Having spent the summer writing and recording in Finland, NYC-based musician Melanie Edwards recently returned home with a brand new album in hand. Her third solo album, entitled “Back to Basics”, was released on October 2nd and offers a classically-inspired sound with an array of dynamic musical arrangement and a quaintly authentic tone. Edwards defines herself as a musical scientist, combining two different worlds to forge something that comes together as a whole. Personally, whenever I hear the words ‘music’ and ‘science’ together in the same sentence, I immediately think either paradox or contradiction; however, the two don’t necessarily have to live apart.
These days, we often dissociate the soulful from the cerebral, but, as Edwards points out, it hasn’t always been this way. “Art relies on intuition and emotion,” she says. “Science toys with data and facts. But they are both inventive and curious. Look at Amelia Earhart: a writer and an aviator. Leonardo Da Vinci was a mathematician, scientist, painter and architect. As a musical scientist, I’m acting as a channel between the binary. I think art and science are best friends, but can get on each other’s nerves. We all wrestle with collective and individual duality, because paradox is a human condition, but there can be a beautiful balance, between the binary; it’s magic.”