In 2007 Scott Cook quit his job teaching kindergarten in Taiwan and moved into a minivan, touring almost incessantly across his home countries of Canada and the United States and eventually expanding his tours to Europe, South Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Along the way he released six albums of songs informed by his travels and the profound commonality among the people he met. When the pandemic brought his thirteen years on the road to a halt he fled back to Edmonton, where he produced online shows with his new housemates and finally found the time to finish a 240-page hardcover book to accompany his seventh album Tangle of Souls. The songs were recorded in Australia with an intercontinental stringband, while the book––written in Taiwan, the US and Canada––offers glimpses of road life and his own battles with self-doubt and self-destruction alongside the broader question of how we humans might somehow save ourselves from extinction. The album spent two weeks at #1 on Alberta's province-wide community radio network CKUA, and earned Scott his third Canadian Folk Music Award nomination, for English Songwriter of the Year. Its second single Say Can You See was the second most-played song of 2020 on Folk Alliance International's folk radio charts, and took top honours for the folk category in both the 2020 UK Songwriting Competition and the 2020 Great American Song Contest. Like all of Cook’s work, Tangle of Souls is story-based, straight-talking, and sturdy, born of the belief that songs can change your life, and your life can change the world.
Scott Cook’s seventh 'love letter' to the world is all strings and beauty, a 12-song agnostic endorsement of love over fear... It doesn’t condemn, it summons to one fire... Of all his records this one simply feels the best. ✭✭✭✭✭ –Fish Griwkowsky, The Edmonton Journal
Damn, this is a gorgeous album. Scott Cook’s voice –– vocally and lyrically –– is as clear-eyed, optimistic, and straightforward as ever... Tangle of Souls is the medicine we could all use right now. –Rachel Cholst, Adobe and Teardrops
He sings his heart and soul, and in doing so lets light flood into your own... He has a good eye for imagery, a gentle human touch, a wry sense of humour, a whole lot of integrity, a warm, rugged voice and a bunch of memorable lines... Truly one of Woody Guthrie's children. –RnR Magazine
