Hey friends!

If you’re new to this list, welcome. If you’ve been with me a while, thanks for being here.

I haven’t written a Hobo Travelogue in almost three months, which goes to show how scarce my time’s been. I’m writing now from Lossiemouth, on the Moray Coast in the north of Scotland, where we’ve had a few precious days off, based in a bargain hotel with a view over the ocean, catching up on things and gradually feeling saner after the whirl of the last while.

We’ve already done five shows this side of the pond, and it’s been sweet so far. This is Pamela’s first visit, and I’m getting vicarious thrills of discovery from her. It also feels like a first for me, since my four previous tours were under the wing of English musician and fellow Taiwan alum Jez Hellard, whereas this time it’s me doing all the planning and driving and the inevitable miscalculations.

Our first show was at one of the quirkiest venues I’ve ever set foot in, the Square and Compass Pub in Worth Matravers. The ceilings are so low that I need to duck between rooms, they serve drinks and pasties through a hole in the wall, and there’s a museum connected to the pub with bronze age relics and dinosaur fossils. The owner Charlie Newman is an amateur fossil hunter whose family has owned the pub for over 160 years, and one of our oldest mammal ancestors—a rat-like animal from 145 million years ago called Durlstotherium newmani—is named after him.

Our next show was a garden concert in tiny Priston, Bath, where we reunited with Jez, his longtime upright bass maestro Nye Parsons, and our hosts Sue and Owain, who’d been holding a box of my CDs since I was last here almost ten years ago. We swapped songs in the yard after the show, then around the dinner table after a feast, and it warmed our hearts.

In Cardiff we played my old friend Dan Lambert’s 50^th birthday alongside Jez and Nye and a host of local musicians, and managed to silence the rowdy bar with a lot of words and a little perseverance. We had an extra day to explore the city, take in a local poetry open mic, and enjoy the sound of spoken Welsh.

In Huddersfield we did a sweet house concert called Better Than Telly ('cause house concerts are!) for my old friends Bar and Jac, met Pamela’s second cousin Ian for the first time, and stayed up late solving the world’s problems.

Everywhere we went, people were talking about the huge nativist rally in London last Saturday and how similar forces are in play around the world, where working people who’ve been exploited and abandoned by corporate interests are now ripe for recruitment by far-right demagogues who skillfully redirect their anger at immigrants and trans people rather than the wealthy elites. Both Pamela and I feel relieved to be outside the States right now, but we’re all too aware that the same fights are happening here.

On Thursday we made it up to Scotland and straight to the Captain’s Bar in Edinburgh at the urging of our North Carolinian songwriter pal Chuck Brodsky. They have an unamplified folk singing circle there every day, and the kind folks there welcomed us sweetly with songs by our respective national bards Robert Burns and Neil Young in amongst the originals. I got the full-on tingles there in that circle, for the first time in a while. We had to split early to get to our first Scottish show at Kirkcaldy Acoustic Music Club, but it was the kind of gig that makes this whole life make sense, with a roomful of raised voices and open hearts.

As always, it’s just such a joy to be in Scotland. Folks are kind, funny, classy, and humble. Buildings stand for centuries. Billboards are practically non-existent. If you want to see it for yourself, we’re coming back here in May and leading a tour from Edinburgh up to the Highlands and back, with visits to the Isle of Skye, Isle of Raasay, Inverness, Loch Ness, Pitlochry and more. We’ll take in a couple concerts from Scottish musicians and hear the history from our Scottish guides, and us Canucks will play a couple private concerts for the group as well. It’d make the perfect start to a longer trip over this way if you’ve got the time. Our bus is half-full at this point, so there’s room for you on board if you don’t wait too long. The single room spots are already booked up, but we’ll help match-make for single travellers who don’t mind sharing a room, just let us know. All the info’s here.

Since we came up to the coast we’ve made side trips out to the cute little Ardersier Folk Festival, a legendary weekly jam at MacGregor’s Bar in Inverness, and to the Findhorn Ecovillage, an intentional community that’s been going and growing since the Sixties. 

Today we’ll get over to the Black Isle in the Highlands, where I’ve never been, and get back in the saddle! We’ve got ten shows to go:

Tue Sep 16 • Inverness, Scotland • The Folk Club at Glachbeg Croft
Thu Sep 18 • Falkirk, Scotland • Falkirk Folk Club
Fri Sep 19 • Glasgow, Scotland • Robinsfield Bowl house concert w/ Sarah Jane Scouten
Sat Sep 20 • Letham, Fife, Scotland • Letham Nights w/ Sarah Jane Scouten
Sun Sep 21 • Edinburgh, Scotland • Wee Folk Club
Wed Sep 24 • Aviemore, Scotland • The Old Bridge Inn, opening for the Poozies
Sat Sep 27 • Sheffield, England • Café #9 w/ Marilla Homes opening
Wed Oct 1 • Schwalbach am Taunus, Germany • Cowhide House Concerts
Thu Oct 2 • Bonn, Germany • house concert
Fri Oct 3 • Duisburg, Germany • Where the Birds Fly House Concert

As always, all the deets are on my website. After we finish up in Germany we’ve got a few free days to bike around in the Netherlands, then Pamela’s gonna fly home to pick the squashes and potatoes in the garden. I’m flying to Melbourne with a two-night stopover in Guangzhou, where I’ve never been out of the airport before. In Australia I’ll be reuniting with our campervan Hector and my pals Liz Frencham, Justin Vilchez and Pete Fidler to form a new band called Scott Cook and the Little Rippers. We’re gonna record a new album of bluegrass-adjacent originals, and we’ve got a bunch of shows together to get the band ship-shape:

Wed Oct 15 • Moruya, NSW • St. James Church w/ Liz Frencham
Thu Oct 16 • Erowal Bay, NSW • house concert w/ Liz Frencham
Fri-Sun Oct 17-19 • Kangaroo, Valley, NSW • Kangaroo Valley Folk Fest w/ Liz Frencham
Wed Oct 22 • Woy Woy, NSW • house concert w/ Liz Frencham
Thu Oct 23 • Newcastle, NSW • house concert w/ Liz Frencham
Fri-Sun Oct 24-26 • Dorrigo, NSW • Dorrigo Folk and Bluegrass Fest w/ the Little Rippers
Tue Oct 28 • Sydney, NSW • TBC
Wed Oct 29 • Canberra, ACT • Smith’s Alternative w/ the Little Rippers
Thu Oct 30 • Yackandandah, VIC • Feather and Drum Hat Co. w/ the Little Rippers
Fri-Mon Oct 31-Nov 3 • Maldon, VIC • Maldon Folk Festival w/ the Little Rippers
Wed Nov 5 • Melbourne, VIC • Lomond Hotel w/ the Little Rippers
Fri Nov 7 • Glenlyon, VIC • Glenlyon Hall w/ the Little Rippers
Sun Nov 9 • Bendigo, VIC • The Old Church on the Hill w/ the Little Rippers
Fri-Sat Nov 21-22 • Mia Mia, VIC • The Troubadour Weekend

Tickets are on sale for all of these, so book in through the links on www.scottcook.net and I'll be seeing you soon! I’ll do another tour down under with Pamela in January and February, and another short run with the Little Rippers in March – the announced dates are up on my website and more are coming soon. But I’ll be leaving Australia mid-way through the Troubadour Weekend to fly to Taiwan, where my old pal Crees lined me up a beach house for a month in Fulong. I’ve stayed in that little town a lot over the years, wrote “Pass It Along”, “Mama Always Said” and “You Don’t Find Out in the End” there in 2012, and wrote the bulk of the book for Tangle of Souls in a refurbished shipping container there in 2019, so it feels like the perfect place to get the book of liner notes for my new album Troubadourly Yours over the finish line.

I spent most of my summer working on the book, but it’s proving to be the hardest project I’ve ever done. The world and the flurry of people’s opinions about it just seem to be moving faster than ever. Maybe you share that feeling. The unimaginable suffering some folks are enduring and the war of words on all sides are making it incredibly daunting for me to try and say something clarifying (and dare I say, even conciliatory) that can hold up through the undoubtedly crazier times to come. But as the months go by, I’m ever surer that it’s work worth doing.

I took a couple writing retreats out at Elk Island National Park with my phone turned off, and our friend Bob Stenhouse gave me the use of his cabin for a week in July. The birds and beavers and a big bike ride every day helped hugely, but it turned out to be a bigger task than I had time for. 

Eventually I had to give up on delivering the book in time for our hometown CD release at the end of August and focus my energies on making sure we at least had a CD to release. Even that proved difficult, with me going back into the studio to re-record all the lead vocals and my engineer Brad Smith re-mixing all the songs to suit the new approach, but it was worth it.

It felt kinda sweet and anachronistic to release a CD in physical form that isn’t available on the internet. Pamela even ran a silent auction for a couple used CD players for folks who don’t have one at home anymore. We felt mightily supported, with musical help from Miles Zurawell, Miles Wilkinson, Joe Nolan, Hannah Goa, our old housemate Elliot Thomas, and special guest Sam Steffen (a great songwriter that I saw for the first time at Edmonton Folk Fest), Emily Bachynski on sound, and two hundred kind hearts packed into the Roxy Theatre singing along.

I’ve shared the album with my Fellow Travellers on Patreon (some of whom even contributed their voices to the choir on the song “A Bigger Tent”) via a secret listening link, and if anyone reading this is among the folks who pre-ordered the album in person and doesn’t want to wait for the physical thing to land in their mailbox, I’m happy to share it with you too, as long as you’ll keep it under your hat. I expect to be done the book by late December, which means it’ll manufactured by mid-January sometime, shipping out to pre-orderers as soon as Pamela gets home from our duo run down under, and available to the wider world sometime in March. I’ve never taken this long on a project before, but I think it’s worth the wait, and I’m gonna do my best to get these songs to new ears all over this big hurting world.

We managed to squeeze in a trip out to the last Robson Valley Music Festival in tiny Dunster, BC right before we flew over this way, and I’m so glad we did. Like ArtsWells, which we also got back to this summer, it was a fest I played a lot back in the day and found a lot of my friends at, but it had been eleven years since the last time. It was a huge joy to reconvene. It’s a beautiful intergenerational gathering on one family’s land with a big ol’ family of friends. Much like our beloved Earthwork Harvest Gathering, which concluded its decades-long run last year, it’s a fest that’s always worn its ethic on its sleeve, leading with values, focused on creating community, taking care of the land, and getting a serious boogie on. Bittersweet as it is to see it go, at least in its current form, it was a beautiful reminder of how much work goes into making dreams real, and in what it’s all about — gathering together, taking care of each other, loving and leading by imagination and example. I reckon that’s what we’re here on Earth to do.

I put my phone away for the whole weekend — unwinding the cellphone from my brain has been changing my game for the better these days — but here's a pic of the throng in full flight from Barry McKillican, behind the sound desk:

Wherever you are, we’re sending our love from here. Stay kind and take it all in,

s