Canadian 'prairie balladeer' Scott Cook has spent the last six years rambling contentedly across The United States, Europe and Asia.
He's currently based in Edmonton, Alberta but probably won't be for long.
The inclusion of the text of Walt Whitman's Song Of The Open Road in the CD booklet shows that he is addicted to the troubadour lifestyle.
The one cover song on the album, Greg Brown's The Poet Game, can also be taken a manifesto/celebration of this nomadic existence. Scott Cook recognised Brown's "plain-spoken open-heartedness" as the voice of a kindred spirit.
By chance, I made a tenuous link between these two artists myself. When I heard Cook's You Don't Find Out In The End, I thought of Iris Dement's Let The Mystery Be. It turns out that, not only has this song been covered by Brown but that Dement is this singer's third wife.
The other nine songs on Cook's fourth album, are the fruits of a travelling life and what he calls a "love letter to the world".
His extensive sleeve notes set out his philosophy as a free spirit who finds no point of connection with the 'every man for himself' principle that drives the capitalist system on the road to nowhere.
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"I see my own struggle mirrored in the world at large", Cook writes and expresses this same sentiment in song form on Broke, And So Far From Home when he sings "the whole sad mess is like me I guess".
In a similar frame of mind, Among The Trees speaks of a Blakean nostalgia for the innocent pleasures of childhood games before "we traded our dreams for things".
His solution to this money grabbing selfishness is set out in Pass It Along and New Grist. The first embraces the altruistic folk tradition of sharing songs, a principle Cook finds a modern equivalent of in the creative commons ethos pioneered by the late Aaron Swartz. The second of the songs is a plea to "dust off the old tunes" and breathe new life into them.
With his warm voice, acoustic guitar, clawhammer banjo, and helped by a bunch of friends, he is armed with the tools to do just this.
Scott Cook's website
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