Elizabeth Cook has proven many times over that she can only be herself, and thank heavens for that. Throughout her career rich stories and songs have oozed out of her with a kind of magical ease that makes her instantly a magnet for listeners.
“Part of it is how I was raised,” says Cook while on the road in Texas with her band on their current Waltz Across Texas Tour (Take Two). “It was a really bad thing in my house to be, for lack of a better term, ‘a bullshitter.’ We are who we are and we have no shame about it regardless of how it looks.”
“It was a really bad thing in my house to be, for lack of a better term, ‘a bullshitter.’ We are who we are and we have no shame about it regardless of how it looks.”
Cook and her band are making their way through Texas and will stop in Houston on Sunday, August 18 for a performance at White Oak Music Hall. This tour is a sort of do over opportunity for Cook and her band who last winter had to cancel a whole Texas run due to illness.
For the multifaceted Cook, returning to tour after a few years off the road feels pretty good. “It’s such an important thing for me as a songwriter to go out and play this music and connect it with people. It really kind of finishes the cycle of that process and I haven’t been doing it as much these past few years.”
The always busy Cook has been off the road and adding new activities to her ever evolving “Bingo Card” as an artist, trying new projects and taking time to keep herself healthy and creating. She is currently set to begin recording a new album this fall.
Cook hosts her daily SiriusXM show Apron Strings on the Outlaw Country station, a gig she got about fifteen years ago from station programmer and producer Jeremy Tepper.
Cook describes how she started with a weekly show and gradually built on that until Tepper had her doing a daily program on the air so that he could continue his behind the scenes work with the station and its yearly Outlaw Country Cruise.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t have put it on my bingo card for my journey in music like so many things,” she says with a laugh.
This year the Outlaw Country family has suffered two back to back blows with the unexpected and sudden passings of not only Tepper, who passed away earlier this summer, but also Cook’s fellow DJ the “Loon In The Afternoon” Mojo Nixon, who passed away on the cruise.
“It’s been a really, really wild and gutting year in every sense of the word, she says somberly. “We are rallying, re grouping, resettling and all hell bent to carry on the legacy of what those guys created so that’s the cathartic part of it, that’s the healing part of it.”
There’s no doubt that Cook can help be a major part of what keeps the Outlaw Music community and movement going as she herself embodies the main spirit of it all, being unabashedly yourself, tough as nails and the love of real, good music.
Cook also hosts a fishing show Upstream With Elizabeth Cook where she takes other musical friends fishing and to wax philosophic about life, music and more. She has her brand of clothing and other accessories Women For Sheriff which perfectly captures her whimsical, country aesthetic.
Most recently, she has been working on a film about her life, another project that has kept her off the road as of late.The yet unreleased film titled The Easy Kind will feature a blend of documentary footage, some actor portrayals and like her music, a lot of truth embellished a bit to add to the story.
“I don’t know why,” she says about her many creative roles. “I’m pretty lazy really so it’s kind of a facade I feel like but I do get bored easily so I have to constantly rotate around how I’m creating.”
Cook’s story is an interesting one and sure to translate well to film as it does to song. Raised in a large musical family where her daddy was in and out of jail for moonshining and she and her parents had a family band which she performed with since a small child. Throughout her career, Cook has never turned her back on her roots.
“We are who we are and we have no shame about it regardless of how it looks, regardless of the records with the law, the records with our socioeconomic brackets. I look at my family as beautiful, talented, intelligent people who come from the school of hard knocks and I’ve never had the idea to try to act like I wasn’t that.”
Her family history and country upbringing are a huge part of what makes her songs so feel warm, wise and approachable with lyrics that often teeter between comical and deep making Cook a rough and rowdy poet with a sweet yet gritty voice of an angel.
Cook studied to be an accountant and shortly after landing a “good” job at the prestigious PricewaterhouseCoopers in Nashville but somewhere between the corporate culture and uncomfortable yet mandated pantyhose dress code, Cook started to lose her sense of self.
“It was stifling in every way and because I had nowhere to exercise myself creatively in my job, it was killing me. It’s the first time I went on antidepressants.”
After playing one song for a friend, she got a publishing deal and worked her way to becoming a Nashville sweetheart who currently has been a guest on the Grand Ole Opry over 400 times.
Despite her publishing deal Cook still had to dance with the classic Nashville attempts to box her into the cookie cutter, sweetheart, pretty girl country singer but Cook found a way to be herself even more, an experience that seems to be reflected in her 2020 release “Perfect Girls Of Pop.”
“I couldn’t not be who I was. Even when I was in Nashville and I was with the deal that sort of grooved me in another direction for sure but my stubborn creative streak was too strong and could not be repackaged to that extent,” she admits.
She wasn’t trying to cause any trouble, what they wanted just wasn’t her. “It’s really wild to look back on because I was trying so hard to be a good girl and be what they wanted but I just couldn’t do it, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
Thankfully, the days of pantyhose and pre-approved outfits are long gone. These days Cook can usually be caught wearing a fabulously dazzling and long fringed “funsie” jumpsuits designed by her friend and Women For Sheriff partner, Cybelle Elena.
Cook’s last album, Aftermath was a sort of rebirth following an incredibly challenging time in her life filled with personal loss and tragedy which Cook used to explore new sounds and dig deep into herself.
The album showed Cook stepping even more into herself and poking fun at her experience while again celebrating her roots with songs like “Thick Georgia Woman” and the oh so powerful “Two Chords And A Lie.”
Aftermath ends with her take on John Prine’s “Jesus The Missing Years” with Cook’s cleverly and aptly titled, “Mary, The Submissing Years” and a real testament to her strength as a writer. She describes the concept of the song weighing her for years until one winter around the Christmas holiday, she hunkered down to be by herself, with only a few corn dogs to eat, and busted it out.
“When I get a line, which usually comes from reading something or somebody has said something or I think of a story that I just can’t quit talking about or telling and those little spark moments become lyrics in a song and it’s a real rush for me to do that,” says Cook adding, “That’s usually to me what the sign is that something is trying to find its way out into the world.”
Elizabeth Cook will perform with Cousin Curtiss on Sunday, August 18 at White Oak Music Hall, 2915 N Main, 7 p.m, $20.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
