Not Just Country

This phone call catches Elizabeth Cook at home “packing a lot of underwear” in preparation for her inaugural Australian visit. It's lucky her merch includes a line of underwear her former musician father spruiks on YouTube, as she admits she may have to dip into that! “It's gonna take me days to wash all the underwear I'm gonna need,” she protests.

If there's one thing about this Wildwood, Florida-born country singer it's that she's totally up front. That's probably why Cook, who has the looks and sound to be top of the mainstream heap, wasn't about to be constrained by the limitations of the major label she signed to for her 2002 album, Hey, Y'all, and has followed the indie path since, which allowed her, last year, to cut a gospel EP, Gospel Plow.

“It's part of ma story,” Cook explains. “Ma parents were not religious people but in our neighbourhood there was this Pentecostal sort of Holy Roller church with this big gospel band that was really good, and ma parents, I'm sure they thought it was being good parents to dress me up and send me there when I was little. So I would spend a lot of the weekends in bars with them in their band and then on Sundays I would be at the Pentecostal church, and I loved that sort of gospel music a lot. To me it's a form of roots music; it's a lot of what Elvis heard around Memphis when he was comin' up and so it was a lot of fun to make a record to address that music.” Of course, along with six regular gospel songs, Cook also recorded a version of the Velvet Underground's Jesus, because, “it's all the same thing to me”.

Both her parents were musicians and Cook inevitably joined them on stage at the age of four, though by nine she was fronting her own band. Her father, meanwhile, also ran a welding business, and it's her memories of that particular career that prompted her to call her 2011 album Welder, its songs by turn tender, forthright and honest, and wickedly funny.

“I don't really dictate my muse,” she admits. “I've just been trying to be pure and let it flow and be honest, so all those different things come out – which probably points to that I have some sort of personality disorder more than anything else,” she laughs. That sense of humour paid dividends a few years ago, however, when Cook scored her most significant hit with a track titled Sometimes It Takes Balls To Be A Woman, which she cowrote with our own Melinda Schneider.

“I adore her! I met her when she came to America to write songs. She used to visit Nashville quite often and I was fortunate enough to be someone that she sought out in the Nashville songwriting community to write with and we wrote together a fair amount. We wrote three songs together in one day, the last of which on that day was Balls To Be A Woman. She was telling me about some things she was goin' through in her career and her personal life, and I said, 'Well, sometimes it takes balls to be a woman', and she looked at me with that knowing look and we sat down and it came very quickly.”

Cook's Australasian connection goes further in that she'll be touring with guitarist husband Tim Carroll, whose song If I Could was recorded by Kasey Chambers, and double bassist Bones Hillman, formerly of Midnight Oil.

“I heard him play with a singer-songwriter friend of mine, Donna Beasley, and I asked if he'd like to play with [me] for a show and he wanted to play upright with somebody, so I got to be that lucky girl.”

Elizabeth Cook will be playing the following dates:

Friday 18 - Sunday 27 January - Tamworth Country Music Festival, Tamworth NSW
Thursday 31 January - The Basement, Sydney NSW
Sunday 3 February - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC