The acoustic guitar chords that lead off “Daddy, I Got Love for You,” one of the tracks on Nashville singer and songwriter Elizabeth Cook’s new album Aftermath, sound like the kind of folk-country licks you’ve heard countless times. But “Daddy, I Got Love for You” isn’t exactly a country recording. Aftermath — which Cook cut in Santa Monica, Calif., with producer Butch Walker and a crack band that included Music City guitarist Andrew Leahey — takes country music as its subject matter.
Cook’s lyrics make it clear she has cultivated an empathy for the rural Southern people she writes about, but the record uses classic-rock tropes in a manner that might remind you of Pink Floyd, R.E.M. and The Band. It’s a rich, elusive collection of songs that suggests Cook, whose most recent album was 2016’s critically acclaimed Exodus of Venus, has found her way out of the world of country music itself.
Cook cut most of Aftermath in 2019 at Walker’s Ruby Red Studios in Santa Monica, with one track recorded at Nashville’s Creative Workshop. In every way, her latest music builds upon the considerable virtues of Exodus of Venus and her 2010 breakthrough album Welder. For Cook, the pop eclecticism of the record sits easily with the grand theme of her songwriting.
“My perspective is earnest; my experience is rural,” Cook says from her Nashville home. “My stories pertain to an ilk of people that are considered country people. But I just don’t think all these rigid ideas about country are what make it matter.”
Indeed, Aftermath confounds ideas about musical, lyrical and thematic approaches, and does so brilliantly. It’s arguably Cook’s finest work to date, and it’s been a long time coming.
Cook was born in Florida in 1972, and she came to Nashville in 1996, garnering a publishing deal and releasing albums like 2002’s Hey Y’all. She hit her stride on 2007’s Balls, which featured a song titled “Sometimes It Takes Balls to Be a Woman,” a clever take on sexual politics. The song, which Cook wrote with Melinda Schneider, established Cook as a savvy Americana artist. I wrote about Cook at the time of Balls, when the idea of hip country was beginning to take hold among fans and critics. The spare, rocking arrangements on the album — and Cook’s cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” — suggested she had already transcended the restrictions of genre.Â
The follow-up, Welder, proved Cook was an ambitious artist who artfully balanced humor and serious examinations of the fate of country people who found themselves in a rapidly changing world.
Producer Don Was helped turn Welder into a country record hipsters could love, and Exodus continued in that vein. Meanwhile, Aftermath draws from rock and pop, but the rueful tinge of Cook’s lyrics — and the meticulous way she allows the words to flow within the music — mark her as an exemplary post-country artist. This fusion of words, music and production makes the record’s “Stanley by God Terry” an unclassifiable piece of work. The song lasts for five minutes, but this is a track that could run for 30 minutes.
“That’s a story I wanted to tell for a long time,” Cook says about “Stanley by God Terry,” which begins with an oddly familiar chord progression that evokes John Barry’s theme for the 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy. The song has a circular, repetitive feel that allows Cook to tell her story effectively. “Stanley by God Terry” also shows off Cook’s genius for rhyme, as she sings: “Passed out on the concrete porch / Love sure is a bitch when your liver is scorched.”
“I remember writing that song on my front porch, and I remember getting the bulk of it in one sitting,” says Cook. However she arrived at the final version of this remarkable composition, the song, like all of Aftermath, evinces a high level of sheer craft. Cook & Co. dip into any number of classic-rock approaches on the album, but none of the songs feels like genre exercises.
Elsewhere on Aftermath, Cook recalls R.E.M. and The Byrds on “When She Comes,” a song worthy of The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday. “Thick Georgia Woman” is an empathetic look at the life of a small-town woman, and Cook rhymes “J.C. Penney” with the name of Drivin N Cryin leader Kevn Kinney. As the two songs make clear, the record’s pop leanings situate Cook in a culture that is larger than country music.
It’s an addictive record worthy of Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here. That album mourns the disappearance of troubled Floyd singer Syd Barrett, while Cook mourns a vanished way of life in the American South. What’s gone may be gone, but Cook has used her immense gifts to help you remember what should never be forgotten.
