Hey friends!
I started this Travelogue on a plane over Greenland, but I’m finishing it here in a temporary hideout in Maple Ridge, BC where we've been enjoying four days without drives. As you faithful readers know, I’m writing a book to accompany the new album, and recent events have made it feel increasingly relevant—maybe I could even say important—to send out into the world. But that kind of writing requires a species of concentration that gigging doesn't easily afford. Thankfully, we've got another stretch of downtime starting next week on Salt Spring Island.
We’ve just returned from our first visit to Ireland, with pictures to prove it. More on that below, but first, we're getting back on the road tomorrow, and we'd love to see some familiar faces along the way!
Spring Tour Dates
Tue Jan 28 • Bowen Island, BC • Tir-na-nOg Theatre
Wed Jan 29 • Powell River, BC • Cranberry Community Hall
Fri Jan 31 • Courtenay, BC • Old Church Theatre
Sat Feb 1 • Quadra Island, BC • cameo at T Buckley Trio’s Quadra Concerts show
Sun Feb 2 • Quadra Island, BC • afternoon show at Heriot Bay Inn
Fri Feb 7 • Brentwood Bay, BC • Village Empourium
Thu Feb 13 • Port Alberni, BC • Char’s Landing
Fri Feb 14 • Qualicum Beach, BC • Oceanside Folk/Roots Club w/ special guests Kimberley MacGregor, Tom Neville and Mick Sherlock
Sat Feb 15 • Sooke, BC • Sooke Folk Music Society
Sun Feb 16 • Victoria, BC • Victoria Folk Music Society
Wed-Sun Feb 19-23 • Montreal, QC • Folk Alliance International
Wed Feb 26 • Salt Spring Island, BC • house concert
Thu Feb 27 • Duncan, BC • Duncan Showroom
Fri Feb 28 • Nanaimo, BC • Harbour City Concerts
Sat Mar 1 • Gabriola Island, BC • Agi Hall
Sun Mar 2 • Vancouver, BC • Notional Space w/ special guest Kathleen Nisbet
Wed Mar 5 • Port Townsend, WA • Palindrome
Sat Mar 8 • Seattle, WA • Seattle Folklore Society
Sun Mar 9 • Olympia, WA • Traditions Fair Trade
Mon Mar 10 • Portland, OR • feature at NW Portland Hostel open mic
Thu Mar 13 • Portland, OR • Artichoke Afternoons
Fri Mar 14 • Eugene, OR • Tsunami Books
Sat Mar 15 • Ashland, OR • house concert
Fri Mar 21 • Walnut Valley, CA • Devil Mountain Coffee House w/ Laura Zucker
Sat Mar 22 • Sacramento, CA • house concert w/ Justin Farren
Sun Mar 23 • Mokelumne Hill, CA • house concert w/ Justin Farren
Fri-Sun Apr 4-6 • Tucson, AZ • TBA
Wed Apr 9 • Las Cruces, NM • Cruces Creatives
Wed Apr 23 • Kansas City, MO • Waldo Folk
Fri Apr 25 • Nashville, TN • WMOT’s Finally Fridays at 3rd and Lindsley
Sat Apr 26 • Asheville, NC • house concert
Sun Apr 27 • Weaverville, NC • house concert
Wed Apr 30 • Roanoke, VA • 3rd Street Coffeehouse
Sat May 3-4 • Lewis Center, OH • Central Ohio Folk Festival
Sun May 4 • Ferndale, MI • house concert
Sat May 10 • Maple Plain, MN • Sun Dog Farm
Tue May 13 • Appleton, WI • Stone Arch Brewpub
Sat May 17 • Chicago, IL • Acoustic Renaissance w/ Heather Styka
Sun May 18 • Bishop Hill, IL • Bishop Hill Creative Commons
That'll bring us back around to Alberta, where we'll be spending most of the summer. As always, all the details are on www.scottcook.net, and we're hugely grateful for any grapevine-rustling you can do.
Where Else Should We Play?
As you can see, there's still a bunch of open space in our Stateside schedule, and we'd love to fill it in, especially considering that this is likely the last time for a good while that Pamela will be joining me on a run through the USA. The absolute insanity of the P2 visa process has resulted in us donating ('cause what else can you call it?) over $6000 USD to the Department of Homeland Security over the past couple years for the privilege of touring in the country, and eventually it starts to feel like throwing good money after bad. The take-away is, if you want the two of us to swing through your state, now's the time. Reach out to scottcooksongs@gmail.com and hopefully we can sort something out.
Why Am I Leaving My Home Again?
We had a wonderful month at home, with friends and family and even a couple cozy living-room jams, the stuff of life! I also put in a lot of work on the book for the new album, which I'd actually hoped to finish before we got back on the road. Pamela wasn't surprised at all that I didn't meet my wildly ambitious timeline, but I'm a lifelong self-deluder. As Corin Raymond wrote in his big album/book Dirty Mansions, “we have to fool ourselves about these things just to make them possible.”
We tore ourselves away from home January 8th, piloting Roadetta over the snowy Rockies to Kelowna for a visit with Pamela’s daughter before she flew off to Mexico to sail across the Sea of Cortez(!), then to Langley to sing for a surprisingly full house at the hidden gem Bez Arts Hub alongside our friends Russ Rosen, Ivan Boudreau and Kathleen Nisbet. I was actually kinda nervous getting back up to do our thing after a month or so off the stage, but it felt potent and wonderful to be back in the saddle.
at Bez Arts Hub, photo by Norm Cook
We crossed the border the next day for a sold out show at Concerts At Our House in Seattle, a legendary livingroom series that’s hosted well over 200 shows over the years, and truly made a family out of the folks. These two van-gabonds are inexpressibly grateful for all the love labour that keeps this whole thing turning.
The Emerald Isle
The next day we hopped on a plane to Ireland for our first time, to showcase at the Your Roots Are Showing conference. Pamela had never been to Europe at all, so I got a vicarious thrill out of her first visit to a castle and all the inevitable mind-bending that happens when New World kids like us first encounter really old stuff.
We drove around the southeastern side, through Cork to Killarney, and checked into the Gleneagle Hotel for six nights at the conference. The first night they hosted a concert from the big names on the bill, including Irish artists Liam O’Moanli of the Hothouse Flowers and Enda Scahill of We Banjo Three. At one point there were five banjos going at the same time—a new record for these eyes—in the capable hands of Enda Scahill, Dirk Powell, Rhiannon Giddens, Alison Brown and Ron Block, the last three of whom have banjo-playing Grammys on their shelves back home.
Our hometown pals Billie Zizi and Celeigh Cardinal were both showcasing at the conference with their full bands, as well as fellow Canadians Sarah Jane Scouten, Ellen Froese, Julian Taylor, Allison Lupton, La Famille Leblanc, Melisande, Rose Morrison and Dave Gunning, a whole bunch of Aussie friends including Khristian Mizzi and Aine Tyrell, and our buddy Ben Gage from Akron, Ohio, who we just shot a few videos with back in November, like this one:
We attended a bunch of workshops, did six-minute speed-dating sessions with various presenters and industry people, watched as many showcases as we could, and dug the late-night trad jams in the hotel bar.
On the last day they arranged a “Music Trail” around Killarney, and we got to see Dirk and Amelia Powell and Rhiannon Giddens play at Sunday morning mass and then in a rowdy pub with no cover charge—the kind of gig we’ve all done, but they probably haven’t done in ages. We could barely hear anything they said for the first few songs, but as time went on they won the crowd over with cajun squeezebox, banjo, fiddle and flatfoot dancing, and eventually made an audience out of them. Later on our pal Ben Gage worked similar magic, completely unamplified, at another pub along the trail.
Our friend Sav Madigan joined in on fiddle and harmonies for a couple songs in our showcase and nailed it like the total pro she is. I don't know if we got much work out of it, but we were happy with what we did, and all of it was good prep for the big rodeo in Montréal next month, Folk Alliance International.
We spent the rest of our time touristing—went for hikes in the woods, wandered around graveyards and ruins and prehistoric ringforts, and drove a fair bit of the “Wild Atlantic Way,” which is single-lane for lots of its length, winding along the coast through fields of gorse and brambles and sheep and stones. We visited Dingle, which we hear is a hopping spot in the summer, and were delighted to be among only a few tourists. Plenty of Dingle’s old bars used to be hardware stores, and some still are—you can buy a hammer or rat poison or get a belt made by a leatherworker along with your pint.
We also went up to Doolin, which is famous for traditional music, but didn’t realize that it’s a ghost town in January, with all the guesthouses and all but one pub closed. We stayed in the home of the fella whose family owned Gus O’Connor’s Pub, and dug the darkness and sea sounds and starlight on our long walk to the only pub that was open.
The next day we made a pilgrimage to John O’Donohue’s grave and then wound our way back to Dublin with some brilliant backroad directions from the locals that took us right past a perfect rainbow.
Along the drive, Pamela checked in on Instagram and saw Carsie Blanton posting from a demonstration in support of the Occupied Territories Bill in Dublin. It turned out she was in the country for an event called “Women Of Note” as part of Trad Fest, alongside Peggy Seeger, Aoife Scott, Clare Sands and more in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
St. Patrick's was founded in 1191, and it's the biggest church in Ireland. Jonathan Swift was the Dean from 1713-1745 and is buried in the building. That’s the kind of thing that blows our little Canadian minds.
We had a few free hours in Dublin before the show, so we walked the cobblestone streets, dug the architecture, checked out Dublin Castle and the Chester Beatty Library, and even happened upon the same demonstration that Carsie was at. Many of Dublin's museums are free to the public, which may seem anachronistic to late-capitalist sensibilities but strikes me as a beautiful thing for a prosperous country to offer its citizens. In the National Museum we marvelled at intricately-made artifacts from the Bronze Age and a couple bog bodies of men murdered over 2000 years ago, so well-preserved that archaeologists could tell what they ate for their last meal, theorize about their status based on their manicured fingernails, and speculate about the specific acts of ritualistic violence they’d suffered. Prehistory makes my head spin even more than the stuff that got written down.
When we got to the show, the front rows of pews were already full, but a lady saw us looking and brought us around the side, where we just happened to be seated in front of Wallis Bird, who I haven’t seen in years, and who was playing the same venue the following night.
It was a beautiful thing to hear Peggy Seeger sing her 1970 classic “I'm Gonna Be An Engineer” alongside a younger generation of feminist firebrands; to be reminded of the timelessness of people's struggle for liberation, and of the centrality of women in that struggle, all summed up perfectly in Carsie's song “The Little Flame”:
A hundred years, a hundred more
We throw our weight against the door
Even if we don’t survive
We keep the little flame alive
And that right there's the only message I've got for you this month, friends. I confess, I'm scared. I'm worried for my trans and non-binary friends, and the way Trump's broad legislative swipes will embolden bigots to say and do awful things. I'm grieving all the tedious, incremental work of organizations like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and the like that will be swept away in this fit of petty destruction. I'm aghast to see the Democrats' near-total embrace of moneyed interests one-upped by an outright assault against any limits on extractive capitalism, and their lukewarm support for Netanyahu's unrelenting assault on Gaza superseded by an openly-admitted plan for ethnic cleansing. We're way up shit creek, and the folks in the front are determined to paddle further. But the more I read history, the more I'm convinced that we haven't got it nearly as bad as folks before us did.
They kept the little flame alive, and that's the best we can do. The work is the same. And, though I say this at risk of alienating some friends on the left, the enemy is the same, and it isn't your neighbour who voted for Trump. As Carl Sandburg asked in “The People, Yes”:
“when have the people been half as rotten
As what the panderers to the people
Dangle before crowds?”
As much as the power-crazed oligarchs at the top of the pile need to be taken down, the system that elevated them needs dismantling. I haven't got detailed plans on how to do that. I'm just a folksinger. But I'm pretty sure it's gonna involve the difficult work of understanding, organizing, and dreaming, like it always has.
Here's hoping,
s
