Hey friends!
This Hobo Travelogue's coming to you from a corner of the world we’ve never seen before, though it kinda feels like a tidier, more cosmopolitan version of our boreal home. We landed in Oslo, Norway last night and will be taking a train to Gothenburg, Sweden tomorrow, then hopping on a boat to Frederikshavn, Denmark, for three gigs lined up by our friend MC Hansen. I wanted to be sure and write before this whole adventure gets rolling, since I’ve got Taiwan tales to tell, and because I’ve got a new song coming out right away!
“There Is a River” drops May 15th as the first single from Troubadourly Yours. There’s a link to it on all the platforms here, and if you use the streaming services, I’d be very grateful if you’d pre-save it.
The day after I sent out my last Travelogue, I found out that the song won the grand prize in the Great American Song Contest, and that “Frankie’s Braids” (coming as a single in July) took first place in their “Special” category. That very same morning, I also heard that I got a big chunk of change from the Canada Council for the Arts in retroactive support of all our international “Purveyors of Hope” tours over the past year. All of that, in addition to the ongoing backing of now 257(!) Fellow Travellers on my Patreon, has me feeling mightily supported even as this whole business feels increasingly precarious.
I’ll be pumping the bellows of the ol’ social-media furnace more than usual in the weeks and months to come as this album rolls out to the world. Personally, I think I’m a better person when I’m ignoring my phone, so I certainly don’t want to encourage anyone to pay more attention to theirs. But I’m gonna try my best to find some new ears with this album, and a team of savvy young Edmontonians called Hurry Hard Music are helping me with that. I believe in this set of songs, I believe in the book I’m writing, and I believe in the power of music to open hearts and minds, so I’m gonna blow these dandelion seeds as far and wide as I can. I just want to apologize in advance if you hear a bit too much “look at me!” from Cook & Mae HQ over the next while. I have way more faith and investment in the real world of face-to-face friendship than the fickle winds of online fame. And to any of the 150 or so folks who preordered the album in person a year or so ago, rest assured that yours’ll be in the first bunch we send out!
First, the dates on this run:
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, Angus Scotland • Montrose Folk Club
Then our summer dates back home:
June 18-21 • Driftpile, AB • North Country Fair w/ the Outdoorables
June 24 • Edmonton, AB • North Country Fair Afterbender (TBC)
June 26-28 • Tofield, AB • Wild Oats and Notes
July 2 • Valemount, BC • Valemount Anglican Church
July 3 • BC • where should we play???
July 4 • Summerland, BC • An Evening in the Valley
July 8 • Gibsons, BC • SoulShine Concert Series
July 9 • Vancouver, BC • Notional Space
July 10-12 • Crawford Bay, BC • Starbelly Jam
July 17-19 • Yellowknife, NT • Folk On the Rocks
July 22 • High Level, AB • TBC
At the end of August I’ll be travelling solo out to Ontario, and I’m still pretty much wide open for gigs including house and yard concerts – drop a line to scottcooksongs@gmail.com if you want to make something happen! At the beginning of September I’ll be crossing into Michigan for Wheatland Music Festival, and then all the way down the middle of the country to Texas and back up the East Coast. Dates are on www.scottcook.net but there’s still a lot to be filled in — please shoot me an email if you’ve got any ideas, even if it’s your living room. Maybe I should say especially if it’s your living room. Living rooms are feeling like ever more precious spaces of community and connection the more I get to sing in them, like we just did in tiny but mighty Calmar, Alberta a week ago.
My second home
The run around Taiwan was incredible. The island's just as staggeringly beautiful as I remembered, and Taiwanese people are kind as ever. My pals are all growing older, and their kids are growing up, but so much feels the same. I went by my regular breakfast restaurant in my old hometown of Longtan, and the lady still remembered my usual order after twenty-some years — 玉米起司蛋餅 / yumi qishi danbing, in case you're ordering for the table! It did my heart so much good to see her and her sister still there after all this time, with her sister's kid working there now too. I asked how long she’d been at it and she said 30 years, which meant she was just getting started in the breakfast business back when I was just getting started eating Taiwanese breakfast.
After a couple heartwarming shows in Beipu and Taichung I went up into the mountains, wound my way through misty bamboo groves, got caught and soaked in a sudden downpour, and finally made my way up to Alishan, where I got up early to catch sunrise over the tea fields.
Back down the hill in town I saw something I'd never seen before: a self-serve, weigh-your-own grocery stand selling local veggies. Like the farm stands on the Gulf Islands, just way more Taiwanese.
Along the whole trip, I made a habit of putting the phone away and finding my way like I used to: paying attention to the sun and the landscape and asking people along the way. I felt some old head space coming back.
From Alishan I drove deeper into the mountains to a gorgeous valley connecting three Tsou indigenous villages that my buddy Tea Andy had sent me to almost twenty years ago with a sheet of hand-written directions. The hillsides were drier than I’d ever seen in Taiwan—the whole island’s in a multi-year drought—but otherwise it hadn't changed much; still not a 7-11 to be found in the whole valley. Even further into the mountains, I camped all alone on a mountainside in Namaxia and wrote a song for my Patreon called “Burn Clean” that I’ve sung at every show since.
I was way down south over the qingmingjie (清明節 / “Tomb Sweep”) weekend, a holiday when Taiwanese traditionally visit their ancestral home to make offerings and cut the grass around the tombs. Back in 1995, our friends Wade and Jimi started a festival called Spring Scream on that weekend which became a huge event for the Taiwanese and foreign indie music scene. As time went on, copycat events started popping up with names like “Spring Wave” that leaned heavier on techno and saw some big drug busts. Eventually, the name “Chuntian Nahan” (春天吶喊) came to stand for a whole spring break scene down south that Taiwan never had before. Wade and Jimi stopped doing their festival in 2019, but the government funds a big event in its place nowadays. I drove through the teenage crowds and blasting sound systems on the way through to “Spring Squawk” — a low-key weekend party at a campground called Shady Tree where I caught up with old friends, marvelled at our aging mellowness, rocked out to some old stalwarts like Point 22 (pictured) and The Combobulators, and even managed to talk a Saturday night drinking crowd into storytime.
Sitting and listening to storytelling songs in English is a very niche thing in Taiwan, as you might imagine. Most of my crowds were 15 or 20 folks, but the shows felt powerful. Hours on the scooter were harder on my butt than they used to be, but the drive was incredible as always.
I saw Taiwan blue magpies, a muntjac, a Taiwan blue pheasant, some really cool lizards, and two monkeys who ran across the road in different spots. I got to play a theatre show for a wonderful crowd of arts students at Dong Hwa University in Hualien with my old friend Mister Green, and got to sing at my friends’ beach bar in Wai’ao for a bunch of old pals, with my bandmate-since-high-school(!) Tyler Dakin — who looongtime readers of this Travelogue will know from our old band The Anglers — picking some characteristically sweet and understated leads on electric guitar.
Fellow Canadian touring troubadour Tennyson King got up to sing one at the Taipei show, right at the start of his own Taiwan tour. I rounded out the last few bittersweet days with a couple nights at the house in Fulong where I'd been holed up writing for most of December, a visit with three of my oldest Taiwanese friends, and a trip to see Shifen Waterfall, which I'd meant to see but never made it to on my last visit.
In case there's any doubt, I’m still plugging away on the book, I’m still believing, and I couldn't be more grateful for y'all sticking with me.
Love from here,
s