Born in West Virginia but raised and based in Canada, Troubadourly Yours is Scott Cook’s eighth studio album. Six years in the making, it is deeply autobiographical and resonates musically and thematically with the spirit of Woody Guthrie (even if, at times, Tom Paxton and Gordon Lightfoot also get a look in). The basic tracks laid down in Edmonton with Pamela Mae, Liz Frencham and Nico Humby variously on upright bass, featuring fellow local musicians Joe Nolan on guitar, Dana Wylie on harmonies and Miles Zurawell on dobro with overdubs by Australian mandolinist Justin Vilchez and fiddlers Warren Hood and John Showman, as the title suggests, this is very much of a folk persuasion.
It opens with a nimbly picked, traditional folk-blues-sounding, dustily sung seven-minute title track. It charts his journey to becoming the musician he is today: listening to rock and roll radio, discovering Cohen and Kerouac, picking up records at garage sales, learning guitar and progressing to an amp and distortion box, going from forming a band with friends to hitting the road solo in a camper van to follow his dream, playing gigs just for exposure (wittily noting “you can die of that too”), and basically paying his dues. As it goes, the track develops into an ode to good, honest hard work (“Every job’s got dignity and drudgery/But it shines when you do it well”), helping those who need a hand, the power of unions and believing in ordinary folk (“No matter what creed or flag”), “that the needs of people, not profit/Should be guiding what we do” and that “we got a lot more in common/Than we got to fight about”. It seems a fair credo to follow.
Opening with Hood’s fiddle and coloured by strummed mandolin, Keeping Good Company is a good-time Appalachian-bluegrass tribute to friends, friendship, his musical mentors and, in a world of social media, the importance of real -world community (“You might be weirdos to the world, but you’re all heroes to me… I wouldn’t be me without you”), while the jaunty Steady For You is a simple love song to partner, Pamela (“Headstrong and prairie as a pallet fire”), she on backing vocals and double bass. She’s also to be found on There Is A River, which, Pete Fidler on dobro, is another autobiographical song that, set on the Cook family farm in Levering, Michigan, celebrates values past down from generation to generation, particularly those of his grandparents and muses on the places we return to in our dreams, recalling how, returning from WWI, his stubborn grandpa (“he insisted on driving/Even when he was going blind”) built their home from salvaged lumber. His dad’s retriever also gets a nostalgic mention.
Frencham on upright bass, fellows Australians Mickey O’Donnell and Michelle Doyle on violin, viola and harp, respectively, with Catie Alison on cello, The Wolf That Wins is a sparse and decidedly downbeat meditation on the apocalyptic consequences of unbridled capitalism (“If you close your eyes and breathe in slow, you can taste the casket”) set as a fable about two wolves fighting for the soul of everyone alive; one embodying love and truth and kindness, the other hatred, lies and greed, that concludes “the wolf that wins is whichever wolf you feed”.
Before he got into music full time, Cook was a kindergarten teacher in Taiwan, as reflected in Frankie’s Braids, a song based around his favourite pupil, a sensitive four-year-old mama’s boy with coke-bottle glasses whose English name was Frank, whose “favourite things were kitties/And flowers and his mom” and who would always ask to have his hair braided like the girls. As such, it addresses issues such as the impact of gender and conformity as children grow older (“Frank would learn like we all did/Not to be strange”), harking back to his own school days and, more powerfully, the Canadian reservation schools where (as they did in Australia) indigenous children were separated from their parents, their braids cut off and forced to assimilate. It returns to thoughts of Frank, wondering if he made it in the merciless grown-up world, saying, “I hope you’re dancing now”.
A lively hillbilly melody with fiddle, mandolin, and upright bass, referencing Jesus preaching that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, Enough again turns its eye to the difference between society values and the dreams of his grandparents’ era, and consumerism now. He contrasts their make-do lifestyle to one where “they got everything you want in warehouses/Called Fulfillment Centers”, but how “everything now seems built to break down/And fixing it’s twice the cost”. Name-checking Musk, Bezos, Trump, Gates, Kanye West, and the Kardashians, the message is summed up in the refrain that his grandparents “never had a lot, but they always had enough”.
As the title suggests, featuring mandolin, fiddle and the all-volunteer Fellow Travellers Choir, the musically revivalist inclined, fast talking A Bigger Tent is a swipe at the hypocritical woke (“the houses with Black Lives Matter signs/And no black folks to be seen”) and fake liberalism in a call for inclusivity and embracing diversity among beliefs and a reminder that the real differences are “less about the left and right, than the top against the bottom” (a theme about how cultural divides are exploited by those capitalists in power to obscure people’s common interests expanded on in the accompanying book) asking “is it right that the boss’ boss/Earns five hundred time/What they pay the poor souls they hire/To run the factory lines?”, the track ending with the chanted call and response “we belong to each other after all”.
Frencham on upright bass and Bramwell Park on banjo, with Mae harmonising, From Here On The Curve is another about family, specifically his parents who emigrated to Canada in search of a better but unknown life, that widens out to address the whole notion of how the American experiment of the nation’s founders became a far bigger picture, referencing slavery and Martin Luther’s King’s mountaintop speech about “a land worth bleeding out for/Where what’s in the heart is the measure that matters/And the poor get the mercy they deserve”. Cook’s own dream is to “find ways to save what I love/For lovers to come generations from now/Who’ll find the courage to dream something better/Than a world where some rule and some serve/And to see how the old rules were breakable/That seemed inescapable from here on the curve”.
It ends, Frencham on bass, Park on banjo and Zurawell on dobro, taking a musical swerve with Something To Do With Love, which, nodding to the songwriter’s craft (“I just catch ‘em and work ‘em ‘til they feel good to sing”), both rides a calypso groove and conjures Stan Rogers in a plea for epistemic humility and a criticism of widening inequality that says that if the world begs a question (“I don’t know why some people go hungry/While other folks got more than they’ll ever need”) then the answer has “something to do with love”.
Cook sings “I don’t know exactly what a better way would look like… I’m looking for what I can do here now”. A job well done, the CD comes in a hard-backed 72-page book of notes, lyrics, essays and stories; this truly is a brilliant sign-off of the times.
Troubadourly Yours (September 25th, 2026) Groove Revival