Dear hearts,
It's been three months since my last Hobo Travelogue, and the doorstep of this new year feels like a good place to send a little note from. Marking another lap around the sun reminds me of all I have to be thankful for: a wonderful partner, close friends and family, a roof over my head, food in the fridge, and work I love which not only feels meaningful but even pays the bills, thanks in large part to you kind souls on the receiving end of these Hobo Travelogues. Seeing other musicians posting their end-of-year Spotify Wrapped stats a few weeks back was a potent reminder of how fortunate I am to be truly supported, financially and otherwise, by the folks who enjoy my songs. Most of my songs aren't on the streaming platforms, and even if they were, I'd only get paid ⅓ of a penny per play. I couldn't live by Spotify if I tried. I live by your generosity, and for that I'm incredibly grateful.
This here's a pic of us from New Years Eve, all paisley'd up and toting a plate of Pamela's home-marinated olives to a little shindig in our neighbourhood that wrapped up by 5pm or so. Back at home after the party, Facebook showed me a memory from twelve years back – a post I made when I was gearing up for a marathon ramble around town with my New Years' date Steven Teeuwsen, riding the free city bus to eight or ten different parties with a ukulele in my guitar case and the rest of the space filled with cans of beer. I checked in with Steve, and he was taking the night off to catch up on work that's piled up since he spent the Christmas season as Edmonton's "kinda hot Santa". For our part, Pamela and I continued our unbroken four-year streak of being in bed before midnight on New Years Eve. So yeah, times change.
It's weirdly, scarily still not winter up here in Alberta, which doesn't bode well for the summer to come. We're planning to stick close to Edmonton for most of it, grow a garden, ride bikes through the river valley and out to Elk Island, take in arts and music around town, and hang out with the multitude of dear pals that make this city feel like home. But I've gotta admit, there's a cloud of wildfire smoke looming over all of that in my imagination.
I wrote a new song called "Old Me" over the last few days – inspired by the turning of the year, the disturbingly warm weather, and the current look of things from behind these eyes – and released it to my Fellow Travellers on Patreon on New Years Eve. If you'd like to hear it (along with the other 28 new songs I've written over the past couple years) you can sign up on patreon.com/scottcooksongs at whatever price feels right to you. I've also put up new studio versions of my unreleased songs "There Is A River" and "Steady For You", recorded last month with our pal Miles Wilkinson. We'll be going back into the studio with him in January, and with Liz Frencham in Australia in February, and my Fellow Travellers have been helping me decide which of this huge crop of songs to record for the new album.
I host occasional online workshops for my monthly supporters as well; last month I did one teaching the clawhammer banjo part for "When We're Back Around" and next Tuesday, January 9th, I'm hosting a songwriting workshop that'll be free for my Fellow Travellers and by donation for everybody else. It's happening at 6pm Mountain Time (you can find your time zone here) and should take about an hour. If you'd like to attend you can sign up for my Patreon, where I'll be sending out the link in the next couple days, or just drop a line to scottcooksongs@gmail.com.
This Weary World
The usual end-of-year stock-taking reminds me how incredibly fortunate we are to live in relative safety and stability while so much horror unfolds in the wider world. The situation in Gaza has been especially troubling, to watch the unthinkable horrors of October 7th ignite an even bigger outpouring of violence that it's hard to imagine any good ending to. I posted some of my thoughts on the subject here a while back, if you want to have a read.
TL;DR? The short of it is that deliberately killing civilians is wrong, whether by gunning them down at a rave or by cutting off the flow of food and water to two million people while unleashing all the modern machinery of death money can buy on them. The staggering asymmetry of power and Israel's military and political dependence on US support means that Americans have outsized influence – should they choose to exercise it – in stopping this war. In my opinion, if the goal is eliminating Hamas, no amount of indiscriminate violence will accomplish it. And if the goal is driving the Arab population out of Gaza altogether, as the Israeli newspaper Hayom Daily reports Netanyahu himself recently confirmed, well, that's a war crime.
There sure are a lot of strong opinions on the subject, but I've been finding sense in voices like Gabor Maté, in conversations like this one from The Lever, and in the relevant chapters of Naomi Klein's new book Doppelgänger, which she's made available for free here.
Of course, Gaza isn't the only place bearing the brunt of humans' indifference to our fellow humans' suffering. And while writing our representatives and showing up for rallies both feel worthwhile for me, when I'm feeling powerless I also find real comfort in giving money to folks who need it more than I do.
If you're feeling similarly motivated, and especially if you're interested in effective altruism, I'm thinking I'd like to get behind that too. If you sign up for a new monthly contribution of $20 or more to any of GiveWell or Rethink Charity's top-rated charities and send me a screenshot as proof, I'll give you a free subscription to the subscribers-only section of my website where I mirror all my Patreon content. I donate monthly to the Rethink Charity Forward Global Health Fund, Helen Keller International (which gives vitamin A supplements to children under 5), the Against Malaria Foundation (which provides bed nets to prevent malaria), and GiveDirectly (which gives cash to people in extreme poverty), and I endorse them all. I've also been giving money to Oxfam, the World Food Programme, and the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, which aren't as demonstrably cost-effective as the aforementioned charities, but still way more cost-effective than me buying myself a fancy coffee. It helps suffering people, and it helps me not to feel so helpless in the face of suffering.
I've also been putting money toward carbon-reducing projects since 2020, when I started to seriously reckon with the consequences of my own way of making a living. I made a commitment in Tangle of Souls to offset the emissions from my tours, and I've kept it up since then, calculating the combined carbon footprint of all my travelling and funding projects that will remove twice that amount of carbon from the atmosphere. This year, on the advice of the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation, I went through Less.ca, which funds Gold Standard-certified international projects such as a geothermal central heating system in a village in China's Henan province, a safe drinking water project in Uganda which distributes ceramic filters to eliminate the need for burning wood to boil water, or a project in China's Henan Province to replace coal-fired stoves with solar cookers. This year our tours generated 23.4 tonnes of CO2, and offsetting twice that amount cost just over a thousand bucks. I wrote a fair bit in Tangle of Souls about how complicated the whole question is, including how by far the best thing we can do is actually pollute less, and I did indeed emit less this year than back in the Before Times, but I want to keep making progress on that. Actually counting the carbon, and voluntarily putting a price on it, feels like one small step in that direction.
Come Together
Maybe surprisingly, my biggest worry for the future of humankind isn't about the climate or any particular conflict so much as it is about our inability to come together, both within our societies, and among our species as a whole. I really believe there isn't anything we can't solve if we can somehow get on the same page. I realize how impossible that might sound to some people. It often feels that way to me too. But like with anything that seems impossible, surprising things can happen when you start making small steps.
In America, a group called Braver Angels is making small steps toward turning down the heat in conversations between folks from across the poltiical spectrum, and their work has been a beacon of hope for me these past few dark years. They've got a new podcast called A Braver Way with Mónica Guzmán, and my song "Say Can You See" was featured in a recent episode with Chris Arnade (author of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America) talking about a widening cultural divide that I think about a lot in my travels across the country. It's a plea for understanding, and I think it's really worth listening to.
Pamela and I passed through 8 provinces and 43 states over the past couple years, and we met kind folks everywhere we went. The road's good for that. It furnishes daily reminders of the kindness of strangers, and the way that people from very different cultural, religious and political backgrounds can find ways to get along when they're face to face.
Dates Down Under!
We're headed to Australia at the beginning of February, and it'll be Pamela's first trip. Her daughters are coming along for the first little bit, and it'll be their first time too. We'll be sure to do some Left-Side-of-the-Roadshows while we're there so folks on this side of the world can ride along with us! Here are the dates so far, but more are coming, and if you're over there and have a spot in mind, by all means please reach out!
Feb 10 • Yarra Junction, VIC • Fiddlers Convention
Feb 17 • Yackandandah, VIC • Old Courthouse w/ Candice McLeod & Gabby Vening
Feb 18 • Violet Town, VIC • Violet Town Music Festival
Feb 25 • Glenlyon, VIC • White Room house concert
Feb 28 • Mildura, VIC • TBA
Feb 29 • Adelaide, SA • The Suburban Brew w/ Matthew Bellamy & Maddy Diamond
Mar 1 • Auburn, SA • HATs Courthouse Cultural Centre
Mar 2 • Adelaide, SA • house concert
Mar 3 • Aldinga, SA • Cooee Arthouse
Mar 5 • ONLINE • Left-Side-of-the-Roadshow!
Mar 6 or 7 • where should we play in Melbourne???
Mar 9 • Bendigo, VIC • The Old Church on the Hill
Mar 10-11 • Mia Mia, VIC • Burke & Wills Folk Fest
Mar 13 • Ararat, VIC • Ararat Live
Mar 15 • Healesville, VIC • house concert
Mar 16 • Mount Evelyn, VIC • singing camp with Men In Suits
Mar 19 • Moruya, NSW • St. John's Church
Mar 20 • Cobargo, NSW • CoCo Community Living Room
Mar 22-24 • Yackandandah, VIC • Yackandandah Folk Fest
Mar 27 • Corryong, VIC • TBA
Mar 28-Apr 1 • something big we can't tell you yet!
Apr 5 • ONLINE • Left-Side-of-the-Roadshow!
Apr 3 • Candelo, NSW • Candelo Town Hall Cafe
Apr 4 • Nethercote, NSW • Southern Valley Folk Club
Apr 5 • Wollongong, NSW • Illawarra Folk Club
Apr 6 • Tomerong, NSW • Tomerong Hall
Apr 7 • Kangaroo Valley, NSW • Kangaroo Valley Hall
Apr 10 • Narara, NSW • Narara Ecovillage Hall
Apr 11 • Sydney, NSW • Petersham Bowlo
Apr 12 • Woy Woy, NSW • Troubadour Folk Club
Apr 13 • Kempsey, NSW • Oddfellows Hall
Apr 14 • Nana Glen, NSW • Gerry & Tania's porch
Apr 18 • Billen Cliffs, NSW • Billen Cliffs Community Hall
Apr 19 • Tintenbar, NSW • Tintenbar Up Front
Apr 20 • Springbrook, QLD • TBC
Apr 21 • Nambour, QLD • Sunday Folk
Apr 23 • Brisbane, QLD • The BUg
Apr 26 • Bundaberg, QLD • Oodies Cafe
Apr 27 & 28 • where should we play up north???
May 1 • Stanthorpe, QLD • Little Theatre
May 3 • Megan, NSW • Megan Hall
May 4 • Newcastle, NSW • Newcastle & Hunter Valley Folk Club
As always, all our dates, as they're confirmed and/or announced, are on www.scottcook.net.
Resolving
My new years resolution last year was something Pamela said that sounded like good words to live by: to do a bit of everything today that we want to see tomorrow. I think I actually did pretty good on that this past year. Not always, mind you, especially when the flurry of touring got too thick to leave room for much else, but I managed to get in a lot of pushups, flatpicking practice, mbira practice, yoga practice, occasional sitting meditation, and even got myself caught up on the last two neglected years of taxes and pretty much ready to file for 2023. A younger me would be amazed. I also managed to deliver a new song every month, thanks to the incredible support and encouragement of my Fellow Travellers.
This year's got a lot of challenges for me, including writing a book, recording an album, and releasing both into the world, alongside our tours. But I know I'll do better at everything if I just do a bit of each thing every day. On New Years Day, Pamela said “the only magic in the resolution is doing something today so that tomorrow has a different yesterday.”
So here's an invitation to do something today, no matter how small. It'll give tomorrow someplace to jump off from.
Love from here,
s