The first show singer and songwriter corook played in Nashville was at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, a venue in Madison that mostly caters to alt-country singers, bluegrass pickers and the occasional rock band. It was in March 2020, just before the pandemic began shutting down live shows, and corook had only recently landed in town, having made the move the previous summer. Three years later, corook is a star whose music pushes pop in progressive directions, as you can hear on their new EP Serious Person (Part 2), which is out on Friday. They might have been unfamiliar to the clientele at Dee’s in 2020, but corook grabbed their attention.
“That first show was way before anything was really happening for me,” they tell me from their home in Nashville. “I remember starting to sing, and obviously being a pop act, and everybody that was playing pool stopped playing and looked over and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ But it was in a good, curious way, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna do this; I’m gonna kill it.’”
Serious Person (Part 2) makes its case for corook as a master whose music doesn’t recall any referents that would place it in the context of, say, Americana. Like the first installment of what amounts to a radical statement of self-determination, Serious Person (Part 2) gets over on sheer craft. Every song on the twin EPs works as great pop, with the Serious Person (Part 1) tracks “CGI” and “Natalie” mind-boggling examples of corook’s gift for creating concise and subtly fucked-up music that contains hidden angles and ultra-hip chord changes.
Talking to corook, I know I’m in the presence of a devotee of an aesthetic that’s in short supply in the New New Nashville. They were born in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1995, and grew up on the city’s South Side. The future pop star went to Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School in Midland, a town about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. They explain that they listened to a typical mix of old-school music and radio hits.
“My dad had this really eclectic taste, and my mother just turned on the radio,” they say. “I feel like corook has become kind of a mix of those two worlds. I want anybody to be able to sing it, but no one to be able to quite understand how it was made.”
This is spoken like a high-level songwriter who knows the techniques for creating addictive pop. Perhaps the biggest trick of all is to disguise the tricks by placing tart melodies on top of changes that would satisfy the most muso-friendly members of your audience. This means, for one thing, that corook graduated from Boston’s esteemed Berklee College of Music in 2017 and emerged with their pop sensibilities intact.
“When it comes to the really brainy part of Berklee, I was pretty detached,” they say. “For me and most other peers, it feels like Berklee’s this wonderful place to meet the music industry before it’s the music industry.”
Whatever corook gleaned from Berklee, you get the sense that a corook song is ineffably right in its composition, down to the smallest detail. The aforementioned “CGI” uses the warm harmonic structures you find in the work of Todd Rundgren, XTC and Prince, while the Serious Person (Part 2) track “Party” is supported by a framework that reminds me of the ’60s soul of Brenton Wood and Jay and the Techniques. Their use of keyboards borders on the eccentric, but corook keeps everything clean and uncluttered throughout the two EPs.
You can see corook’s process at work in the performance video they and their girlfriend Olivia Barton made for the duo’s 2023 song “If I Were a Fish,” which garnered corook and Barton accolades for the song’s charm. The song addresses negative online comments corook and Barton had received about their gender identity and their image. The song is simultaneously childlike and very adult, and corook’s enthusiasm for recording and writing comes through in the video.
Saturday night’s show at The Blue Room is part of corook’s first headlining tour, after serving as an opening act for the likes of X Ambassadors and Jukebox the Ghost. They’ll have a full band, and corook says they’ll play everything from guitar and banjo to kazoo. Since they turned the heads of the pool-playing contingent at Dee’s, corook has come a considerable distance. Their music represents a new take on the ancient avant-garde verities, which means corook respects musical rules that avant-gardists often discard.
“Everybody says it’s so easy to write pop music. I would beg to differ, and ask them to try again. It’s a difficult thing to make something so simple and yet move you.”
