“I’m grateful for my path,” that’s how Elizabeth puts it, a phrase she returns to. A mantra.
“She went and got herself a degree,” says Rodney Crowell, whose own hardscrabble upbringing in Houston — the subject of two of his most recent (and arguably best) albums — gives him a close understanding of her path. “She takes a lot of pride in being an intelligent woman, a certain amount of fierce pride and dignity: ‘I’m going to make something of myself.’ And I admire that about her.”
After college she had offers from Ernst & Young in Atlanta, where there was a boyfriend, and Price Waterhouse in Nashville, near to where some of her family had just moved. So she ditched the boy. “I wanted to see if I could break into music once and for all,” she e-mailed. “Of course I took the Nashville accounting job not fully understanding or respecting the meaning of a 60-hour work week and relentless out-of-town travel.”
She lasted 18 months, had a nice apartment in the suburbs with a pool and a bartender boyfriend. One day she was in that apartment practicing to sing in a friend’s wedding when a friend of a friend who happened to work at ASCAP heard her. “He said he knew a few publishers that were looking for a girl singer with a real country voice to demo some catalogue. At his arranging, I met with PolyGram and Bro N Sis.” Jeff Gordon, from Bro N Sis, signed her.
“Kinda freaked me out,” she says. “Jeff was very convicted after hearing me in my two-piece business suit half-ass strum a half-ass written song I’d been working on in my head. His passion was strong and made me want to believe in him and his intentions, and maybe one day actually believe in myself. He had an honest face, too.”
She quit her job, left the bartender, and moved into the publisher’s office, in what was apparently once a home for unwed mothers, a floor above what was then the offices for Steve Earle’s label, E-Squared. “It felt scary and safe at the same time, which makes perfect sense. I wrote ‘Demon Don’t Get In Bed With Me’ about the nightmares I was having. That song fittingly ended up in Steve Buscemi’s prison movie, Animal Factory. Lots of spirits in that place.”
She has made four records so far, or just two, depending on how one wishes to count a pair of tarted-up publishing demos, or maybe just one, this new one, the one she calls Balls probably because calling it “Sometimes It Takes Balls To Be A Woman” would be a little too confrontational. Maybe this is really her first real record.
Certainly it’s her best, so far, her most coherent musical presentation and her most varied, most revealing set of songs. Crowell proves — not unexpectedly — to be a sympathetic producer, the supporting players are mostly old friends (Harry Stinson, Richard Bennett, Kenny Vaughan, Alison Prestwood, that Tim Carroll guy), the songs sparkle, and it is possible to hear and enjoy both her humor and her humanity.
And the woman can write.
“I say I’m a semi-retired producer,” Crowell says, breaking away from writing what may prove to be the last song on his next album. “It seems like I only produce records when people come looking for me. I look at it like photography, like taking pictures. So framing her, to me, I thought it would be a mistake to try to commercialize, to give the trappings…”
Crowell trails off. He has been an enormously successful country artist and retains no little respect for that world. Starts again. “I thought that the choices should always be about framing the special, quirky authenticity of the music she makes. In a way I thought about Loretta Lynn, when she was coming of age. It just happened naturally. And if someone had superimposed the keyhole of a certain kind of radio format on her, it would have been disastrous.”
Cook has imposed no format on herself. Balls runs from a disarming cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” to an almost forgotten Tim Carroll gem, “Always Tomorrow”, to one of her piercingly glib love songs, “He Got No Heart”.
She has an easy, disarming smile, and sings that way. She’s clever and funny, and more than clever. More than funny. It is impossible to hear “Rest Your Weary Mind”, her gentle, wrenching duet with Bobby Bare Jr. on Balls, or “Heather Are You With Me Tonight”, still the best and most human song about the war in Iraq — a hidden gem among a dozen quirky love songs on 2004’s This Side Of The Moon — without taking notice of her subtle and compassionate intellect.
“Rest Your Weary Mind” was co-written with Australian singer Melinda Schneider (as was the album’s title track). “I heard it more like a bluegrass ballad with three-part harmony on the chorus, which is how she cut it on her record,” Elizabeth says.
Crowell heard something even more deeply rooted. “It seemed, in a way, like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain,” he says. “It had, somehow, the feel of the Civil War to me. You really go back into the Scots-Irish authenticity that really sort of came out of those hills. And I had produced a Bobby Bare record years ago, when I was brand new at it, and it was one of my favorite things, so I really wanted to work with Bobby Bare Jr. But, I have to say, he was Elizabeth’s idea.”
It was a very good idea. “Weary Mind” isn’t properly a duet, it’s a dialogue between Bobby’s broken voice (“My life’s been/a hard, gravel road”) and Elizabeth’s sweet, soaring counterpoint (“I’ll rock you in these arms of mine/you can rest your weary mind”). Crowell heard the 1860s, and set the song nicely behind a fiddle line, but the result also a transcendent modernization of the enduring love behind Charlie Rich’s “Life’s Little Ups And Downs”.
