It's not at all unusual that sin and redemption and the tension between them often frames the themes in the lyrics of 16 Horsepower's David Eugene Edwards; his Christian beliefs almost demand that he address these issues in his art with the same scrutiny that characterizes the expression of his personal faith.
But there are other, more secular battles that are fought just as passionately within the confines of 16 Horsepower, and, with the release of Folklore, the band's fifth full length album, the conflict between their electric side and their acoustic side is brought to light. The sparse and dusty expanse of an acoustic direction carries the day on Folklore, but just barely.

"Well, we're always in a constant battle between calming down and being loud," says Edwards with a laugh from his Denver home. "Primarily what we listen to is traditional music and classical music; quiet music. When we get together and play live, it's difficult to do that, because we want to play hard. We tour so much, and it happens to a lot of bands. You feel that pressure to do that, to give people and yourself that instant gratification. So it takes some control on our part. It was definitely a conscious decision. We've done tours before where half the show was all acoustic and the other half was electric. So we kept ourselves back and tried to get the intensity from other places, which is the most important thing to us; to not have to rely on electricity for intensity."

There is certainly no shortage of intensity on Folklore, even as the band dialed back the wattage in favor of a more traditional and authentically antique presentation. One of the new sources of inspiration and intensity for 16 Horsepower (Edwards on guitar and vocals, Pascal Humbert on bass, and Jean-Yves Tola on drums, combined with a rotating support staff) was found in the work of outside songwriters; for the first time in the band's recorded history, Edwards and 16 Horsepower have incorporated nearly as many cover versions - from the likes of Hank Williams and the Carter Family, as well as traditional Tuvan and Hungarian folk songs - as original compositions into an album. And slight addition resulted in a few rays of sunshine (particularly the Carters' "Single Girl") cutting through Folklore's bleak atmosphere causing a great deal of controversy among 16hp fans who have grown accustomed to the band's dour outlook and gothic country gospel mutation that plays like the jukebox in the truck stop on the road to hell.

"We were going to record an album of all traditional songs and we'd been planning on doing that for awhile," says Edwards. "We chose the ones that were of particular influence to us. We did some traditional songs but then we had some of our own that we felt were going to work with them. We love traditional songs, but we love playing our own music as well, so we wanted to put them alongside and see how it worked. We chose songs that were cohesive together. The only jarring differences are the happier songs. Some people are like, 'Ah, why did you put those on there? They break up the morose mood I was in at the time."

It seems incredibly petty for fans to upbraid Edwards for introducing a bit of light into his musical darkness; Folklore is still, on the whole, as archaic and as gloomy as anything in the band's previous catalog. Anyone carping about 16 Horsepower's apparent new attitude should consider themselves lucky at the prospect of even having a new album in hand at all; when the band went on hiatus last year, there were suspicions that they would not be returning as a group.

After the 2000 release of Secret South, 16 Horsepower took off for their standard European tour, a common occurrence for the band considering their voluminous and widespread support overseas. A subsequent tour after the release of the band's live album, Hoarse was mysteriously canceled with someone reporting "tensions within the band" as the cause. Although the band denied anything was afoot, 16 Horsepower's individual actions spoke much louder than their positively spinning press releases.

"Everybody needed a break; we'd been on tour since 1995 straight, I mean all the time," says Edwards. "We all have wives. I have two children. We have responsibilities that are more important than running around playing music, in a sense. We all needed time to take care of those things. So everyone stayed home and did their thing."

Further evidence of Edwards' seemingly moving away from the confines of 16 Horsepower came to the fore when he released a solo album under the name of Woven Hand, a project that was very much in the Folklore vein; a stripped-down acoustic album.

"Unfortunately, I don't have the means to take a year off;" says Edwards. "I don't have the resources. So I ended up recording this solo album, and I sent it to (German label) Glitterhouse and they loved it and put it out. And I toured Europe for about four weeks when it came out, and that was great, because it kept me going."

Rock history is littered with the corpses of bands who insisted that their members' solo albums had no bearing on the health and continuation of the parent band. Even with Edwards' denials that there was no serious talk of dissolving 16 Horsepower, fans and the media suspected that things within the band's tight knit circle were in flux. In a way, they were right.

"I'm sure there were thoughts of it," says Edwards of his solo venture. "There weren't any worried discussions about it, or anything like that. It's changed where we are in certain ways. And it's not only that; it's time and life that have done that as well. Your thoughts about everything are slightly different. Everyone thought we were breaking up. But it's not so cut and dried as that."

The hiatus that 16 Horsepower took in order to recharge their batteries turned out to be a very good decision. After the sessions that created Folklore, 16 Horsepower felt rejuvenated and energized, and the band jointly declared their intentions to remain together. With the band's renewed commitment came the inevitability of what direction a new album should take. The decision to make Folklore an acoustic album seemed almost a foregone conclusion.

"I guess it's been going on for awhile, it's just been working its way this way," says Edwards. "When it came time to make the record, it was pretty much unspoken. It was just the way it was. That's what we were gonna do, because everybody was in that mindset. And all of our songs start acoustically, with a guitar or a banjo and they develop from there, and there are a million things we could think of to add. That was the challenge of the record; to see what we could take away."

In very close proximity to the making of both Woven Hand and Folklore came the unbelievable news of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Although Edwards knows that his music may have been subconsciously shaped by those events, he is less inclined to accept that the attacks made a significant impact on his lyric writing at the time.

"For me personally, those are the kinds of things I'm singing about all the time." says Edwards. "To me, the events are happening all the time, whether it's between two people or two nations. To me, there's no difference in the heart of the matter, in the attitudes of the hearts of people. That's the subject I deal with in every song. It did put a big spin on what we were choosing to sing about. It's not to say it wasn't a horrendous thing. It was. I just deal more on the personal, one-to-one level between people and their relationship together and how it parallels that.”

There are already plans in the works to follow up Edwards' Woven Hand album, and Edwards and the band are busy coming up with the material for what will be the next 16 Horsepower album. There is, of course, the inevitable touring that will accompany Folklore, the bulk of it occurring in Europe, the hotbed of 16 Horsepower's greatest support. Which leads to an interesting question: will 16 Horsepower be rearranging the new material for a more electric presentation, or mount an acoustic tour to match the somber and quieter tones found on the album?

"It's inevitable that they're going to be more charged than normal," says Edwards of the Folklore songs' live personalities. "There's really no controlling that, and that has do with what it takes to amplify all our instruments and what it takes to get the sounds that we need live. That automatically makes them louder than they would be on the record, and have a little bit more of an edge to them. They will be of that mood, but they will be a little more lively."

Ultimately, any discussion of 16 Horsepower must naturally lead to a discourse on God and His role in the work that 16 Horsepower has done over the past seven years. Edwards doesn't hesitate to give celestial credit where credit is due.

"The only reason I'm doing what I'm doing is because He's allowed it," says Edwards. "I never figured I'd be making a living doing this. The music itself is not commercial. It's fairly melancholy and a lot of people don't like that. And the lyrical content, as well: me being a Christian and singing from that point of view can turn a lot of people off. I was absolutely amazed that we got a record contract in the first place, much less a major label. To be going this long and to have such a following, especially in Europe, to be able to go over and play whenever we want, it's just a given that it comes from Him."

Even though his lyrics rarely seem to directly proselytize, Edwards seems to intuitively understand the discomfort that his beliefs can raise in the secular realm, sometimes even among his bandmates. When Edwards considers the question of whether he looks at himself as the new generation of circuit riding man of the cloth, a position once held by his traveling Nazarene preacher grandfather, he defers to his position as an avocation rather than a calling.

"I just think that I'm a musician," he says with a dry chuckle. "I don't consider myself a preacher of any sort. Other than the fact that each person who is a believer has this responsibility, to share what they know and what they've experienced. Because it's not just a matter of spirituality, it's a matter of life and death to a Christian. The way you believe and the message is of the utmost importance to get out. That's what I've tried to do, and that's why I make music."

Amen, brother. Amen.