Artist: Scott Cook
Hometown: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Song: “Rollin’ to You”
Album: Tangle of Souls
Release Date: August 7, 2020
In Their Words: “On August 7, I’ll be releasing my seventh album, Tangle of Souls. It comes packaged in a 240-page, clothbound hardcover book, the apotheosis of a long-running, possibly unhealthy obsession with liner notes. This is the first of those songs I wrote — yodeling and laughing to myself in a rented room in Chicago — and it planted the seed of an idea that led to making a string band record. The aesthetic is often the first thing I have in mind, before I even know what the album wants to be about, and this time around I wanted a string band, with a fiddle, because the fiddle is the electric guitar of acoustic music.
“I’d been touring a fair bit in Australia with Liz Frencham, a killer upright bass player with a studio in her backyard, and on one of those tours we got to talking about making a record. I brought over fellow Albertan and longtime collaborator Bramwell Park to play banjo and mandolin, and Liz connected with an Aussie fiddler named Esther Henderson, who I’d never met. I named the band ‘Scott Cook and the She’ll Be Rights’ after an Aussie expression meaning ‘it’ll be OK’ or ‘don’t worry about it.’ (You might say it’s somewhere on the spectrum between nonchalance and negligence.) We arranged the songs along that tour and cut the record at the end of it, then I spent the next year or so writing the liner notes. π ” — Scott Cook
Photo credit: Kate Baker