This much is just enough.
Inevitably Elizabeth’s voice and accent remind listeners of Dolly Parton. It’s not fair; there’s one Dolly, one Dylan. But like Dolly, Elizabeth is quite capable of cloaking her inner battles with breathless joy, of making pain seem airy and effortless, of disarming you with the beauty of her voice.
And so the title track may draw comparisons to Dolly’s “Dumb Blonde”, although it’s not so radio-friendly. “Melinda was meeting some personal and business challenges,” Elizabeth remembers of her co-writer. “Basically divorcing her husband who was also the president of her record company. So I told her, well, Melinda, sometimes it takes balls to be a woman.” And they were off to the races with a clever, biting, true and very funny feminist sitcom of a song.
They’ve shot a video for “Balls”, though goodness knows where it will air. “The band was in drag,” she smiles. “And I was in a yellow ’50s ball gown, and I was in a skate park with little skater boys in drag doing tricks all around me. It was wild.”
Nevertheless, a question about feminism catches her oddly unprepared. “I think it’s kinda in good shape,” she offers after a moment. “We’re driven by the dollar, and women can make money, and women are in the business place and roles are reversing.
“This week I’m staying [in Austin] with a girlfriend that I went to college with. She is single and owns her own home and lives by herself and has her dog and has a great job and a Blackberry and wireless internet in her house and she’s completely…different. What has traditionally been a family structure, that’s almost dissipating.”
But she is not satisfied with that answer, and e-mails a few days later, “As I congratulated an 82-year-old woman I know on her 60th wedding anniversary, the educated mother of four revealed to me that there were many times she wanted to leave but didn’t because she felt she did not have a way to provide for herself.
“Although alimony has certainly set free economic prisoners as affirmative action has liberated races and genders, the fight is far from over. And the idea that races, genders, short people, tall people, fat people, can all have quality and a reasonable chance to pursue happiness is pretty ambitious, but I reckon we have to try.”
That is not, however, Elizabeth’s principal battle. “Now I have a better understanding of what my job is as an artist,” she says. “I’m peeling off the layers of how I wanna interpret that. I still haven’t made my best album yet. But I know what my job is. There’s a lot of peace in that. I don’t want to be distracted by what’s contemporary; what’s contemporary has already happened.”
And then she gets the last laugh: “Strong woman as I claim to be, a dust bunny can just crumple my entire world.”
Elizabeth Cook’s first, self-titled release came out in 2000, with Kenny Vaughan and Tim Carroll on guitar and Rick Schell on drums and Dan Dugmore on steel, and co-writer Hardie McGehee playing this and that; and Brad Jones produced some of the songs, the ones Jeff Gordon didn’t. It’s not the most polished debut — fleshed out demos, really — but nobody was fooling around when they made it.
Gordon also invited her to crash a lunch he was having with Pete Fisher, who had just been named vice president and general manager of the Grand Ole Opry. “One of the key strategies on my mind for the Opry was, wouldn’t it be great for the Opry to be able to tell a story that it was part of breaking and establishing a new young artist,” Fisher remembers.
“I really just kind of fell in love with Elizabeth and her music and was taken aback by the genuineness of what she stood for,” he continues. “And also, her intelligence. I felt, hey, this person’s right in front of me, why not give her a shot. At the time I had no expectation that she would make, gosh, probably 150 appearances on the Opry.”
The Opry’s support, those songs and her voice were enough to get Cook signed to Atlantic’s Nashville office, except that Atlantic was absorbed into Warner Bros. a couple months later. The new Warner Bros. cut 31 acts but kept Elizabeth Cook and an album called Hey Y’All that included about half of those initial songs (re-recorded, of course), plus a cover of Jessi Colter’s “I’m Not Lisa” and some new material.
“They probably shoulda let me go,” she says now. “We had the record in the can, and I had been through a hard time making that record with some of the personnel I was working with that I won’t go into but, they wanted to make a completely new record, and they had already spent like crazy money, and I was like [snorts], I don’t think so!
