him have the computer because he was using it and I wasn't. This was way before the internet, at least before the internet as it is now. There were BBS's, which I did a little bit and that was fun, but finally, like in '94, I got another computer and got online. I got on CompuServe, and I was like, "O' my God, this is so cool" I just had the ASCII interface, I didn't even have Windows yet. I didn't "see" the internet until a little bit later. I was like the internet must be like Disneyworld because you get to see pictures and stuff. I can't wait to do that. Then I got on AOL, then I outgrew that. Then I got real service. As soon as I saw a website, I was like, "I gotta do that. I have to have one. I'm gonna have the best cowgirl website ever" cause I collect cowgirls.

Splendid: When did you start collecting cowgirls?

EF: I started when I moved to New York City. My mom asked me what I wanted, what she should be looking for for me when she went to garage sales. She wants to have this mission for you, to look for something for you. So I told her cowgirls. This was in '90. So she started finding and sending to me all these, a million, billion different, figurines. Old time - I said they have to be cool, old-timey cowgirls. Anything related to that is fine. And so she was happy with that because it was a very broad range of stuff you can get. I had to ask her to stop because I have no room. They're all in boxes. I have the tiniest apartment now and there is just no way I could collect them now. I said just paper stuff now; if it's flat I can stack it. My sister said she needed blankets, years ago. She still gets blankets. Lucy had to go, "Mother, no more blankets."

Splendid: You used to work in New York for Muze [the music database company]?

EF: Yeah, I did, for a couple of years. When I started out I was doing data entry, entering CDs, songs, song titles. And then I was checking data. I quit that one. I quit that one to become a freelance HTML programmer. Actually, I quit the day I got the phone call from Drag City. That was the last straw. It was like now I have a really good reason to screw it - I'm gonna have a record. It was really dumb, but I was like, I'll never get the chance to do this again. I wanna quit really bad and now this record company called me, so I'm gonna march right in there and go, "I quit. I'm going to be a rock star." And I did. I went at lunchtime, to my boss' office, and said I had to quit. "I'm gonna go out to lunch and never come back. " All he said was, "bummer".

It was a great job because all the people I immediately worked with were musicians and very cool people. But it was all this politics, which I just hate, so it was a drag too. And also, I had this constant flow of CDs, brand new releases, coming over my desk that I was checking data on and listening to. You could listen to anything on headphones at work. So I was listening to absolutely everything. It got me to the point that I was just burned out on it, 'cause you're hearing every single thing that comes out. It was one of the reasons why I decided never to work in music again because it made it a chore, hearing it 24 hours a day, then going home and trying to do it yourself. It was overload.

EF: I wasn't playing out that much. I had been playing on my own, at home, and I was, I wasn't playing my own stuff, but doing country and rockabilly for a couple of years before I left there. Since about '93. But as far as solo stuff, I had a couple of shows before I left, but mainly that all started after I moved here.

Splendid: Are you still doing odd jobs, non-music jobs?

EF: I still do odd jobs. I had a part time job doing HTML when I moved here, but for the past year or so I've just been doing music. I did this delivery job for a friend right before Christmas filling in for him when he went to England. And it was great; really pretty easy, just a lot of driving. I got to just drive and listen to tapes and the radio.

Splendid: I saw on your site that you have a new single coming?

EF: We have to get the art work done, and after that hopefully it will be ready real soon, in the next three or four months. Hopefully Archer Prewitt can still do the art work, but he's just so busy right now. Just like every record I've put out, this one has been left hanging up on the art work. But it's actually a really great single. I really love it.

It came out really well. The guy who engineered it died, Phil Bonnet. I didn't know him before the recording, but he was just an excellent, amazing engineer. It was really shocking, weird to hear about what had happen to him right as I came back into town.

Splendid: What's the single?

EF: "Love is Real" is the a-side. The b-side is called "Between Us" together with "The Last One", which we did live in the studio -- me singing and Ryan Hembrey on guitar. It was just a totally off the cuff thing. It's a really old song actually. The single is really full, especially the a-side. A sparkling a-side kind of single. It's a happy medium between the new and the old album. It's not quite as wacked, as weird. It's a little more normal sounding, but with a full band. Archer [Prewitt] played drums and all this percussion. Ryan Hembrey played bass; some upright and some electric. Rick Rizzo plays some guitar, and Mark Greenbery from the Cocktails played keyboard, organ.

EF: No, It's not. It's hard. It's hard to just take the time and work on it. It's a discipline. I suck that way. I can go months and months and not write a thing. But now I kinda have to put out to keep up. So it's kind of difficult. I'd rather let it come when it wants to and not have to take it so seriously.

Splendid: Is it the music or the lyrics that take the time?

EF: It's the same thing. It all comes together in the same thing. It's the discipline of sitting down and trying to craft something -- taking the time to sit down and work. It just takes hours to do that. You do a little bit every day -- at least sit down to play music and work on it. Especially when I'm touring, forget about it. I want to be alone when I write, and there is no private time on tour. That's why I want to take a couple of months off when I get back from Europe. I just want to chill for the rest of the summer and write; get back to that. I've written a few things since the last record was recorded, but not as much as I would like.

Splendid: Your lyrics seem like very structured short stories. Is that your intent? I mean, there is a definite "lyrical yarn" quality to them. Do you like being Edith The Storyteller?

EF: Gosh, I never considered myself a very good storyteller, but I'd sure like to be. To me, it seems like most of my songs are very self-centered and talk about feelings, feelings, feelings, and they don't have much of a story line other than that.

Splendid: What is Marfa, as in Marfa Music, your publishing company?

EF: That's a town in Texas. It's a really tiny town in Texas where the artist Donald Judd has/had a compound. I guess it's still there. The first band I had, really, was called the Marfa Lights. It's a reference to these mysterious lights that are seen outside of town where nobody is at. They look like campfires or something, but nobody is out there. Kind of like the Northern Lights, but some mysterious phenomenon. I've never been there actually, but the guitar player in the band came up with the name. I named my publishing company after that in honor of the band.

Splendid: Did you sing in the band?

EF: Ya. It was Edith and Jeff, which was him and me as a duet, then we got a bass player and a drummer.

Splendid: You're everywhere right now - you show up on Chris Mills' new album, on Smiling Pets (the Beach Boys tribute) and on the Bob Wills tribute.

EF: I've gotten to do some really cool stuff and it was always easy to do and fun.

Splendid: I read on your site that you did some work with the Willard Grant Conspiracy around Christmas. They're a band I haven't heard of. Who are they?

EF: They're a band out of Boston. They have records out on Slow River, which is Rykodisc. They're friends of mine and flew me out there. They're more popular in Europe. They tour Europe all the time, but they've never toured the U.S. I'm actually about to do a tour with them, opening for them, in Europe, in June, for three weeks. It's going to be great - all over Europe.

The lead singer, Robert Fisher, has been letting me, every time I play Boston, crash out in his place, which is this beautiful, old-timey house. So he had me out there right around New Year's. I went for a week and recorded.

Splendid: Do you like playing on other people's stuff?

EF: Yeah, it's easy, it's fun. You barely have to do anything. You just come in for a hour and do something, and you get all these props for it, later on. You didn't hardly have to do anything. It's great.

EF: He does a lot of work period. If you do any work at all in (Chicago), you have to work with Jim O'Rourke. At least 25% of your time.

Splendid: Are you planning to record any covers? Say, an EP of songs you like or on a theme?

EF: I'd love to do that, but I haven't done it yet just because the complicated logistics of securing the rights to release them. It would be a big pain in the ass for Drag City, so I don't think they'd really dig getting involved with something like that. O' well.