Howdy friends!
I haven’t written since early May, and as this email’s absurdly long title implies, there’s way too much to tell. Life just got going too fast to write about it. I’ll do my best to recap our recent adventures briefly below, but first the big news:
Troubadourly Yours is finally rolling out into the world, just in time for my 50th lap around the sun! (My birthday’s tomorrow, but I’m celebrating all week.) The radio's already playing it on both sides of the pond. The full album drops on all the streaming services this Friday, and you can lend it a little momentum by pre-saving it here.
If you’re among the couple hundred folks who pre-ordered a physical CD at our Canadian shows last year, it’s on its way to you. If you’re Stateside, it’ll take a couple weeks longer, but it’s coming tariff-free! The CD’s packaged in a cloth-bound, 74-page hardcover book including the words and chords to the songs and an introductory essay. The 160-gram audiophile-quality vinyl will come in a wide-spine jacket with a 20-page booklet containing the same text as the CD package plus a couple extra pictures to fill it out. The vinyl won’t arrive until next month, but I’ve started taking orders for both right here:
There are lots of options for ways to pay besides the usual credit card checkout, including cheaper shipping for Canadian orders, and bundles with a few recently-surfaced copies of my first three out-of-print albums. I’ve made things as cheap as I reasonably can in my one-man crusade against inflation, but if you’re interested in a bulk order, if the postage seems wonky, or whatever, just drop a line to scottcooksongs@gmail.com and I’ll sort you out.
As you may already know, Troubadourly Yours is an album in two parts. The second volume’s still in the works, and should come out sometime this fall as a book and an audiobook. I won’t reprint the lyrics, chords or text from the CD and vinyl packages in the bigger volume because they won’t fit. It’s a book in its own right, which goes a lot deeper into the stories behind the songs and my thoughts on how we might cooperate to save this fragile piece of paradise we call home. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever made, which is why it held up the release for so long. For now, I’m just glad these songs are flying free. Stream them, share them, like and subscribe — it all helps convince the algorithm that there's something happening over here in Hoboland. Calling up your local campus or community radio station's request line would blow even more wind into their sails. I want these songs to travel as far and wide as they can. I’ve seen firsthand that they can open hearts and minds, and I think our world needs more of that.
Frankie's Braids video!
The second single “Frankie’s Braids” came out last month and has already been finding its way to new ears. I just released a video for it, shot in Taiwan by Bear Tseng. It’s the first proper music video I’ve ever made, and I think it turned out pretty sweetly:
“Frankie's Braids” official video
The last big piece of news is that I’m taking the new album on tour next week, setting out on a sprawling three months of roads around North America that harken back to my early years of troubadouring — travelling solo, playing house concerts and open mics and song swaps, connecting with people wherever I can. I’ve set aside a week to write songs at Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studios in the Texas Hill Country as part of their Occupy Blue Rock residency, and a whole week to hang in Nashville like I haven’t done since my early days on the road. I’ll be travelling through mostly purple and red states in the lead-up to the election, and back up the blue east coast after it. I’m curious to hear what people are talking about, and to contribute to the conversation however I can. I’m still open to adding a few shows if you know someplace along the way where these songs could be of use. Thankfully, the whole run will be bookended by Alberta shows with Pamela Mae, who’s keeping the home fires burning while I’m gone.
Fall tour dates:
Sat Aug 22 • Drumheller, AB • Go Badlands
w/ Pamela Mae, Mallory Chipman and Billie Zizi
Wed Aug 26 • Saskatoon, SK • backyard concert w/ Julie Ella opening
Thu Aug 27 • Fort Qu’Appelle, SK • Qu’Appelle Valley Centre for the Arts
Fri Aug 28 • Brandon, MB • Lady of the Lake
Sat Aug 29 • Winnipeg, MB • afternoon yard concert at Wits End
Mon Aug 31 • Wawa, ON • house concert
Wed Sep 2 • Killaloe, ON • Morninglory Farmhouse
Thu Sep 3 • Ottawa, ON • house concert
Fri Sep 4 • Kingston, ON • house concert
Sat Sep 5 • Godfrey, ON • Woodlot Gathering
w/ Corin Raymond, Treasa Levasseur, Mike T. Kerr and more
Sun Sep 6 • STILL OPEN if anybody’s up for hosting!
Mon Sep 7 • Toronto, ON • afternoon alley concert at Westfalia Way
Wed Sep 9 • Kalamazoo, MI • 9 Roses Ranch barn concert
Fri-Sun Sep 11-13 • Remus, MI • Wheatland Music Festival
Tue Sep 15 • Appleton, WI • Stone Arch Brewpub
Thu Sep 17 • Fort Atkinson, WI • Café Carpe
Sat Sep 19 • Minneapolis, MN • house concert w/ Paul Lawrence
Sun Sep 20 • St. Cloud, MN • Granite City Folk concert at the Lahr Block
Fri Sep 24 • Lincoln, NE • Lincoln Association for the Traditional Arts
Sat Sep 25 • Lenexa, KS • Green Guitar House
Sun Sep 26 • Tulsa, OK • opening for a house concert song circle
w/ Sweet Meg, Chris Blevins and Chloe Beth
Mon Sep 27 • Tulsa, OK • feature set for Songwriters Night at The Colony
Sun Oct 4 • Austin (Cedar Creek), TX • afternoon show at Arhaven House Concerts
Sat Oct 10 • Wimberley, TX • Blue Rock Fresh residency closing concert
w/ Cliff Eberhardt, Judy Blank and Billy Crockett
Sun Oct 11 • New Braunfels, TX • New Braunfels House Concerts
Tue Oct 13 • San Antonio, TX • John Whipple’s Tunesday Series
Thu Oct 15 • Houston, TX • Kojak’s, opening for Susan Elliott
Fri Oct 16 • Opelousas, LA • The Whirlybird Compound
Sat Oct 17 • Birmingham, AL • Dobbers, co-bill w/ Wilder Adkins
Sun-Sat Oct 18-24 • In NASHVILLE! What should I do? Who should I meet?
Fri Oct 23 • Nashville, TN • WMOT’s Finally Fridays at 3rd and Lindsley
Sun Oct 25 • Weaverville, NC • Stage 11 House Concerts
Tue Oct 27 • Roanoke, VA • 3rd Street Coffeehouse
Mon Nov 2 • Fairfax, VA • private event
Fri Nov 6 • Columbia, MD • Concerts at the Cooper’s House
Sat Nov 7 • Darlington, MD • Deer Creek Coffeehouse
Sun Nov 8 • Lewes, DE • The Listening Booth
Thu-Fri Nov 12-13 • Albany, NY • Northeast Regional Folk Alliance conference
Sat Nov 14 • Brooklyn, NY • Voices In the Heights w/ Cloudbelly
Sun Nov 15 • Nyack, NY • Voices On the Hudson w/ Joshua Garcia
Tue Nov 17 • Mystic, CT • White Pine Woods House Concerts
Wed Nov 18 • Dover, NH • house concert
Fri Nov 20 • Rockport, MA • Whale Cove House Concerts
Sat Nov 21 • Springville, NY • Springville Center for the Arts
Sun-Wed Nov 22-25 • Chicago, IL • WHERE CAN I PLAY???
Thu Dec 3 • Edmonton, AB • Prairie Song Folk Club w/ Pamela Mae and Elliot Thomas
As I said, reach out if you've got any ideas to fill in the gaps, particularly in Chicago, Ohio, Iowa, and up the East Coast. I've been outrunning myself for a long time now and haven't had the time or mental space to dedicate to booking, but if you're along my path and up for a show in your living room or your friend's garage or your neighbourhood haunt, just drop a line to scottcooksongs@gmail.com.
Springtime in Scandinavia
When I wrote you all last, we'd just landed in Oslo for our first visit to any of the Nordic countries. That evening we noticed that even the neighbourhood outside our hotel was palpably different from any we've tried to navigate in America, where it's usually a surreal sprawl of multi-use buildings, empty lots, trash, and broken glass and the only good food to be found on foot is a Mexican food truck in a gas station parking lot. Olso's airport-hotel-land had a nature trail and lake nearby, and when we set out, we were surprised to find that somebody had the forethought to pave a path to it, including tunnels under all the freeways. It was like that everywhere we went in Scandinavia. Stuff just works, and it's made with an eye for beauty.
Norway's crazy wealthy, in part because they have oil reserves that they've taxed over the years to invest in a sovereign wealth fund that's now worth over 3 trillion Canadian dollars, or four times their entire GDP. Alberta's oil reserves are 24 times bigger than Norway's, and we actually do have a sovereign-style fund (created in 1976 by Peter Lougheed), but ours is worth about $30 billion, or a thousandth of what Norway's is worth. I can't help thinking that's got something to do with political choices.
We walked around the city for a day, read about Norway's underground anti-fascist resistance during WWII, saw a statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt from right after the war when those two countries' social democracies weren't so different, bounced over cobblestones on rented bikes, dug Vigeland's monumental sculptures, and dropped in to the Nobel Peace Center, where I picked up a little copy of MLK's still-powerful Letter from Birmingham Jail.
The next day we took a train to Gothenburg, Sweden, where we spent a day wandering the city and took in an amazing folk show in a little jazz cafe. Everything about the venue and the show was done with such intention and precision and flourish, and though the songs were entirely in Swedish, we felt it. Afterward some locals filled us in on how neighbourhood-specific and evidently moving many of the songs were.
From Gothenburg we caught a ferry to Denmark, whereupon we were tucked under the wing of a stellar Danish musician and gentleman named MC Hansen who I met at Folk Alliance many years back. MC set up all the shows including a beautiful little festival he helps organize in a village called Lønstrup, where we got to share a stage with the incredible Elona Planman, seen here doing sorcery in the local church on Sunday.
All the shows MC set up were great and well-paid. We got to play in a beautiful shop for a bunch of folks who'd just returned from a hike around some old Viking sites led by the fella of the house, whose grandfather had been active in the Danish anti-fascist resistance and had to flee to Saskatchewan after he killed two Germans. The lady of the house writes books on hygge, and their house was the epitome of it.
Our last show in Denmark was at the wonderfully cowboy-kitschy Cafe Borre on the island of Møn, where we had the next day off to explore Møns Klint, a stretch of limestone and chalk cliffs made of the shells of millions of tiny creatures that lived on the seabed over 70 million years ago. I found a fossilized bit of horn coral that Google tells me is about 300 million years old.
After Denmark made our way through Germany and the Netherlands, walked around old Bremen town, cycled through Haarlem, and dug the amazing libraries and public infrastructure everywhere we went. From the Hook of Holland we caught a boat to Harwich and rode trains up the country for the one and only show I managed to book in England this time, at the charming Cafe #9 in Sheffield, where our mate Jonny is a living testament to investing in making your corner of the world beautiful. On the train platform that morning Pamela Instagrammed me singing an impromptu rendition of Corin Raymond's song “Trains, Boats and Buses” that somehow it went on to be the most popular thing I've ever put on the internet, with over 31,000 likes and 300,000 views.
In Edinburgh we finally met up with our bus-mates for our first-ever Scotland Folk Tours run, and were grateful to have landed with such a cool group — Canadians, Americans and Aussies, some of whom we knew well and others we'd never met, and all of them characters. Plenty had come via or were heading onward to other adventures in Ireland, the Orkneys, South Africa, Egypt, or Japan. We spent four days in Edinburgh in the care of our amazing tour guide Fiona, a masterful performer who brought history to life in a way I've never seen.
The rest of the tour was led by our bus driver Duncan, who took us up to Skye, Rasaay, Inverness, Loch Ness and Pitlochry with rolling historical commentary, comedic asides and an education in Scottish music along the drives. We played two private concerts, had two whisky tastings, hiked through some stunning scenery, saw lots of castles, jammed in a little pub in the middle of nowhere, got to hear and hang with a bunch of amazing Scottish musicians, and even ran into Mouths of Babes in the hotel breakfast room in Inverness, in the middle of their own Scotland Folk Tour. Like always in Europe, I marvelled at the vastly different time scale, the unfathomable craftwork in the built environment, and the intimate proximity between the living and the dead.
Folks have already been asking us if we'll do another one of these tours, and I reckon we will, but not right away. Loads of other folk musicians are leading them all the time, and you can check out the Scotland Folk Tours website if you're keen. As for us, we're gonna stay a little closer to home for the foreseeable, but we are considering leading a group bicycle tour in the Canadian Rockies next June – drop a line to scottcooksongs@gmail.com if you think you might be interested in that.
Pamela and I stayed a few extra days in Scotland for one last gig in Montrose, and randomly decided to spend three of them in Kirriemuir, the old hometown of Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, where we got to see the camera obscura he gifted the town in 1930, a shining example of good old-fashioned analog human ingenuity kept open to the public by a small team of local volunteers.
Summertime in Canada
Pamela had to resort to extraordinary measures to resurrect her sourdough starters when we got back, but she had a couple joyous weeks of turning out loaves, digging in the garden and walking other people’s dogs before our summer season kicked in. We played North Country Fair for my 20th time, and two long-term readers of this Travelogue drove all the way up from Arizona to be there! I was grateful that the North put on a show for them.
We made a quick run out to the West Coast after that to visit Pamela's daughter, and squeezed in a few really heartwarming shows along the way. One was at our dear friends Craig and Deb's place in Summerland, a barn concert called An Evening in the Valley that's truly one of the best venues in our known universe. Just a month later, the Bald Range Fire suddenly doubled in size and forced a rushed evacuation of the whole town. Their place is also an animal sanctuary, so they left the sprinklers running when they left. Amazingly, the animals survived, but all their buildings were burned to the ground with nearly everything inside. Their home was insured, but there's a GoFundMe set up to help them rebuild the venue. Our hearts go out to them and all the other folks uprooted by this. It's hard to see from here, but we look forward to some sweet evening when we get to sing there again.
We swung homeward through the Kootenays, a place my heart's been missing, and got to play a festival called Starbelly Jam that I last played 21 years ago. It felt incredibly good to sing for that sweet intergenerational gathering, looking out on the faces of friends I've known for decades now, and to see all the brilliant young ones coming up. And I was tickled to think of how unforeseeable all this was to my younger self – playing music steadily for over twenty years without approaching anything like fame, and somehow finding a deeper set of reasons along the way.
Our next gig was at Folk On the Rocks in Pamela's old hometown of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, a 24-hour drive from Starbelly Jam. Our old housemate Elliot Thomas came along to play with us, and it was both his and my first time. We got to stay up there for a week, check out some of Pamela's old haunts, hang with a lot of her extended family and friends, and even attend a thing called “Float On the Rocks”, where the audience paddles out on the lake to watch bands play through a solar-powered PA on the front porch of a houseboat.
On our way home we got to sing in a shop in High Level for our dear friends Leslie, Paul and Jared, who run the local Tim Hortons and do a lot of the heavy lifting for Guitar Camp in Manning, where I taught a few years back. They set up a little showcase beforehand, with a bunch of local acts singing two songs each, and a little open mic afterward, when it was storming too hard for anyone to leave. It put me in mind of Craig and Deb in Summerland, and all the local heroes who put so much work into bringing music to their communities and nurturing young talent. It reminded me of the political diversity in places like that, where the local conservative MP stayed late getting to know people with very different views. It made me think of how crazy the weather's been all summer, with droughts in BC and record rainfall here in Edmonton that made a lake out of the street in front of our house and flooded lots of our neighbours' basements. It reminded me of how people come together in a storm.
I'll be in a lot more places like that over the months ahead, and I hope to see some of you there.
With love from our place to yours,
s