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Show Edwards to Play Cowboy Bar v- (if ) it,""m i . Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Edwards, who will perform at the Cowboy Bar Thursday night, March 10, started his career with a hit single, 'Sunshine', but decided that was not the life for him. "Having a hit single," explains Edwards, "can put you into an area by itself, a pop vein where things happen so quickly that if you're not careful, you can see yourself walking around with a microphone in your hand like some singer in Las Vegas. It's a money-oriented totally commercial Top 40 scene. "I didn't have that picture in mind when I started out. Like a lot of people, I just wanted to express myself through songwriting and singing and playing. Then all of a sudden, whammo! You either have to assume the pop role or not. I chose not to." The lanky, 6-3 tenor chose to express himself as an album artist, where the leisure of the listening format affords more time and more ambitious material. The most recent of his six albums Sailboat (Warner Bros.) which features Emmy Lou Harris on a duet cut, further explores the soft-rock nature-inspired idiom often associated with James Taylor. Tay-lor. Edwards is no whiner. A powerful voice and self-penned and uptempo material mark his thumping acoustic style. Says Edwards: "I like the concept of albums - they're my main interest. I try to interpret the songs as best I can, as clearly and concisely as possible for that format. I derive a tremendous amount of pleasure from the live concert also, but what I communicate rests in the Please turn to page 1 2B More Edwards fine. Now I just chop wood and write the songs. I've got a bunch of new tunes and new ways to put them across so it's a real kick." As for advice? Add one part practice to two parts perseverence. "The only thing to do is practice your tunes and get in front of people and play them any chance you can. If you have to work three jobs to do this, then work them. Continued from Page 7B grooves of the album." Both the pressures and the pace of the music business can trouble an artist who prefers to take one album at a time, one concert at a time, and still have time to sit on the back porch with a guitar. When you start out believing that, ideally, music is something some-thing you make with your friends, it takes time to learn not to be discouraged in the face of the sometimes blunt merchandising aspects of show-biz. '"I go back and forth all the time," he admits, "between being in love with the business and being disgusted with it. For a while there I was tempted to take up landscaping just because I wasn't happy about the way I was handling the business. "But now I've found inspiration both from the songs I write and the people I work with. Now I've been around long enough to know what's real and what's not for me, what's not my own concept. ' 4 My present feeling about the business is that it's real exciting. I'm feeling up about it. I'm on the phone all the time now or working out songs, trying to get with other musicians, trading licks with people-always on the lookout for a song. In short, I'm finally starting to relate to this business the way I should. Before, I was really aloof. If they liked it, fine; if not, |