Friends!
I'm writing you from home, which is such a sweet syllable to savour that I've been saying it extraneously these days, stretching out the long "o" so it feels like a word you could live inside.
We had a couple really heartwarming Albertan homecoming shows with the Second Chances at Gallery House Concerts in Calgary and Northern Lights Folk Club in Edmonton, and since then we've been laying pretty low. We've got plenty to keep us busy––Pamela's doing some heavy lifting on the board of our housing co-op, taking a full course load in her almost-finished bachelor's degree in industrial relations, and has picked up dog-sitting and snow-shoveling side hustles. I'm catching up on taxes, working on tours for the new year, and finding my way back into the daily discipline of practice and exercise that was serving me so well before we headed out on tour in January and all that became impossible to sustain in the rush of the road.
It's been a long, winding, challenging and inspiring year. Pamela and I passed through 38 American states and 7 Canadian provinces this year, not to mention my July and August run all the way out to the east coast and back with the Second Chances. We put over 40,000kms on Roadetta and another 20,000 on my minvan Lucky. I only spent about three weeks at home this whole year until just now.
We've got two shows left to close out the year: tomorrow (Wednesday, December 7th) we're playing the Heartwood Folk Club in Athabasca, and today, Tuesday December 6th, we're broadcasting the final Indoorables show from home. Our dear quaran-teammate Elliot is flying the nest in the new year, moving into a tiny house on the Southside, so it feels like the end of an era. We'll be joined by our pal Jarred Albright, who's put together a holiday album and songbook of old-timey fiddle and banjo tunes that's really perfect for the season.
The show starts at 5:55pm Mountain Time (find your time here) on either of my Facebook pages, or on YouTube here. I intend to keep doing livestreams the first Tuesday of every month, but I reckon this last Indoorables show (at least for the foreseeable) will be really special, and we sure hope you can make it.
After our Athabasca gig I'm going to hunker down at my folks' place to spend the holidays with them and downsize a couple decades of life debris at the same time. Seeing as I won't have any upcoming shows to promote, I'm planning to take a social media fast while I'm there. I've never really questioned the usefulness of these networks for my work, but I sure have noticed how they scatter my attention. Pamela's put it down since we got home, and she's enjoying the clearer mental air so much that I think I'd like to try some of the same.
Travels down under
In the new year I'll be headed back down under for some long-awaited reunions. My friend and house concert host extraordinaire Bill Lippe asked me to stop in Seattle to play his 200th living room concert alongside Krista Detor over the Jan 20-22 weekend, and when I got looking at flights from Seattle to New Zealand, it occurred to me that I didn't have to do it all in one shot. With a little more figuring I managed to book myself a pretty straight trip from here to Christchurch with stops in Seattle, Honolulu, Samoa, and Fiji along the way.
I've never been to any of the Pacific Islands, so I've got several days in each place to look around. Of course, if you know anywhere I should play on Oahu, Samoa or Fiji, I'd be all over that, but mostly I'm just keen to see some new places and learn a bit about these islands' peoples, whose cultures and languages overlap significantly with the Maori, and whose ancestry all likely traces back to Taiwan.
My New Zealand tour dates won't be announced 'til Friday, but seeing as you get these Hobo Travelogues direct to your inbox, I'm happy to give you the inside scoop on the dates:
Tue Feb 14 • Onekaka • Mussell Inn
Thu Feb 16 • Christchurch • Little Andrometer
Fri Feb 17 • Invercargill • Southland Musicians Club
Sat Feb 18 • Queenstown • The Sherwood
Sun Feb 19 • Dunedin • Dunedin Folk Club
Wed Feb 22 • Levin • House Concert
Thu Feb 23 • Palmerston North • Globe Theatre
Fri Feb 24 • Katikati • Katikati Folk Club
Sat Feb 25 • Auckland • Ministry Of Folk
Sun Feb 26 • Whangarei • Lama Lounge TBC
Mon Feb 27 • Auckland • The Bunker
The details'll be on www.scottcook.net on Friday, and the tickets'll go on sale on www.undertheradar.co.nz at the same time. I've got a few days' leeway on either end and a few more in the middle, so let me know if there's anything else I should really do, but I imagine these'll be it! From there I'm headed to Australia for a Festival of Small Halls tour of rural Victoria that was supposed to happen in 2021 and has been postponed twice. Those dates won't be released until the new year sometime––I don't have even have them yet––but I do know that the first stop'll be the Port Fairy Folk Festival, a fest I've wanted to play for ages.
I was especially tickled to see some pals on the bill. The tour has an exclusivity clause, so I can't add any shows of my own, but I do hope to bring Pamela along for a longer run in 2024 and show her all my favourite spots.
The road home
Gallery House Concerts photo by Andy Stanislav
Last I wrote, Pamela and I were in Lewes, Delaware, just about to turn our wheels homeward. We took Roadetta on a ferry to Cape May, New Jersey the next morning and made our way up the South Jersey Shore. On a bridge over one of the inlets, we saw a dolphin! And then pulled over and saw there were two. No offence to Jersey, but I really didn't think of it as a dolphiny kinda place.
That night in Teaneck we played a concert series called Ethical Brew hosted by the Ethical Culture Society, a quasi-churchy secular humanist movement founded in 1877 by Felix Adler, based on the idea that living by ethical principles and trying to build a fairer world are central to what makes life meaningful and fulfilling. Sorta like a godless version of the Quakers or Unitarians, movements which also put more emphasis on doing good than on dogma––as Adler put it, "deeds not creeds".
They put up a life-size banner of me outside the venue, and we thought that was pretty hilarious.
The next night's gig was at Voices in the Heights in Brooklyn Heights, and we'd been sweating for a while about the prospect of driving Roadetta into the big city and trying to find a place to park. Pamela's a prairie gal who'd never seen New York City, so she was particularly apprehensive, but to be honest I was a little wound up about it myself.
We made it across the George Washington Bridge, wide-eyed at the sprawling city view, and into bustling Harlem, where we quickly came upon low bridge warning signs that made me second-guess the GPS directions. As it turned out, plenty of Manhattan's major arteries have limited clearance, and there doesn't seem to be any good way of finding out the specifics. So we ended up taking a slow scenic route down New York Island––following Amsterdam Ave straight south through Harlem, cutting across Central Park and down to Midtown before we finally got on some quicker roads to the Manhattan Bridge and across to Brooklyn. After driving around Brooklyn Heights a bit, with it coming on rush hour, we miraculously found a street parking spot big enough for Roadetta just two blocks from the venue. We even had time to bike across the Brooklyn Bridge and back before soundcheck.
The show was wonderful––people came out to see us, which always feels like a pleasant surprise in the big city, and Joshua Garcia, who played first, was really great. After the show we drove out to Long Island to park in the driveway of the next night's house concert hosts, Robin and Ross of Shine Sessions House Concerts. It never ceases to amaze me how much love and sweat people put into keeping music going, whether in venues or in their own living rooms, and the Shine Sessions are a shining example.
The next day, armed with a better knowledge of the roads and bridges, we bombed it back through the city and up the Hudson to Pete Seeger's old hometown of Beacon for a show at the legendary Towne Crier Cafe. Not just Pete, but pretty nearly everybody in folk and roots has played there over the years, as attested to by the all-star gallery of 8x10s on the walls. Pamela gets especially tickled when we get to play somewhere John Hartford's been.
The Crier's been in three different locations since it started in 1972, but it's still run by the original owner, Phil Ciganer. He wanted to see Roadetta after the show, so we hung out in the parking lot and he told us stories about living in a VW bus for a couple years, taking it as far south as Panama, before starting the Crier on a whim 50 years ago. Nowadays he says he's just dreaming of taking a van back out on the road.
We made our way west through central Pennsylvania, and wow, is it ever gorgeous in the fall.
We played for a small but lovely crowd in a barn outside Pittsburgh, and again felt incredibly grateful for the people who put so much heart into bringing music to their communities.
Outside Detroit, we played the charming Trinity House Theatre with local songwriter Mike Ward, and had the opportunity to drive into the city for a visit to one of Pamela's biggest baking inspirations and bucket-list destinations, Sister Pie.
The next day we drove north to Petoskey for a show with Hearth and Hymn (Sam Cooper and Elisabeth Pixley-Fink) in the gorgeous Crooked Tree Arts Center, presented by the kind folks behind Blissfest. It was the classiest venue of the whole run, and really heartwarming to share the show with Sam and Elisabeth.
We were blessed to have a bunch of my family in the audience, as well as some folks we weren't expecting to see: friends from down state who'd made it to five shows this year (one in March in Arizona, two with the Second Chances in the summer, at Earthwork Harvest Gathering on our way out in the fall, and then at Crooked Tree on our way back) and two friends we met at bluegrass camp in Saskatchewan this summer who showed up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario along their own cross-country ramble, and then surprised us at Crooked Tree on their way back. The international superfan club was well worthy of a picture.
The next day my cousin Amber was hosting a party for Hallowe'en (by far her favourite holiday), and since we were living in van with no tickle-trunkery to speak of, we had no choice but to dress up as each other. Pamela made a really good Scott, but I wasn't so great at Pam. Thankfully everything we needed to play our parts was close at hand––I had props like the ever-expanding bag of take-out containers she washed to re-use and her latest secondhand bookstore find, and she had an uncomfortably thorough acquaintance with my all-too-easily-parodied schtick.
We spent the next few days in Bliss, Michigan on the Blissfest farm, in a farmhouse behind main stage that's housed many bands over the years. We looked through the past years' performers and saw that John Hartford had been there too. We did our November livestream from the farmhouse, joined by our pals the Doggone Brothers from the Kootenays––it's here if you wanna watch.
I also finished a new song called "Troubadourly Yours" while we were there, and shot a video of it to share with my Fellow Travellers on Patreon.
Like my home festival, North Country Fair, Blissfest has opened up the grounds to camping throughout the summer. Big magical gathering places like those feel thick with memory to me, with laughter and energy lingering even when the partiers are away. It was wonderful to spend a few days there outside festival time, with the campers all gone home; to sit on main stage in the sun, and go for walks through the forest that's grown to hold all that revelry and music.
After a delightful week on the farm, we drove less than an hour away to spend the weekend at Lamb's Retreat for Songwriters, held in a 60's-style motel and conference centre just outside lovely Harbor Springs, Michigan.
There were thirty-five of us at the retreat, including four invited presenters––Rj Cowdery, Karen Mal, Dana Cooper and myself. The whole event spans two weekends, and some of the participants stay in the hotel for the whole stretch including the week in between. It felt like a sanctuary––the founder John discouraged phones, we didn't check in with the news, and even there in Emmet county right before the midterm elections, all of that felt a world away––with a singular focus on song.
John D. Lamb, who has shepherded this thing successfully through 28 years, gives each participant (including the invited presenters) a unique, paragraph-length prompt, written specifically for them, and chooses one of the invited presenters to write one for him. Everybody gets their assignment when John reads them out loud on Friday morning. I've never been given that kind of songwriting mission, but thankfully it landed in a good place with me.
John has asked me to do a presentation about hoboing on Saturday, and I wanted to learn a few new songs for it, including last month's song "Troubadourly Yours" (which I'd never performed before) and Willi Carlisle's "Van Life" (which is another mighty mouthful of words), so I had plenty of preoccupy me besides writing my song. But on the Saturday night, when Pamela was asleep in the motel room, I was out in the van chasing it down. I went with a new-to-me rhyme scheme for the verses – ABCABC – which proved to be the kind of challenge that actually drives me forward creatively. On Sunday morning we all played our new songs for the group, and it was an incredible series of revelations to hear what everybody came up with.
One woman didn't sing her song, but instead sat and wept while her daughter-in-law sang it––a tribute to her father, who she's taking care of and who's beginning to forget who she is. There aren't a lot of places in this world with room in them for stuff like that. I'm grateful to John for creating and sustaining one.
I didn't return to my song until we got home, adding another verse and a chorus that finally gave it a title: "See One Good Thing Through". I recorded a demo to share with my Fellow Travellers last week––if you'd like to hear it you can join them at whatever price feels right for you on my Patreon or the subscribers-only section of my website.
That makes sixteen songs I've written and released since I opened up the invite to Fellow Travellers a year and a half ago, and I'm incredibly grateful to all 150 of them on board for keeping me writing more than I ever did before.
The cold finally hit on our way home across the prairies, and we started hauling our stuff into hotels rather than letting it freeze in the van. We stayed a couple nights in charming Marquette, Michigan, where the big old ore dock still stands from the old iron mining days, and saw a captivating community-theatre production of Anne Washburn's amazing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play upstairs at the Ore Dock Brewing Company.
In Duluth, we got to share a show at Wussow's Concert Cafe with my Taiwan buddy Paul Lawrence and a great local fiddler named Kailyn Spencer. Wussow's was the first (and only) American venue I played on my first cross-country run in 2005, and also the only US gig of my second run in 2007, and I'm so glad Jason's still the flame lit after all these years.
In Nisswa, MN we played Grassroots Concert Series, a really wonderful, volunteer-run series that's been running since 1988. We were the 347th concert, if they've got the count right. Then in Inglis, Manitoba, we played an afternoon show at Roots at Rusty's, another beautiful example of the kind of heart and effort that keeps music flowing through out-of-the-way places.
If you sniff a theme running through this Hobo Travelogue, it's gratitude. I'm awed and humbled by the tireless energy and generosity of the people who present music in the places I'm privileged to pass through, and by the enthusiasm and generosity of the people who come out to listen and keep people like ourselves on the road. So thank you.
There's lots I could say about the wider world, but for now I just want to offer my anecdotal opinion, based on a long year of travel all over Turtle Island, that people across this land are a lot nicer and have a lot more in common than it may look from our little screens.
While our systems unbuckle in various ways and the cost of living rises ever higher, I hope we'll see through attempts to shift blame onto one powerless minority or another and remember who benefits most––the powerful. As a recent article in the Boston Globe laid out, inflation has more to do with profiteering than anything else. We saw stickers with Joe Biden saying "I did that!" next to the price on gas pumps everywhere; my uncle has one on the cash register in his store, and we've even seen ones with Trudeau saying the same here in Canada. I'm no fan of Trudeau or Biden, but I intend to make some stickers with a monopoly man to replace them, because let's face it, the capitalists are way more powerful than governments, and while they keep us distracted fighting each other they rob both sides blind. We're gonna sing a new Carsie Blanton song on that theme in tonight's Indoorables Ho-Ho-Hoedown.
That's enough outta me for now, friends! Thanks for reading, and for believing. Here's hoping all's well where you are, and whatever you celebrate, here's hoping there's yummy eats involved.
Big love from our house on the snowy prairie,
s