Hey pals,
It’s only been three weeks since I wrote last, but I wanted to send out thanks to the kind folks who welcomed us on our run around Aotearoa just now, and let y'all know about some things coming up in Australia, Taiwan, and Europe. I also want to assure any eager beavers that I’m continuing work on Troubadourly Yours, aiming for an early summer release, and will put out the word for pre-orders here as soon as I know what it’s going to cost me to ship!
I flew into Sydney from Christchurch Monday night, and I’m currently staying in the vacant home of a very kind folk music fan in Thirroul, New South Wales, feeling frankly gobsmacked at all the astounding generosity that makes this life possible. The Little Rippers are reassembling piece by piece, with Justin and Pete making the drive from central VIC last night, the mighty Robyn Martin stepping into Liz Frencham’s massive shoes, and Jed Wesley-Smith jumping in for our first gig tonight, a sold-out little hall in Stanwell Park. It continually blows my mind that I get to play with so many fine musicians. We’ve worked things out to record my ninth album in an old church outside Candelo, NSW under the tender care of my old friend David Ross MacDonald (a formidable songwriter and fingerstyle guitarist who also plays drums for The Waifs), and I think we’re gonna make some magic. We’re not playing many shows on this run, but I’m stoked for the ones we’ve got:
Thu Feb 26 • Stanwell Park, NSW • CWA Hall – SOLD OUT
Fri-Sun Feb 27-Mar 1 • Cobargo, NSW • Cobargo Folk Festival
Sat Mar 7 • Newcastle, NSW • Newcastle and Hunter Valley Folk Club (Scott solo)
Thu Mar 12 • Melbourne (Clifton Hill), VIC • House on the Hill Concerts – LOW TIX!
Fri Mar 13 • Eaglemont, VIC • private house concert
Sat Mar 14 • Upwey, VIC • Burrinja Cultural Centre w/ Robyn Martin opening
Fri-Sun Mar 20-22 • Yackandandah, VIC • Yackandandah Folk Festival
For our last stop at Yack Folk Fest we’ll have the full quiver of Little Rippers, including Pete Denahy on fiddle. I expect the festival’s gonna sell out again, and camping’s been known to sell out at Cobargo too, so don’t snooze on tickets if you want to join us at any of these shows.
After the Australia tour I’m headed to Taiwan for a three-week motorbike trip around the island. It’s something I haven’t done since 2015 (not counting me and Bramwell Park almost pulling it off in 2018 before his fateful scooter crash, and me and Corin Raymond rounding the island in an Austin Mini later that same year), and it’s something I dream about all the time. I’ve lined up a few shows already, but if you know of a quiet venue or a living room and some English-speaking folks keen to listen to songs and stories, please drop a line to scottcooksongs@gmail.com and we might be able to make it happen!
I’m headed home for a month after that to spend time with my folks, then Pamela and I are jumping across the pond for some shows in Denmark, our Scotland bus tour (which I’m grateful to report is now sold out!) and a few shows in the UK. We’d love to add a few more dates if we can, so please shout out if you have any ideas, but here’s what we’ve got so far:
Thu May 14 • Lønstrup, Hjørring, Denmark • Lønstrup Festival
Fri May 15 • Gjerlev, Denmark • Kærby Mølle
Sat May 16 • Borre, Denmark • Café Borre
Sun May 24 • Sheffield, England • Café #9
Tue May 26-Fri June 5 • Scotland bus tour
Tue June 9 • Montrose Folk Club, Angus, Scotland
I’ll be spending most of the summer at home, which my heart’s been craving. We’ve got a couple festival announcements coming soon, but I can already tell you that Pamela and I will be at the wonderful Wild Oats and Notes in Tofield, Alberta, June 26-28. In September we’ll be hitting the road out to Ontario, and then I’ll be crossing the border solo for a tour down the middle of the country and back up the East Coast, assuming the US hasn’t descended into martial law by then. I’ll even be there at election time, assuming there is an election.
I know some of my fellow Canadians, Pamela included, are refusing to visit the States right now, and that sounds sensible to me. But as an American citizen, it feels like my problem too, so I want to be of whatever use I can. Songs can remind people they’re not alone. Songs can even open minds and hearts. That feels like work worth doing, now more than ever.
Aotearoa
Our run around New Zealand was beautiful for lots of reasons. Kiwis are incredibly kind, generous, real, and hilarious, and the country is stunning. We played 17 shows across both islands, and they took good care of us everywhere we went. We revisited some places I hadn’t been since our first trip there in 2020, before Pamela was even playing the bass, so it was beautiful to show up as a duo and be reminded of how far we’ve come since then. Pamela’s got people coming to her for bass lessons nowadays, and she’ll be playing the sold-out Women of Folkways show at Northern Lights Folk Club in Edmonton May 7th alongside Dana Wylie, Maria Dunn and Darla Daniels, singing songs by her heroes Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard and Jean Ritchie interspersed with her own compositions. She even wrote a new one for the occasion, about the Giant gold mine in her old hometown of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories – the broken treaty promises, the deadliest labour dispute in Canadian history, and the toxic legacy of half a billion pounds of arsenic still frozen underground. I helped her out with it, so it’ll be this month’s song for my Fellow Travellers on Patreon.
Pamela’s eldest daughter Mia came along for the last ten days of our run, so it was a real joy to do some family-vacation-touristy stuff with her, ray of sunshine that she is. On one of our last nights we stayed at a funky campsite with no electricity, did some long-overdue singing-songs-around-the-fire, and the gals even got in a wood-fired bath under the Southern stars.
It was really interesting to witness New Zealand at this moment in time – unquestionably doing better in so many ways than many of the places we travel, with its social safety net largely intact and homelessness nowhere near what we’re seeing back home, but still riven by the same schisms we see everywhere we go. We’ve been through a lot of the English-speaking world over the last year, and while the goalposts are in different places in different countries (some people have come to expect universal health care, for example, or decorum from their politicians), the same cultural dynamics seem to be at play everywhere. As Pamela and I see it, chronic underfunding of the public sphere – social services, education, and all the other long-term investments that don’t make sense from within a neoliberal mindset that looks at the whole world as a marketplace and everything sacred as a commodity – has hollowed out our societies, and we’re suffering the predictable results. But as significant numbers of other people see it, the blame falls on immigrants, “woke” leftists, or a shadowy cabal of globalists that engineered the Covid pandemic and are actively trying to bring about a communist world government.
The mutual unintelligibility of these two positions is what interests me most, because 1) I’m aware of how inviting any given rabbit hole can be, given enough time on the internet, and because 2) I’m committed to not giving up on my fellow citizens. I truly believe that the only way we’ll take the world back from its self-appointed owners is by building a coalition of ordinary people big enough to stop them. That means having countless conversations with folks whose opinions are very different. And while social media's been deliberately designed to encourage the opposite kind of conversations, I’m grateful that real social situations, including folk music shows, continue to afford the opportunity for them, as long as we can manage our own instinctive emotional reactions to ideas we find incomprehensible or even abhorrent. I know I mention Braver Angels a lot, but I’m finding their work more important than ever on that score.
Alright, I’ve gotta sign off now! We’re getting the band back together.
Love from rainy Thirroul,
s