Tumbler Ridge’s third most famous musical export (after the Moffats, if you consider the brothers as a single unit) and Joey Moi, Scott Cook is returning to town for the first time in years for a concert on July 27.
Cook, who now calls the Edmonton area home, has been stomping around his home turf for the last month after spending much of the first part of the year in Australia. “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,” says Cook.
He says he’s doing what he can to pollute less. “Making fewer trips to the other side of the world, and staying longer while we’re there, is part of that,” he says. “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.”
But Cook, a dyed in the wool folk singer, says its hard to care about these things when the future seems 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.”
Cook spent three years in Tumbler Ridge—from 1987 to 1990 (“grade 6 to halfway through grade 9.) His mom was a nurse and his dad was the pastor of the Alliance Church, which used to meet in a room in the Community Centre.
Cook writes songs that are simple and earthy, the words like grain springing up from good dirt. These are not fancy words strung together to create ambiguous meaning; they are good, strong words that tell stories and paint pictures, and even when he starts to consider the very nature of existence in the album’s title track it never strays too far from those concrete, tangible images his words evoke. Consider these lines from the title track of his previous album, Tangle of Souls:
It’s a fleeting incarnation
It’s a gift that you can’t keep
Stardust with a will to live is all there is to me
Every atom’s borrowed and every heart’s a refugee
Looking for home in this strange tangle of souls
Between the field of stars above
And the fields of dead below
Taking a wayward shot at love
Giving it all back when we go
Some say this world’s an accident
Just a clockwork running down
Some talk like it’s a tournament where the cruellest gets the crown
Seems to me it’s a pilgrimage and every step is hallowed ground
A walk through fire in a holy tangle of souls
“Stardust with a will to live” is one of the best turns of that tired cliché that I’ve stumbled across.
We asked him to tell us about his early days as a musician here in Tumbler Ridge, and to fill in the gaps between then and now.
“In grade 7, after a killer air-band rendition of The Final Countdown on fake plywood electric guitars, my buddies and I decided we wanted to start a rock band. Ray Proulx [guitarist of the exceptional rock band Downwater Union] had an electric and had already learned some pentatonic scales from his guitar teacher. Me and my other friend Rishi just had a lot of ideas and less in the way of musical skill. That was as far as we got with that. But I did write some raps with friends, and performed one of them in a talent show in the community centre. We played the beats on my parents’ keyboard and did the scratches with a toy record player that I destroyed because I thought scratching actually involved scraping the stylus sideways across the record.
After leaving Tumbler, what was your path to Canadian Folk super-stardom? How did you get there from here?
My family left TR in 1990 to live in Sherwood Park, outside Edmonton. In 1991 I saw Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit on MuchMusic and decided I needed an electric guitar. My folks gave me a Squier Strat, I bought an amp and distortion pedal with my newspaper money, a friend showed me how to play power chords, and I was off to the races. Me and four classmates started a punk band called Super Dooper. I was on bass because the other two guitar players were better than me.
Pretty soon we started getting gigs, playing all ages shows at seedy dives in the city, getting hurt in the mosh pits and just generally revelling in the craziness of the whole scene. I don’t recall us ever getting paid, but some girls did come to our shows and eventually even started singing along. For kids like us who weren’t good at sports, it was pretty much the coolest thing ever.
During university I kept playing loud stuff, but also delved into electronic music, programming drum n’ bass, as well as getting funkier with a band called Triffid and jamming on acoustic tunes by the river with my buddy Tyler from high school.
We both ended up living and teaching in Taiwan after university, and formed a roots and reggae band called The Anglers while we were living there. I’d initially gone there on a whim, thinking I’d stay for six months, but I ended up falling in love with the country and living there for six years. I’d come home in the summers to visit friends, go to music festivals, and see what other trouble I could get into, traveling around and singing wherever I could.
We were just weekend warriors in Taiwan, but back home I saw professional folk musicians who actually made a living at their craft, and tried my best to learn by watching them. In 2003 and 2004 I brought my Taiwan bandmates over for two summer tours that ending up being financially disastrous but otherwise life-changingly good, and in 2005 I decided to move back home and try to make a go of it on my own. I just couldn’t shake the thought of all the might’ve-beens that might haunt me if I never really gave it a try.
I put an air mattress in the back of a van and set out on the road, made it all the way to Halifax, maxed out my credit card and limped home on fumes. I got a job pushing broom in a local rink to earn enough for a plane ticket back to Taiwan, where I recorded my first album in a buddy’s apartment and worked another year and a half to save up enough to try again. I moved back into the van (with a real mattress this time) in the summer of 2007 and I’ve been a full-time musician ever since. In the early days it was a lot of playing in bars, being ignored, drinking too much, and piling up debt. As time went on, kind folks I met along the way started offering to host shows in their houses, and I finally got to learn what to do with an audience’s full attention. Gradually I started getting booked at festivals, folk clubs and theatres, and my tours expanded to Europe, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. It’s been a DIY endeavour the whole time, but it’s the big web of friendships I’ve made along the way that’s kept me afloat.
What is the farthest place you’ve been from Tumbler, perhaps physically, perhaps ideologically. Draw a line between the two.
Hard to say about ideological distance – I mean, New York City’s a long way from TR, but someplace like Muag Ngoi Neua in Northern Laos must be further. Physically, the furthest place I’ve played a show from Tumbler was Johannesburg, South Africa.
The line between any two places is that there are people in them, and people, I believe, are a lot more alike than they are different. We may have very different customs and beliefs about the world, but deep down I think we all fundamentally want the same things, which are to love and be loved.
Does growing up in TR affect your music, especially lyrically?
I grew up mostly rural, and I deeply appreciate the unpretentiousness and honesty that comes with living in a small town. Different kinds of people have to learn to get along in small communities in way that they don’t in cities. I try to write my songs in a language that has room in it for everybody. I try to see what’s admirable in people, and speak to the good in them.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
