Hey friends!
It’s been a full-tilt month and a half since I wrote you last, but now that things are mellowing out a bit, I wanted to send out a note before I retreat into a weeklong writing residency in the Texas Hill Country. It’s called Occupy Blue Rock, and it’s happening at Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studios in Wimberley – a legendary recording studio and house concert venue that was geared up with help from Rupert Neve and has hosted folks like Lyle Lovett, Paul Simon, Jesse Winchester, Ruthie Foster, Eliza Gilkyson, Mary Gauthier, Bill Frisell, and many more. Since I've been moving so much lately, it'll be amazing to stay in one place for a week, tune out the world, and tune into writing and playing my instruments. I’ve wanted to do this since I heard about it a few years ago, and it’s an honour to be chosen. I’ll be staying there with three other writers – Cliff Eberhardt, Judy Blank, and our host Billy Crockett – and on the last day we’ll be debuting some of our new creations in a writers-round concert for an audience in the studio and online! It’s free to tune in if you want to join us, here.
The rest of my dates are all here, with a couple new ones since I last wrote:
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
Sat Oct 17 • Water Valley, MS • TBC
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
Wed Nov 4 • Fairfax, VA • private event
Thu Nov 5 • Fredericksburg, VA • house concert
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 and Susan Isaac opening - LOW TICKET ALERT
As always, all the details are on scottcook.net, and if you've got people in any of the places I'm going, I'd love to meet them !
In other news, Troubadourly Yours continues rolling out into the world – its European release date was a week ago, and it’s already gotten some fine reviews, like this one in KLOF Mag.
Pamela and I have managed to get all the North American orders in the mail (except the vinyl, which is still on its way), and the Australian orders are going out with help from my friend Greg at Sugar Sounds in Bega. If you’ve been meaning to put in an order, get on over here and we’ll get it to you!
The big companion book of liner notes is still on its way. I’ve kept jotting down ideas on this trip, but I’m finding it impossible to keep up with myself amid all the driving and gigging. I did listen to Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World along the ride though, and wow, they sure tie a lot of threads together. They’re covering some of the territory I’m covering in my book, although way more thoroughly and journalistically, and the audiobook’s read by the authors themselves. Highly recommended.
Tour’s been amazing so far. Pamela and I had a dreamy last show together in a coulee outside Drumheller with Mallory Chipman and Billie Zizi, and then she decided to come along for the ride to Saskatoon so we could have another last show together.
After that I was off on The Big East West (as Stephen Fearing calls it), gigging nearly every night and feeling incredibly lucky staring up at the moon from campsites after the shows. Doing the long cross-country drive alone brought back a lot of memories. I even had one shitty bar gig where the crowd talked over me the whole time, in one of the places I’d actually thought of as one of the better spots I played back in those early years. It reminded me that those are the kind of gigs most working musicians play all the time. Since I’d booked the Canadian shows on very short notice, most of them were house concerts. Looking through the eyes of my younger self, I couldn’t believe how good I’ve got it — travelling in a big campervan that feels downright extravagant for one person, singing for people who came out to hear the songs and be changed by them, and subsisting on the generosity of the kind folks who open up their homes and their circles of friends to music.
In the Wilno hills, I got to play at an intentional community that’s survived since the sixties, where they loaded me up with fruit and veg and some really wide-ranging, thought-provoking, heterodox conversation extolling hippie values, the traditional ways of the Huron tribes and the anti-mandate truckers' Freedom Convoy. In Ottawa, my buddy Paul drove his backhoe to the house concert on his way home from a jobsite. He told us about parking his snowplow at the National Arts Centre one time to watch a concert in the middle of a 20-hour shift during a big storm. When he left, he swung the big shovel of his backhoe to tinkle the wind chimes on the tree out front. My Taiwan pal Mojo came on her bicycle, and had to ride home to get up early and learn how to shoot guns the next morning. Lots of people don't fit in boxes.
In Godfrey, my old friend Corin Raymond pulled off a feat of organizational oomph called Woodlot Gathering with our hosts Shamus Hannah and family, setting up a sweet stage in front of their barn for a crowd of about a hundred to gather on a beautiful fall evening and witness jaw-droppingly good performances from Treasa Levasseur, Mike T. Kerr’s trio, Corin’s band the Sundowners and more. Our buddy Greg Klyma even drove up from Buffalo to play and give it all at the campfire ‘til the wee hours. The dogs-to-humans ratio was incredibly high. The potluck was huge. My old songwriter pal David Newberry brought his partner Megan and four year-old Leonard, who loved it. At one point I was sitting in front of them, watching Treasa weave magic and joy and healing out of story and grief and groove, when she said something about all of us belonging to a mystery.
Little Leonard said, “we belong to a mystery, don’t we?”
And Dave said yeah, yeah we do.
I wrapped up the Canadian shows with my third visit to Westfalia Way, a sweet afternoon house concert in a back alley in Toronto, then headed out toward Michigan. The next day I tidied up the van, tucked away my Jacobin magazines, tallied up all my merch and mustered up all my courage on the drive to the border. I'd been listening to the news about the escalating trade war and tariffs and cross-border hostility and contending with all the imaginary questions and van-scouring scenarios I could dream up, but the guard just asked a couple easy questions and waved me on through.
My first Stateside show, in Kait Rose’s barn outside Kalamazoo, felt like a hug. Some longtime fans showed up (including our friends Rich and Christine, who have sought us out in several different states and even came along on our Scotland bus tour!) along with a bunch of kind folks I hadn’t met yet. People apologized for the antagonism from their country, related the big struggles to their local struggles, and told me things I'd never heard before. The shows have all been like that.
At Wheatland Music Festival in Michigan I got to mingle with a very ideologically-diverse crowd, and get taken to school by old pros like Laurie Lewis and The Right Hands, the Lonesome Ace Stringband, Mary Gauthier, Ray Bonneville, the Wonder Women of Country and more. Upstate, I got to visit with some of my fam and stop in at the old Cook farm and hardware store. In Wisconsin I savoured their accents and way of thinking and got an ever deeper feeling of kinship between Canada and the Midwest. In Milwaukee I got to learn about the long history of “sewer socialism” that was such a big inspiration for New York City mayor Mamdani. In Minneapolis I got to meet one of the many clergywomen who got arrested during Operation Metro Surge, and got to sing my song “Love Is Tough”, which I wrote in New Zealand after Renée Good and Alex Pretti got killed and the widespread, organized resistance of Minnesotans inspired people around the world. The power of that effort, of neighbours helping neighbours, of ordinary people refusing to “obey in advance” as Timothy Snyder puts it, was a big part of the reason I wanted to come back down here. I finally had three days off in a row, which I spent in Albert Lea State Park.
I shot straight south from there, marvelling at the quickly-changing climate and birdsong and accents along the way. In Lincoln, Nebraska I got to play a dreamy concert series held in a building shared with a halfway house. In Lenexa, Kansas I played another wonderful concert series held in a Unitarian Universalist church, and stayed over to sing in the church service the next morning. My hosts were headed to a NASCAR race later that day, and I had to wonder about the size of the overlap on the Venn diagram between Unitarian Universalists and NASCAR attendees.
In Tulsa I got to camp for two nights at an old favourite pirate oasis of ours, a funky multi-use space among the decrepit factories along the river.
Unfortunately, Roadetta had a problem that could only be fixed at the Mercedes stealership, so I had a fish-out-of-water morning in the waiting lounge trying to drink enough lattes and eat enough snacks to make up for the outrageous price of repairs while eavesdropping on a slow-talking, nice-seeming old guy telling his friend that he’s walking every day and eating lots of vegetables and his only vice is ice cream, how he’s lonely at times but he thinks he made the right choice in not remarrying, talking about the Gospel of Mark and the music at the new church and how America’s under threat more than ever before, and how Trump should probably send troops into Iran, but should probably wait until after the midterms. I didn’t butt in, but I was tempted.
Later that night I played the feature set at an open mic at the Colony, the first place I ever set foot in Tulsa years ago. I wondered for a second whether “Frankie’s Braids” might be a bridge too far for the crowd given how hot the culture war around gender seems to be down here, before reminding myself that it’s what I’m here to do. Later on I got to watch an Oklahoman songwriter friend of mine arguing politics with a friend of his who actually thought Trump won the 2020 election and wasn’t responsible for what happened on January 6th. I chimed in only occasionally, mostly just marvelling at how it all went, how their talk got hot but remained tempered with trust, how they both said “I love you” to keep it on the rails, and how well my buddy communicated ideas that lots of folks would call “socialist” (although he didn’t) in a language everyone could understand. Funnily enough, after it cooled down, the fella who’d been defending Trump told me that the song about the Taiwanese kid slayed him.
I wish I knew a faster way to change minds en masse, but I don’t. Keep making ripples, friends. Get out and vote, but don’t be fooled that the world’s gonna be saved by what we do in private behind the voting booth. Keep talking to people. They might surprise you.
Love from here,
s