Elizabeth Cook triumphs over tragedy

NASHVILLE — When both your parents are country musicians who play honky-tonks, the best way to rebel is to become an accountant.

That's what Elizabeth Cook did after a childhood spent performing in Florida dive bars with her mother and father. But she couldn't turn her back on the family business completely, and after a stint at PricewaterhouseCoopers' Nashville offices in the late 1990s, she signed a publishing deal, and in 2000 released her first album.

In the years since she moved to Music City, Cook — who has the sweet voice of Dolly Parton and the feistiness of Loretta Lynn — has performed on the Grand Ole Opry more than 400 times, released four full-length albums and an EP, worked with top-notch artists such as Rodney Crowell, Buddy Miller and Dwight Yoakam, become a favorite guest of former Late Show host David Letterman and has hosted the popular Apron Strings radio show for the better part of a decade. Earlier this month, Cook released a new record, The Exodus of Venus.

It's her first full-length album since 2010's Welder. She's spent the past six years dealing with one tragedy after another: multiple deaths in the family, divorce, rehab, a fire at the family farm and a sitcom deal that fell through (though she did star in a Swedish web series called Long Way Home).

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"It was like every six months there was somebody dying," Cook remembers. "I was pretty present for most of them. (I) basically was hospice. It was hard to know what to do with all of that emotionally."

She channeled her feelings into her writing and emerged with Exodus, an album unlike any she'd made before.

"(Making the record) was therapeutic," Cook says. "When I look back now over the material and see the emotional darkness, I'm like, 'Wow. That's where I was then.' But that's life."

Exodus of Venus also finds Cook incorporating more rock and soul into her country sound.

"A lot of that is (producer and guitarist) Dexter Green," Cook says. "He's very good at interpreting lyrics tonally."

In March she and her band tested the new material during a monthlong residency at the 5 Spot in East Nashville, packing the bar for five shows and welcoming guests such as country star Wynonna Judd and her friend Todd Snider's band, Hard Working Americans.

Where previous albums featured songs such as "Everyday Sunshine," the Exodus track listing is one heartbreak after another, as Cook goes from "Dyin'" to "Slow Pain" to "Straightjacket Love" (featuring Patty Loveless) to "Methadone Blues," a continuation of one of her earlier songs, "Heroin Addict Sister."

One of the album's finest songs was inspired by a tragedy she didn't experience firsthand. Closing track "Tabitha Tuders' Mama" was written about Tuders, 13, who went missing in East Nashville in 2003. Cook, also an East Nashville resident, says she "got obsessed" with Tuders' disappearance: "I began researching it, clipping out articles about it and taping them on my wall. Every once in a while, I’d just jot down a few lines. ... I tried to base it around some of the story as it actually happened. ... The story didn't get much attention in those critical first few days, and I feel like that was a socioeconomic statement by our society. Had it been a little girl that plays polo, that lives in a gated community, it (would be) a national tragedy."

Cook and her band are on tour this summer, playing everywhere from Cleveland to Calgary. After six years without a new album to promote, Cook laughed that she had to get "whipped back into shape with this workload".

"It feels kind of sudden," she says, "but we're in it now and just holding on."

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ON THE AIR

Every weekday, Elizabeth Cook's drawl greets thousands of satellite radio listeners nationwide: "Good morning, beautiful outlaw people."

For the past nine years, Cook has hosted her own show, called Apron Strings, on SiriusXM's Outlaw Country channel. She plays classic country, Americana and Southern rock, and in between songs, discusses anything and everything that comes to mind.

"It's a cool gig," she says. "No matter what kind of mood I’m in it always shifts when I get to playing music that is fun and that I want to hear and talk about."

Cook is often on the road, but she has mobile equipment that she takes on tour, which allows her to broadcast episodes of Apron Strings from as far away as Australia and Japan. A full schedule of upcoming Apron Strings shows can be found on siriusxm.com/outlawcountry.