Dear hearts,
I’m writing from home, at last, where familiar boreal birds are singing, our washing's hanging on the line, and Pamela's happily digging away in the dirt. A nesting pair of robins built a little hidden home in one of our cedars. I pumped up the tires on both our bicycles and have already gone for a few cruises through the sun-dappled greenery. My mom gave us vegetable seeds and a panoply of plant babies she started indoors. We took down our dilapidated front fence, and Pamela had a lovely, loamy truckload of soil delivered through the new opening. We’ve rigged up four big rain barrels in anticipation of a dry summer. Pamela transplanted a grapevine from her aunt’s place, and is busy filling every patch of ground or planter with seeds, seedlings and flowers. Things feel tenuous, but possible.
My first couple days back from Australia were hard, contending with jetlag and insomnia as I crashed back into all the long-neglected work to be done at home and the tragic news from the rest of the world, especially the suffering in Gaza. We'd been mostly tuning out the wider view for the last three months, in favour of focusing on the people and places in front of us. In my experience, touring requires that kind of selective attention, but the “out there” – whether it’s mundane obligations or the harrowing circumstances of people far away – is no less real for being ignored.
We also had smoky skies here for a couple days, blown down from further north. We’ve both been worrying about the summer since winter. It’s hard to say what’ll happen. All I know is that when the sky’s smoky it’s hard for me to think of anything else, but as soon as it turns blue again it’s far from my mind, and questions of mitigating climate chaos lose their urgency. It's bug of human psychology, I guess, or a feature, depending on how you look at it.
Roadetta got back from an expensive visit to the spa a couple days ago, and after a lot of head-scratching and manual-reading and electrocution-avoiding on my part, her solar system's working and attached to a new lithium battery. I'm taking her for a test run today, headed out near Elk Island National Park for a couple days camping, biking, and starting to write the book that’s going to accompany the new album.
I've also gotta get to work on a song for my Fellow Travellers on Patreon, who just crossed the 200-strong mark the other day. It's a really humbling, incredible feeling of support and motivation to know that so many of you have my back.
When I get back I’m flying to Texas for the Kerrville Folk Festival. I’ll be playing main stage on Memorial Day weekend, judging the New Folk songwriting competition, and teaching at Steve Seskin’s wonderful Songwriters School, and all of those are dreams come true. I've entered the New Folk contest four times, made it to the finals twice and lost both times (though I'm in good company there, with fellow losers like Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, and Nanci Griffith). I've also been a student in the songwriting class twice, and the guitar class once. I learned a lot every time. Though there's an incredible lineup spread over eighteen days, Kerrville's less about what happens on stage than about what happens in the campground – folks circling up, sharing songs and hanging out in named camps, some of which have been there for decades. It's the deepest well of song I've found in all my travels. We stayed for two weeks last year. If you're serious about songs, and the community of songs, it’s worth the trip. Somebody at the gate'll tell you “welcome home!” and with any luck, before long you'll believe them.
We’ll be staying put a lot more this summer, with a garden and a new album on the go, but we do have some fun stuff on the calendar:
Jun 20-23 • Driftpile, AB • North Country Fair
Jun 26 • Edmonton, AB • 15th Annual North Country Fair Afterbender at Blues on Whyte
Jun 29-30 • Edmonton, AB • something sweet I can’t tell you about yet!
Jul 19-21 • Hinton, AB • Wild Mountain Music Fest with Ramblers Choir (Scott Nolan, Joe Nolan, Scott Cook and Pamela Mae)
Jul 24 • Valleyview, AB • house concert (Scott solo)
Jul 25 • Fort St. John, BC • Music In The Park (Scott solo)
Jul 31-Aug 4 • Driftpile, AB • North Country Fair Music Camp (Scott teaching songwriting, guitar and stagecraft)
Aug 9-11 • Ear Falls, ON • Trout Forest Music Festival
September 19-22 • Winfield, KS • Walnut Valley Festival
One thing I’m especially tickled to be around home for is Corin Raymond bringing his one-man play Bookmarks to the Edmonton Fringe in August. We’ll also do a few Alberta shows with him in early September as we head out on our big fall run to release the new album. Our tour will take us down the middle of the States to Kansas, out east as far as North Carolina and Virginia, up to New England, on a loop through Ontario, and back through the Midwest to Winnipeg, where we’ll reunite our new Ramblers Choir collaboration with Joe Nolan and Scott Nolan. It started as a one-off, for a show last fall at Festival Place in Sherwood Park, but it felt like the kind of magic we'd be crazy not to repeat. We're bringing it to Wild Mountain Music Fest this summer and doing a longer run across the prairies on our way home this fall.
All the dates are on www.scottcook.net as they’re confirmed, but there’s still a lot to be filled in on our Stateside swing. If you’ve got any ideas for MT, WY, CO, SD, IA, NE, KS, IN, TN, AR, NC, VA, WV, MD, DE, NJ, NY, CT, VT, NH, ME, PA, ON(tario), OH, MI, or IL, we’re all ears – drop a line to scottcooksongs@gmail.com and I expect we can work something out. This’ll likely be our last visit to many of these places ‘til sometime in 2026, so we want to make the most of it.
Our run down under
Pamela’s first visit to Australia was an amazing three-month ramble. I can’t begin to tell it all, but I can summarize it with gratitude. I’ve gotten to know a lot of good people on my previous trips down there, and that wealth of connections became ever more palpable as we wound our way through the sprawl of welcomes, friendship and generosity across the country.
We were mostly on vacation for the first three weeks or so, with Pamela's daughters along for what was also their first look at Australia. I flew into Sydney a day before the gals, to thread the needle on a 10-hour mission of picking up our rental car, buying a PA, borrowing the bass from the Blue Mountains, doing a morning radio interview in Albury and hustling to Melbourne to get them from the airport.
Our first destination was Yarra Junction Fiddlers Convention, but we stopped in en route at the Duckpond, home of Cecilia Sharpley (who did the eco-dye art throughout Tangle of Souls) and her partner Jonni. They fed us lunch, regaled the gals with Aussie history and even showed us their resident bowerbird’s bower. Native to only Australia and New Guinea, male bowerbirds build an elaborate scene to perform their courtship dances in, arranging sticks or grass into a bower – often incorporating an optical illusion of height and depth by forced perspective – and gathering bright-coloured things to arrange on the ground. It gets the chicks.
The Fiddlers Convention’s an annual gathering held at Camp Eureka, a place built by communists, trade unionists and fellow travellers after WWII that served as the holiday camp for a socialist youth group called the Eureka Youth League from then until 1968.
The festival’s very low-key, but they have old-time and cajun dances in the big shed, blackboard (open mic) slots during the day and half-hour slots from various unpaid acts in the evening. We played both days, and our pal Justin Vilchez – who Pamela met at a bluegrass festival in Saskatchewan – joined us on mandolin for the first of many sets on this tour.
At night there were bluegrass concerts in a smaller shed, trancey fiddle jams in the cook shack, and folks picking and singing in the campground ‘til the wee hours. We tented under the big starry sky, digging the Southern Cross, the Magellanic Clouds, and the constellations in different places than we’re used to. My friend Mick – a woodcarver whose place I’d stayed at on a tour through the Scottish border country over a decade ago – showed up in a rented campervan on his first visit to Australia. My friend Tom – who fixed my last van Skippy as a labour of love – and his partner Alida are regulars at the festival, and were happy that I finally made it. And we got to meet and fall in love with some of the old hard lefties who started the camp.
From Fiddlers we went to Phillip Island for a couple days swimming, hiking and seeing the sights, including the little penguins who waddle their way up the beach from the ocean at dusk every night. We even got to see an echidna up close, a couple copperhead snakes, and a kangaroo with a joey peeking out of her pouch.
On our last night there, a big storm caused a massive power outage through most of Gippsland. We enjoyed the old-time feel of tuning out and tuning in, entertaining ourselves by candlelight, but the next day we drove for a worryingly long time before we found an open gas station. With the internet and everyone’s point-of-sale systems down, the few grocery stores that were limping along on generators were taking cash only. We had some from our CD sales at the festival, but it was an easy example of why Australia’s current plan to become a cashless society is a bad idea, without even getting into the scary possibilities that arise from central control of everyone’s money potentially ending up in the wrong hands.
We drove way up and over the Snowy Mountains, stopping for nights in Dinner Plain, Bright, and finally Yackandandah, where we stayed at our pals This Way North’s place while they were away on tour. We played a sold-out Arts Yackandanah show at the Old Courthouse with Candice McLeod and Gabby Vening opening and local legends Paul Wookey and Pete Denahy joining us for cameos. The next day we played the inaugural Violet Town Music Festival, then headed south to drive the Great Ocean Road and circle back Melbourne way for two lovely house concerts and more exploring before the girls flew home. They even sang with us for the last show at our friend Bronwyn's house.
Pamela and I made a five-show swing out to South Australia from there, dug the big desert spaces, tried some fancy wine, experienced 43°C (110F) heat in Mildura, and saw dolphins on a kayak excursion through mangroves near Port Adelaide.
We did our big Melbourne show on a Tuesday night at the Wesley Anne, and made a little festival of it, with help from Justin Vilchez and Liz Frencham, and cameos from old friends John Flanagan, Mandy Connell, Canadian transplant Claire Jenkins, and Michael Waugh. We got to play Burke and Wills Folk Fest, the little festival at the winery home of my original visa sponsor Andrew Pattison and his wife Heather, spend a couple nights under that incredibly starry sky, and try our hand at picking gewürztraminer grapes on the last morning.
Some plans fell through, but other possibilities swept in to save the day. When a harmony-singing camp we were supposed to teach at cancelled, our friends stepped in to host a house concert for a bunch of bright-eyed Steiner-school (Waldorf) kids and their parents. We didn’t see a single phone in any of the kids’ hands. All of them made easy eye contact and conversation with the grownups. Our hosts’ teenage son joined us on fiddle for a song, and absolutely killed it.
When a campervan we were going to borrow from a friend fell through, Pamela suggested reaching out to Cat and Leisha of This Way North, and it just so happened they were hoping to sell their old tour van. We had to do some serious reorganizing and missioning to pick it up, drop off the rental and connect the dots of our previously-booked gigs, but we managed to pull it all off, and now, for around the same price as it would’ve been to rent a campervan, we’re Australian homeowners! Hector’s his name, and going uphill very slowly is his game.
We took him over the Snowy Mountains early on, still a bit unconfident in his abilities, but he made it up some seriously steep and windy roads, past wild emus and brumbies (feral horses) to a creekside campsite in Geehi where there are plenty of kangaroos and no cell signal.
We played Yackandandah Folk Festival and the National Folk Fest in Canberra with Justin, hugged a lot of old friends and made a lot of new ones. At the National we had Paul Wookey join us again for his haunting song “The Last Coal Train”, which we started covering on this trip. By a stroke of good luck and timing, we got to play with one-time She’ll Be Rights fiddler Jeri Foreman on one set, and were joined by the mighty American vocal quartet Windborne (who blew us away at Summerfolk last year) for an on-stage collab on my song “Get ‘Em, Letitia James”. They were kind enough to do a little version for the social media afterward, which I'll be sharing as soon as I get my head wrapped around captioning videos. Follow me on Tiktok if you're into that sort of thing.
Later that weekend I got to step on the big stage for the first time as part of our friend Josh Bennett’s variety show, being interviewed by the wonderful Gina Williams and playing “Say Can You See” with an absolutely incredible band of musicians. Here’s a video someone shot of mostly the big screen if you wanna have a look. The next day we had the honour of playing “Pass It Along” with Mickey & Michelle and a string section they assembled from festivalgoers, performers and volunteers. Rehearsing with them the day before, with Mickey swinging the baton and the players turning pages on an intricate score that’s just squiggles to me, hearing a song I wrote a dozen years ago during a month of rain and tears in Fulong Harbour lifted to become something I never imagined, was an almost out-of-body experience. I’ve asked for the professional video of that one, and will share it with you when it comes.
We spent plenty of time camping out on the trip, both in tents and in Hector, and it was always a joy waking early to the sounds of Australian birdsong, and hearing it change as we moved through different biomes up the country.
In Colac Colac (pronounced “clack clack”) we camped near the site of the Nariel Creek Folk Festival (Australia’s oldest folk fest, and even more low-key than Fiddlers Convention), and at Pamela’s suggestion, I wrote a song about the festival for my Patreon supporters. We played it at several shows as the trip wound on, and I was grateful that it landed with the longtime festivalgoers we met along the way. I’m already daydreaming about recording a bluegrass album in Australia including “Nariel Creek Waltz” and Paul Wookey’s “Last Coal Train”.
After five days at the National, we headed down to Candelo for a visit with my dear friends there, a show in their hall, and a livestream from our pals Dave and Rae’s house with a cast of local legends that makes a pretty good watch even on the replay. We made our way up the East Coast from there, stretching out the end of summer by going north as autumn was arriving down south. We played in little halls in the country, bigger halls in town, little theatres, lawn-bowling clubs, off-grid communities, an old museum, two tin sheds and one front yard, and felt warmly welcomed into all the various communities along the way.
photo from Nana Glen, NSW by Tania O'Connor
It was especially cool for Pamela to connect in person with folks whose names she already knew from our online shows, and to hear Aussie friends and fans ask about other singers back home who we’d had on as guests.
photo from Oodies Cafe in Bundaberg by Lianne Loach
In Billen Cliffs, NSW, in the big old rammed-earth hall the community built in the 70s, a bat circled and temporarily alighted on Pamela’s face as she was singing. She was zen as could be about it. The hippies were impressed. In Maleny, Bundaberg and Hervey Bay we got to see even bigger bats hanging in cackling, leather-jacketed gangs in the trees, and filling the skies at dusk.
Pamela’s birthday fell near the end of the trip, and I splashed out on a couple nights in a rainforest lodge in Springbrook National Park, a non-profit whose proceeds go to benefit the park. It was a cleanse for both our brains to be offline for a couple days, walking through the towering fern trees, inhaling the camphorous eucalypt scents, marvelling at the songs of whip-birds and catbirds, and watching the little pademelons bounce around.
On one of our last days, we drove Waterfall Way from Dorrigo down to Bellingen, and it was like the swooping birds – rainbow lorikeets, crimson rosellas, galahs, a gang of sulphur-crested cockatoos – were putting on a highlight reel for the end of our trip. Driving southward took us back into autumn, and the cold and the rain and the European trees changing colour seemed to say it was time to go.
Our friend Bronwyn flew up to Sydney to meet us and take Hector on a road trip of her own. He'll be living with her outside Melbourne until we come back, and available for other overseas folksingers, should they happen to need a tour van.
Admittedly, I always feel conflicted about flying around the world to drive around singing songs about peace and love, knowing full well that our flying and driving contributes to the heating of the planet, which contributes to the wildfires that our Aussie friends are even more viscerally familiar with than we are here. Offsets aren’t a solution – and there won’t be any one solution – but I do think it’s a good step to contribute to projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere in proportion to the carbon we’re putting into it, as long as they’re fair and legit and otherwise worth doing. For this tour I contributed to the Great Bear Forest Carbon Project, which is the first North American carbon-offset project led by indigenous folks on their unceded territories. The project protects areas of the Great Bear Rainforest that were previously slated to be logged, employing local Coastal First Nations folks as forest stewards. Me and Pamela’s flights and all the driving we did added up to about 20 tonnes of CO2, which cost $600 to offset.
The even more important piece, of course, is polluting less. Making less trips to the other side of the world, and staying longer while we’re there, is part of that. We’re hoping to get back in late 2025 through early 2026 for an even longer run. And we’re always aiming to tour slower and play as many little places along the way as we can.
Some days it feels hard to care about this stuff. Some days it feels hard to make plans for 2026 when the future feels so uncertain. Some days I just feel like humankind has lost its collective mind, if we ever had one, and we must just be witnessing the inexorable end of this whole blip on Earth’s timeline. The persistence of war, the systems that perpetuate it, and the moneyed interests that profit from it, all make a mockery of our little attempts to do a bit of good here and there – planting flowers, picking up other people’s trash, donating to relief efforts, helping a neighbour with her garden, trying to write songs to remind us how beautiful and sacred life is, trying to find words that might help us understand one another better, and offer a glimpse of a vision of a world that isn’t based on exploitation and coercion. But that’s what I’m doing, and most days, I can’t think of any better answer to Mary Oliver’s question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do. With your one wild and precious life?”
With love, gratitude, and hard-won hope from here to wherever you are,
s