Elizabeth Cook - Singer/Songwriter

Here's a delightful article from The The Tribune which gets Elizabeth to reveal a lot about herself and the way she thinks and writes.

Elizabeth Cook (July 8, 2011)
By Steve Knopper, Special to the Tribune

4:07 p.m. CDT, July 7, 2011

Country singer Elizabeth Cook is talking about what made last year's hilarious and poignant "Welder" such a leap in sophistication beyond her previous three albums.

"I'm a late bloomer. It just took time. I just had to gestate," Cook says by phone from outside a Mexican restaurant near her Nashville home. "I got really free and just started following every whim and muse, collecting porcelain bathtubs in my backyard, and roller-skating and doing all the weird, quirky stuff that goes with being free to do what I wanted."

Hang on a second. Roller-skating? "Well," she says in her Tennessee twang, "I've always had roller skates around all my life, and there's just something about that process that is very freeing to me." OK, but collecting porcelain bathtubs? "I just like them!" she says. "I plant flowers in them. And some of them I just keep open, and some of them I just take a bath in sometimes. (There's) this really bad, ugly, '50s pink one. It came from a salvage yard in east Tennessee. It's just open and doesn't have anything in it."

Actually, these diverse hobbies will come as no surprise to Cook fans, who have come to appreciate the singer-songwriter's chatty, charming non sequeturs - only some of which she concentrates into vignettes that are the core of her narrative-heavy country songs. On her program for SiriusXM's Outlaw Country channel, she has mastered the art of the two-minute midset ramble, at one point ripping bass player Bones Hillman for flying a toy helicopter at a Cleveland tour stop. "Next, what's he going to do, come out with a metal detector and a little beanie hat and be walking around?" she says. "Freaks! I swear."

Cook also exults in repeating her life story, beginning with her father, Tom, who served three separate prison sentences, for a total of eight years, for moon-shining. He learned welding at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and turned that into the family business. At 86, he cooks mustard greens and gleefully hawks his daughter's CDs and merchandise in hilarious YouTube "storemercials." (Of a pair of women's underpants emblazoned with Cook's "Balls" album title, he ad-libs, "I'll tell you right now! I will not be responsible for what happens to your husband when you wear a pair of these into the bedroom.")

"I guess it was my idea to do it. He is a person that really enjoys attention. And I am a person that does not," she says. "He talks about all the stuff that he did, that he had a store, that he ran a numbers game based on the price of eggs in the paper. He came out of jail with more money than he came in with."

A folksy stage presence with a funny streak, Cook is blond, good-looking, talented and most obviously inspired by Dolly Parton, in addition to shambling country legends such as Roger Miller and Tom T. Hall. Her mother, Joyce, had been a West Virginia hillbilly singer, and, growing up in Wildwood, Fla., Cook was part of a family band at age 4, and led one of her own five years later. Eventually, after numerous appearances at Nashville's legendary Grand Ole Opry, she put out a record in 2000 then signed with major label Warner Bros., which released her "Hey, Y'all." But eventually she rebelled against pressure to make hits that sounded like all the other hits, and left the label.

"I'll never ever sit down and go, 'I'm going to try to write a summertime feel-good hit,'" she says. "(Expletive) that. I would rather mow my lawn. I would just rather not bother."

Instead, she put out last year's "Welder" on tiny indie 31 Tigers, which has distribution through Sony Music. She seems content with a small career rather than one that resembles Carrie Underwood's. "I don't think she's aspiring to be a huge big thing," says Brad First, a former board member of the Americana Music Association and a festival coordinator for the annual South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. "But she is very interested in longevity. She just is steadily, slowly building her fan base."

Although Cook worked on "Welder" with Don Was, the producer who has overseen albums by Bonnie Raitt, the Rolling Stones and others, her ideas were totally her own. "Mama's Funeral" describes exactly that, in loving detail, down to the sad boys drinking beer near the barn; "Heroin Addict Sister" is about a (fictional) woman who refuses to be taken down by her demons; and in the inspired shaggy-dog rap "El Camino," Cook rhymes "annul it" with "mullet." Before making the album, to prepare for Was' arrival, Cook pulled all-nighters at Kinko's, printing lyrics in a nervous, manic state.

But there turned out to be no pressure. "It was just like eating cake - it was so fun, and it was so easy!" she says. "It wasn't the typical Nashville thing. Players got there at 9, 10 in the morning and left at 12, 1 in the morning or later. We had all kinds of booze and music and TV and movies. It was like a house party. I'll never forget it."

onthetown@tribune.com

And we will never forget her or her new album "Welder" mullet and all. (Some of us in the older generations thought a mullet was a fish which is really yummy fried and served with grits. :)

CMT Hits has just reported that Elizabeth Cook will appear as "Tammi" on Squidbillies on October 9.

Squidbillies is a popular animated television series about a poor family living the the mountains of North Georgia.

George Jones has recorded the theme song for the series witch is part of the Cartoon Network.

09/29/11, 4:30 pm EDT

"George Jones has recorded the theme song for Squidbillies, an animated comedy series that returns Sunday night (Oct. 2) on Adult Swim. Jones recorded the song with Hargus "Pig" Robbins, who also played piano on Jones' first No. 1 hit, "White Lightning." Series creator Dave Willis describes himself as a lifelong fan of the legendary singer, saying he has been trying to persuade Jones to cut the song for five years. Billy Joe Shaver has sung the theme in the past. Willis and co-creator Jim Fortier describe Squidbillies, which includes adult themes, as "the surreal world of backwoods Appalachian squids." In related news, country singer Elizabeth Cook will make an appearance on the show as the character Tammi on Oct. 9."

We wish Elizabeth Cook well in her new endeavor.