Hey beauties!
This here’s a quick mid-summer howdy from Grande Prairie, Alberta, where I’m just starting a van-camping solo run through the Peace Country. For the TL;DR crowd, here are my gigs at a glance:
Solo:
Wed Jul 24 • Valleyview, AB • house concert
Thu Jul 25 • Fort St. John, BC • Concerts in the Park
Sat Jul 27 • Tumbler Ridge, BC • Tumbler Ridge Visitor Centre
Wed Jul 31-Sun Aug 4 • Driftpile, AB • North Country Fair Music Camp
with Pamela Mae:
Wed Aug 7 • Regina, SK • Johnston house concert
Fri-Sun Aug 9-11 • Ear Falls, ON • Trout Forest Music Festival
Fri Aug 30 • Manning, AB • Aurora Theatre
with Pamela Mae, Corin Raymond and Naomi Shore:
Tue Sep 3 • Vermilion, AB • Vermilion Folk Club show at Copper Cork Distillery
Wed Sep 4 • Edmonton, AB • The Yardbird Suite
Thu Sep 5 • Red Deer, AB • The Velvet Olive
Fri Sep 6 • Calgary, AB • Ironwood Stage
Sat Sep 7 • Lethbridge, AB • The Owl Acoustic Lounge
Fall tour with Pamela Mae:
Sun Sep 8 • Bozeman, MT • Bozeman Folklore Society
Tue Sep 10 • Sheridan, WY • house concert
Sat Sep 14 • Omaha, NE • FolkHouse concert at Rosyln Castle
Sun Sep 15 • Lawrence, KS • Vintage Church
Mon Sep 16 • Salina, KS • E Bar Z House Concerts
Wed-Sun Sep 18-22 • Winfield, KS • Walnut Valley Festival
Mon Sep 23 • Tulsa, OK • The Colony Writers’ Night feature
Wed Sep 25 • Fayetteville, AR • Folk School of Fayetteville
Fri Sep 27 • Asheville, NC • house concert
Sat Sep 28 • Weaverville, NC • Stage 11 House Concerts
Sun Sep 29 • Cary, NC • house concert
Mon Sep 30 • Roanoke, VA • 3rd Street Coffeehouse
Fri Oct 4 • Marblehead, MA • Me&Thee Music
Sat Oct 5 • Amherst, MA • Pioneer Valley Folklore Society
Sun Oct 6 • Mystic, CT • White Pine Woods House Concert
Sat Oct 12 • Rochester, NY • Golden Link Folk Singing Society
Wed Oct 16 • Huntington, NY • Hard Luck Café
Sat Oct 19 • Fanwood, NJ • Fanwood Performance Series
Fri Oct 25 • Kingston, ON • Livewire Concert Series
Sat Oct 26 • Kitchener, ON • Folk Night at the Registry with Jay Linden opening
Mon Oct 28 • Perth, ON • Listening Room Concert Series
Sat Nov 2 • Ottawa, ON • TBC
Thu Nov 14 • Toledo, OH • Toledo Library
Sat Nov 16 • Detroit, MI • Mama’s Coffeehouse
with Ramblers Choir: Scott Nolan, Joe Nolan and Pamela Mae
Nov 20 • Winnipeg, MB • West End Cultural Centre
Nov 21 • Inglis, MB • Roots at Rusty’s
Nov 22 • Saskatoon, SK • The Bassment
Nov 23 • Watson, SK • Watson and District Regional Library
Nov 24 • Regina, SK • The Artesian
Nov 26 • Vulcan, AB • Nine In a Line Brewing
Nov 27 • Nanton, AB • Loree house concert
Nov 28 • Calgary, AB • Fish Creek Concerts
Nov 29 • Canmore, AB • ArtsPlace
Nov 30 • Edmonton, AB • Northern Lights Folk Club
Dec 1 • Vermilion, AB • Vermilion Folk Club
As always, all the details can be found on www.scottcook.net, and if they're not there yet, they're coming soon! Tickets are already on sale for the shows with Corin Raymond, and I'd really encourage you to book in if you want to be there because many of these are sure to sell out.
Recent rambles
Pamela and I played Wild Mountain Music Fest in Hinton last weekend, and it felt like the best kind of family reunion, with a bunch of pals on the bill and lots more making the trip out for the hang. It was supposed to be our debut as Ramblers Choir with Joe Nolan and Scott Nolan, but health stuff kept Scott at home, so we just guested on Joe’s set and had him jump up on ours.
Red Hot Hayseeds bringing the western swing on Sunday
After closing the festival with “Pass It Along” alongside a bunch of performers and volunteers on Sunday, Pamela scooted back home to give our suffering garden a much-needed drink in the heatwave. I stayed overnight and went to Jasper the next day to camp with my folks and my sister and brother-in-law, visiting from Korea. We had a nice visit, ate dinner and got in one game of “Mexican Train” dominoes before a fellow camper came by to tell us there was a fire getting close. We packed up in a hurry and joined the flow of campers out of the park.
It was crazy how fast it turned. They ended up evacuating the whole park and town of Jasper that night. Friends from there and from Wells, BC (another beautiful town emptied out with fire bearing down on it) are in my thoughts today, along with gratitude for the first responders and volunteers who leapt into action to get everybody out.
We can be sure that there’s scarier weather ahead, even if we do manage to break the spell of the capitalist death cult we’re wrapped up in. Earth’s a big ship, and it’ll take a lot of time and effort to turn around. No one’s coming to save us, but we’ve got each other, and I reckon the sooner that realization sets in, the better.
This Saturday I’ll be playing in Tumbler Ridge, BC where I lived from grades 6 to 9, and taking a couple days to camp out and bike around and see what I can remember. My friend Trent Ernst even wrote up the show in the paper, here.
From there I’ll be swinging back by Driftpile, Alberta to teach at the North Country Fair Music Camp, a camp I started in 2021 that’s been capably steered by Dan Barton ever since.
This’ll be the third camp I’ve taught at this year, after Songwriters School in Kerrville, Texas and Guitar Camp two weeks ago in Manning, Alberta, which I stepped into when my Aussie buddy Tom Richardson couldn’t make it.
The Guitar Camp throng in Hotchkiss Hall
It was great to have an opportunity to stretch our classes out over several days, and to get a feel for what that particular camp’s all about, which has more to do with building people up than teaching music per se. In our sharing circle on the last day, I got to thinking again about how lucky I am to be surrounded by a creative community of open-minded folks, given how rare acceptance, generosity and encouragement can be in the “real world”, and how little space there is for magic in so many places. I also had a sweet reminder of synchronicity when I got a call from the Home Routes office in Winnipeg about a gig in Manning. I naturally assumed that it must’ve been connected to Guitar Camp somehow, but it turned out to be random – the person doing the booking had reached out to Home Routes because they’d sent performers through there for house concerts, and Home Routes had recommended me because I was only six hours away in Edmonton, not knowing that I was actually in Manning at the time. So, through some sweet serendipity, Pamela’s gonna get a chance to meet a bunch of my friends from camp at the end of August.
In the meantime, I’m excited to bring some of what I’ve learned to the North Country camp. I’ll be teaching songwriting, and looking forward to the chance to really dig in with a small class. There’s still time to sign up if you want to join us, here.
After camp I’ll pick up Pamela and head out east to Trout Forest Music Festival in Ear Falls, Ontario – a glorious little lakeside fest that doubles as a holiday for Winnipeg roots musicians. Thankfully, we’ll be back home in Edmonton for the rest of August, because Pamela’s garden’s going gangbusters, and our buddy Corin Raymond’s coming to town to do a run of his one-man play Bookmarks at the Edmonton Fringe. At the beginning of September, we’re doing five co-bill shows around Alberta with Corin and Naomi Shore before Pamela and I head south for a three-month tour. I’m still filling in dates for our fall run, so please, if you know of a good listening room near our path, even if it’s your living room, I’d love to hear from you at scottcooksongs@gmail.com. I've also already started on a run down the West Coast and back up the middle in early 2025, and even started brainstorming on a trip to Europe in August and September of 2025, so I'm all ears for places to play on those trips too.
Summer’s been glorious since I wrote last, at least until the smoke socked in, and we’ve loved being closer to home. I’ve been putting in a lot of work on the new album and writing the book to go with it, and I intend to do more of that while I’m up in the Peace country this week. Both Pamela and I have been finding the American political soap opera especially compelling lately, but I’ll conserve my writing time for the more durable format of a book. For now I’ll just say that the mission of Braver Angels feels more urgent than ever.
I’ve had an unbroken streak of new songs every month on Patreon for a couple years now, and some of the new ones like “A Small String of Lights”, “Outside of a Seven Eleven” and “Keeping the Dream Alive” are feeling like stone-cold keepers to me. Last month I also released a re-write of an older one called “A Bigger Tent” that feels appropriate to the political moment we’re in. I’ve only got a week left to finish another before the end of the month – if you’d like to hear it (and any of the Inside Tracks I’ve already released), you can sign up at whatever price feels right for you over on patreon.com/scottcooksongs or directly (without all the bells and whistles, but also without Patreon’s finder’s fees) through my website at scottcook.net/fellow-travellers.
Alright, I’ve got a house concert to get to! Wherever you are, I hope you’re staying inspired. Hugs from the hustle,
s