Well the three songs below are anyway. If you like what you hear, you can order the whole CD, have it autographed and delivered straight to your door for one easy installment of $18 – and you don’t even have to leave your computer screen, just click here to order.
If you listen well, lifelong traveler and musical hobo Scott Cook’s new album may remind you just how rare a commodity honesty is in today’s music scene. There’s an awful lot of talk about it, but very few songwriters really wear their hearts on their sleeve, and even fewer do it with such lyrical craftsmanship and raw feeling as you’ll hear on this record.
It has been two years and a lot of roads traveled since Scott Cook traded in his job teaching kindergarten in Taiwan for a full-time living as a musician on the road in North America, and while he’s certainly experienced his share of hardships and struggle along the way, he isn’t thinking of quitting. His self-published 2007 debut, Long Way to Wander, made the national folk top ten on college and community radio, and kept him on the road for the better part of two years, living in his van, playing constantly, picking up stories and passing them on. His newest “love letter to the world” is a fitting follow-up, and his best work to date. Entitled This One’s on the House, it’s a collection of road stories, existential ramblings, and musings on love, loss, and the courage to love again.
His heart might be on his sleeve, but it’s wisdom he’s got tucked up it. You get a lot of time to meditate on life while you’re on the road, and this comes out well in Cook’s “Hobo Song”:
There’s no shame in being a hobo
And we all get taken care of somehow
You sure can’t take it with you when you go
Might as well get used to livin’ without now
It reminds me a lot of Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount:
“Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” — Matthew 6:25-26
I suppose it is more than a tad ironic that our obsession with material possessions has made us lose touch with physical reality. Charles Bowden had a strong handle on this in his book, “Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America”:
“We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.”
“Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness. Imagine the problem is not physical and no amount of driving, no amount of road will deal with the problem. Imagine the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act. We hear whispers of the future but we slap our hands against our ears, we catch glimpses but turn our faces swiftly aside . . . Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more. Imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts.”
But you need more than wisdom to make a great record. You need to surround yourself with kindred spirits – preferrably talented ones – and Scott has plenty involved on his second outing. To create a broader sound that draws from folk, roots, country, and soul, Scott called on some of Edmonton’s finest players: Jesse Dee on electric guitar, Bill Bourne on guitar and vocals, Doug Organ on piano and hammond organ, Thom Golub and Moses Gregg on upright bass, Dwayne Hrynkiw and Pascal Lecours on drums, Darrek Anderson on pedal steel, Cam Neufeld on fiddle, Jason Kodie on accordion, Mike Sadava on mandolin, and Lynett McKell, Jacquie B, Megan Kemshead, Haley Myrol and Dana Wylie on vocals, as well as Matthew Ord and Jez Hellard from England, playing guitars and harmonica respectively. Engineer Doug Organ at Edmontone Studios and mixer Brad Smith worked together with Scott to produce a spacious, lushly textured album that will surprise Cook’s longtime fans and undoubtedly introduce many more to the work of this prairie balladeer.
Free mp3 downloads:
3) Hobo Song
I am the creator and site administrator at The Basement Rug. I have been collecting LP's and CD's for more than 30 years. I 
