Ross Cooper Interview
Doug Burke:
Born and raised near Lubbock, Texas, Ross Cooper began his adulthood as a professional rodeo rider before a knee injury ended his career prematurely. He drew upon these experiences of life in Lubbock and on the rodeo circuit and crafting his third album, Chasing Old Highs. This is a follow-up to his albums I Rode the Wild Horses and I Give It Time. Named by Rolling Stone one of the 10 new country artists you should know, Ross combines classic western themes with a modern alternative, indie sound to create ear-pleasing songs. A rising star on the national songwriting scene, his songs have been cut by other rising performers, Randy Rogers, Wade Bowen, and William Clark Green. Welcome to Backstory Song. I'm your host Doug Burke and I am really, really excited to have this guest. Part of the joy of doing this podcast is I get introduced to new music and new artists, and I hope that you, my listeners also enjoy meeting new artists. Today, I have the special opportunity to introduce you hopefully, or if you're already a fan to really get to know Ross Cooper. Ross, welcome to our show.
Ross Cooper:
Hey, man. Thanks for having me.
Doug Burke:
Ross, you have is it your third studio album out and it's called Chasing Old Highs?
Ross Cooper:
Yeah, that's correct. There's some stuff that even if you were to do a deep dive on the internet, you couldn't find that I put out when I was younger, but this is my third studio album.
Doug Burke:
Ross, you grew up in Lubbock, Texas, and were a rodeo rider. I saw in your bio that you got a scholarship to college to ride rodeo? I didn't know that existed.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. It's pretty common. There's a lot of those smaller schools whether they be community colleges or jucos or whatever that offer really good scholarships because a lot of those smaller schools have rodeo teams. Most of those smaller schools that have a good rodeo program are rock solid, and the bigger schools are the opposite. I went to South Plains College for a year and I was in the music program and I was on the rodeo team. I had a rodeo scholarship and music scholarship. Then I transferred to Texas A&M and there was almost no scholarship money. It wasn't a part of the athletic program. We had a team and a really great rodeo coach who in hindsight probably sunk a lot of his own out-of-pocket money into the program. But the smaller schools that can acquire some of that funding, allow an opportunity for a lot of people to go to college that otherwise wouldn't. There were some guys on our team from Canada and some guys in our region from Australia and it's that kind of perfect avenue for people that allow people to come over and get an education in rodeo. When you're college rodeoing, you can also pro rodeo too. So the association isn't NCAA, it's NRA. So they allow you to pro rodeo and college rodeo as well.
Doug Burke:
So I know that's in some of your songs that we're going to talk about, but I found that fascinating and I also found it fascinating that your mother was a musician. So I guess she may have helped get you into music. When did you start writing songs and why did you start writing songs?
Ross Cooper:
She and I wrote a song together. It was the first song I ever wrote when I was 10 and it was a little a gospel song. She always played piano and she still can. She can read music. She's a great pianist. I had the opportunity to start piano lessons right around nine or 10, kind of looking back at that, being 10, I wasn't good at piano and still, really I'm not great at the piano. But it's like I was one to learn enough of an instrument to write a song. Shortly after around 12 or 13, I started taking guitar lessons, and then I started writing my first songs around 13 or 14. And they all sucked. They were all really bad. It was always encouraged. Both my mom and my dad were always encouraging with music. It never made me feel like it was something that I shouldn't do or couldn't do. So I realized how lucky I am and was to have had that because a lot of people don't.
Doug Burke:
The first one we're going to talk about is Freewheelin' Feelin'. And I have to tell you, we've had Jack Temption who wrote Peaceful Easy Feeling on the show. And this song does kind of remind me of that notion of a song about feeling instead of peaceful, you're freewheeling and your music has been described, and let me know if I'm wrong as having similarities to the Eagles and JD Souther and the whole California sound that they sort of get some credit for creating in the early 1970s. So I really kind of felt this song being inspired by Glenn Frey when I was listening to it. Is there anything to this or am I off the mark?
Ross Cooper:
No, you're not off the mark, but it's funny that you mentioned JD Souther because he's from Amarillo, which is like two hours or an hour and a half north of Lubbock where I'm from. Amarillo, Texas is about as Texas as it can get. I met JD, I was at my first job in Nashville. I was valeting cars and it was a... Gosh, almighty, talk about an awful thankless job. I didn't really know who this guy was when he pulled up but it was like one of those things I felt like I ought to know him because he kind of spoke and kind of talked like how I speak and talk. There's definitely a West Texas dialect, but he pulled up on this damn rocket sled on rails, this like little BMW, and got out. Nice guy. I wrote down his last name and I asked for his last name for his claim ticket and I was like, "Oh, this is JD Souther." Then I like started kind of talking with him and I was like, "Hey, I know you're from Amarillo. I'm from Lubbock," and all this stuff. So those songwriters though, what JD does really well, what Don Henley does really well and Glenn Frey did really well is there are really interesting chord progressions and really honest lyrics. I wrote Freewheelin' Feelin' on the piano. It started really, really simple, and then when I got to the chorus, I wanted something. It felt really basic. The meat of it, the bones of it was this really simple thing and then I started playing around with the kind of slipping in some different progressions. Or not progressions. Slipping in different chords into the progression, which on for me writing on piano kind of opens up my world a little bit. I feel like guitar is my primary instrument, but I'm kind of trapped sometimes. When I pick up a guitar, I'll go to like one of three or four things because I'm only really ever working on lyrics. So when I sit down at a piano, I feel like I always write differently at the piano. But the lyric and the mood behind that song is I worry about everything. I'm never not anxious. I've been trying to learn in the last couple of years of like just kind of trusting in the nebulous and in the unknown. When you can't see what tomorrow's going to be, it could be anything. And that can be a good thing instead of the only kind of like having that anxiety about this impending doom or whatever just like trusting and that the fear of the unknown doesn't have to be this big fear. It can be anything that could happen.
Doug Burke:
There's this book out that I'm going to read because I also feel these moments of never-ending anxiety. I think we all do especially during this pandemic. And I think it's called the anxiety loop is written by a psychologist about how to break the cycle. Because a big part of it is you get stuck on something. You know what you're looking for. You're looking for a Freewheelin' Feelin' but it's missing from the equation. But in it, he says you need to focus on kindness and curiosity to break the loop. You have to be curious about something else than what's causing your anxiety, and then also focus on expressing kindness. So I've been trying to do that in my own life.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. It's a true thing that anxiety loop. It's like for me the minute that I think that I'm out of it, and I think about the anxiety, then I'm right back into it. Do you know what I mean? I'm like I'll have this moment throughout the day. I'm like, "Man, I felt pretty good today." I haven't thought about this hasn't been in the loop. Then all of a sudden it just hits that play button again. I'll have to check that book out. But that feeling definitely. For me, I write songs because I love to write songs. Of course, songwriting is cathartic. Absolutely, I think that that's probably the most common thread with writing songs, but I've dedicated so much of my life to it to where sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's a problem that I have to solve. And with Freewheelin' Feelin', it's kind of been this reminder to myself to like in the simplest terms like try not to sweat the small stuff. I will drive myself crazy. I have driven myself crazy with that type of stuff. So it was listening to what that piano demo is and I hope to God that nobody ever hears it, because my piano playing is not great. But from where that song started to where it is now is almost kind of night and day to go back and answer the original question. I think how the melody lays over the chorus and kind of the sentiment of the song, it's probably absolutely inspired by the Eagles and that kind of '70s California stuff. Those songs were country songs. There were country songs with a little bit of swagger and a little bit more groove. You listen to early Eagles stuff, that's to me what it sounds like. That's kind of I don't know how I would describe my music, but I know that it's inherently country and that I want to have something that has a little bit of a groove to it. So that's what the Eagles did the best. And we layer harmonies too.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. You have a lot of that Eagles harmonics, but you also have throughout the album, and I do want to talk about this. I think it's more distinctive on some of the other songs, but it is on this song. There are definitely multiple guitars. And not just guitar players and styles, but actual guitars. You made me think about what kind of guitar are they playing that's making that sound, and what kind of style? Is it a slide? Fingerpicking is a flat-picking. But you talk about this Gibson J50 that was given to you by a friend. Who gave that to you and what's the story behind that?
Ross Cooper:
A friend of our family, one of my dad's friends, Bob passed away and I played guitar with him like once, several years ago and he had this beautiful 66 Gibson J50. For the people that aren't aware really out there of what that guitar is, for an amateur pick, Bob he sold cars. For a car salesman, that's a hot rod. It's a great guitar.
Doug Burke:
It's a hot rod guitar.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. It's a great acoustic guitar, and it sounded so good. There was yellow on the binding from years of cigarette smoke and Bob took care of that guitar though so well. He took it out of that case and started picking on it. I was like, "Oh my gosh. What is this guitar I've never seen?" It had a narrower neck, which is something that Gibson did in the 60s to try to inspire kids because The Beatles were all the rage. So they were trying to inspire kids to start taking guitar lessons. So they built this little narrower neck on those models and the guitar just felt great. He was a good picker too. We traded songs back and forth and we played together. And that was kind of it. Unfortunately, he passed away about a year. Probably a year or two after that. My dad called me and I got word that he left. His family left me that guitar. It was a big deal for a couple of different reasons. One, it's like to me I can't put into words what that gift is. Just the instrument by itself it's the best instrument I have in my house. It's something that I will keep my whole life. The number of songs that it's had in it and the number of songs I've written on it in the last couple of years, the places that I've gotten to take it. I use that guitar in the studio, the cool shows in Nashville like the Bluebird stuff. I always kind of think like anytime that there's a moment that I know that needs to be a moment that I kind of keep in the old filing cabinet, I always kind of think, "Man, Bob would have thought this was really cool." Because he never would have thought this guitar would have seen what it's seen. I feel proud to be able to give it more life because the guitar is better than I'll ever be.
Doug Burke:
So I talk about the sound on this show a lot and I've really been challenged to find words to describe the sound. How would you describe the sound of the Gibson J50 guitar?
Ross Cooper:
Warm and honest. It's a full-bodied warm sound. It's not too dark. It's not too bright. For me, my road guitar, my road acoustic is a J45. It's on the darker side. I switched out the pickup in it and it has a blend on it, so I can brighten it up a little bit. But it's a darker guitar than the J50 is. I do a lot of finger-picking. What the J50 does for me that the J45 doesn't is when I'm finger-picking on the J45, my like G and D string don't really have that resonance that the J50 does. It just doesn't vibrate completely through the guitar you don't feel in the neck like you do on the J50. If I could clone the J50. The thing about the J50, about the one that I have, is if I could just swap all my acoustics for that guitar, I would. I just don't want to pay... Do you know what I mean? I don't want to keep buying that guitar. I'm really scared to take it out on the road because I've been very, very fortunate, and nothing crazy about having my gear still under. So I know that the minute that I take that guitar out is the minute it's going to get stolen. And that could be an irrational fear. My J45 sounds great. It plays really well. If that guitar gets stolen, I can replace it. The J50, I could replace that guitar, but I can't replace Bob having given it to me.
Doug Burke:
That's a real love story to a musical instrument. It's like, yeah. I know you might have other loved ones in your life, but it's a special relationship with your guitars. I find that very touching.
Ross Cooper:
It's given me so much. Why would I not?
Doug Burke:
Yeah. It doesn't talk back to you either. Well, it does talk back, but only when you make it talk back.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. Luckily my close relationships are pretty incredible. But how many friend relationships or relationships that people have that are so one-sided? It's like, "Yeah, I don't put a lot of stock in really loving tangible things. But that guitar, it's different. It's got a pretty special spot in my heart.
Doug Burke:
So Freewheelin' Feelin', I love your lyrics throughout the album, but there's a handful of lyrics that really caught my eye. The chorus, "Just finding my meaning and going about it my own way. I really like that. I really like when you talk about, "So when my skin turns to leather and my heartbeat slows." I mean, that really captures. Oh, and here's one. "We ain't searching for the finding, the finding is in the search."
Ross Cooper:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Tell me about these things. What are you getting at?
Ross Cooper:
So if I have an interest in something, I have to know its backstory. I have to be knowledgeable in it. I think in life in general, there are so many questions that we're never meant to know the answer to. Talking about anxiety, that can be something that can bury you or throw you into an anxiety loop or whatever. I think for anybody who wants to be knowledgeable in something that you might not ever have the answer to, you have to have faith or you have to really find this internal peace with knowing that you could study something your whole life and never really know the answer to it and that'd be okay. So for those lyrics specifically, it's kind of just a broad take on life. I think the probably the meaning of life is way more simple than we think it is. It's when we start really digging, is where we start making ourselves kind of crazy about it.
Doug Burke:
We overcomplicate life.
Ross Cooper:
We overcomplicate, absolutely. Absolutely. It's not supposed to be that difficult. Maybe it is. I don't know. But it's just the notion of like it's not the destination, it's the road to there. And allowing yourself to realize that.
Doug Burke:
Life isn't a static experience. It's a sort of ever-evolving time continuum. And that's a road of sorts, a time road that we're all on.
Let's talk about Flatland because this is about a place you come from, I sense.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. It's about Lubbock. I wrote it with Corey Kent White who's from Oklahoma. He's also from a similar geographical plain. Just being able to stand on a Coke can and see the curves of the Earth. It's one of those places, nobody loves where they're from when they're growing up. We've talked about this in the van here recently. My guitar player is from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. It's one of the most beautiful towns in the country and nobody likes where they grew up. When you leave that place and you have this new perspective on it is I think when you really find it was those places and those people that kind of built you informed you. Nashville is a beautiful place. Middle Tennessee is a beautiful place. It's got seasons which West Texas doesn't have seasons. We have summer and we have winter and that's it. So here in Nashville, we have seasons, we have rivers. There are lakes. There are trees. It's never felt like home and it won't.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, that's what you say I still don't sound like them. Even though you got a southern accent of sorts.
Ross Cooper:
It's different than the...
Doug Burke:
It's a different southern accent, ain't it?
Ross Cooper:
Yes, sir. Yeah. It's a little faster and we don't know how to say our eyes. So honestly that song is just simple. No matter where I'm at, the Flatland is always home. It's always home.
Doug Burke:
This song has a real melancholy nostalgic tone, sort of wistfulness to it. Do you think about moods like that when you're writing a song or does it just come to you?
Ross Cooper:
I think this is a little bit more difficult to do in co-writes. You and your co-writers need to be absolutely on the same page. But the hope is always that the song that comes out is an example of the emotion that you have about the content that you emote what that feeling is. For me, that's been simpler on just single writes and just writing by myself because some of my favorite songs are songs I've written by myself and some of my favorite songs from other people are songs that they've written by themselves because you're able to really, really get in touch with what that emotion is. And you're not overthinking the lyric. That's I think the thing that happens a lot with songwriters is we tend to just overthink the lyric and we write it backward and forwards. We have a tendency to overwrite. You can have the most clever line and clever hook of a song and it doesn't pull any kind of emotion out of you. James McMurtry had a great song on the last record. I don't remember what record is called. It's with like Copper Canteen and all those songs. I think it's the latest one that he put out. Anyway, there's a song called You Got To Me in that recording. He has this excel, You Got To Me. And it's just the way it lands. It's like not reinventing the wheel, but that song and the subject matter of that song, I know that feeling, I know that place and he had to have written it by himself. James McMurtry is one of the best songwriters that there is. Fight me on it. He's that good. But that song is the perfect marriage between a great lyric and equally great emotion. It's such nostalgia. So for Flatland, it's trying to tap into that thing. It helped that I was writing up somebody who's from a similar part of the world, because geographically, again, there's not a lot to really love out there. I mean, man, it's tough. We have 60, 70 miles an hour wind gust. I mean, it's blowing dirt. It's dry. Every year is a drought. This winter, of course, this cold snap was a little different, but the wind chill was negative 20. It's a tough place to live. For me, despite all that, there's such a love of the place and the love of the people, and I just kind of feel it. Hell, I've been in Tennessee for coming on nine years and I'm from West Texas.
Doug Burke:
You're not rooting for the Titans yet?
Ross Cooper:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, I think that's part of... If you're going to live here, you have to root.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, I gotta root for the local team.
Ross Cooper:
You have to root for the local team.
Doug Burke:
What team did you root for in Texas?
Ross Cooper:
Well, the Cowboys, but I was a youngster. It's America's team.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. There you go. I get that. You got to support the locals. I love the chorus here, "Out of place, out of state, out of sorts. I don't belong." But the part I love in this song is when you say, "It keeps calling me over and over again." And the thing I like is the insistent, repetitive guitar lick that leads up to this harmonic crescendo. How did that come about?
Ross Cooper:
So Jeremy Fetzer played guitar on my last record as well. On this record, I used my band, but I also brought in Jeremy. We're in between guitar players and our new guitar player also played a couple of tracks on this record, but Jeremy I wanted the continuity between the last record and this record, right? So I wanted some of those same guitar tones. For a couple of reasons. Jeremy is really great at figuring out really cool guitar parts. It's not just like Shred-A-Palooza or not just hot licks country pick. He's really great at thinking about guitar as a producer. He's got that like the part mindset of like this is going to work for the song. So I wanted that, because I mean that's his wheelhouse, but also where you could listen to the last record and this record. You could see the progression, you know what I mean? You could see how we got from the last record to this record. But those records also be different. I mean, that's all Jeremy Fetzer. He's great with coming up with parts and figuring out how to build moments.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, that's what it is. It's a moment that builds and you're just waiting for it as a listener and getting drawn into the crescendo that you know is coming.
Ross Cooper:
Well, and I think a lot of it is understanding what type of song it is because in some songs you need to pull that mood out of it, and then you kind of base your production choices around that. For me, it's always the song first. What is the song? What does it mean? What's the mood? What's the feeling of it? Let's build everything around that. Some songs are just rockers. Some songs you want to hear. '50s Les Paul just cranked to 11. Some songs you need that. Some songs are super pop songs that you need 808s drum tracks and that's what those songs need. For Flatland, when you listen to it, it's really a simple song. It kind of is what it is for me. This is how I was feeling about the place where I'm from and where I am in relation and Jeremy killed the guitar part on that.
Doug Burke:
Have you played this live? Because I can see the chorus, "The Flatland is calling me home," is a terrific sing-along with the audience, especially in the quiet last chorus.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. We've been playing it out for a while now. Well, I wouldn't say a while, we hadn't played much in the last year, but it is one that I feel like it does land pretty well. There was a struggle to figure out where we put it in our set. Also, it kind of depends on where we play because a lot of people aren't from flatland. A lot of people don't get it. But for the people that do, you can see it kind of land and for the people that don't, they're like, "I don't know what... I'm from the hills."
Doug Burke:
I'm from the city.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah, right. When it works, it works for sure.
Doug Burke:
Chasing Old Highs, the title cut from the album. Correct me if I'm wrong, this is about your rodeo experience. And having your feet in two worlds, the rodeo. But it's kind of a sad love song to that.
Ross Cooper:
Oh, it is for sure. So I haven't really told this story. A couple of people know it, but I got kicked out of a bar here in Nashville, and I won't say why, but it was a closing time and I got kicked off and thrown down by a bouncer.
Doug Burke:
Had you been over-served?
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. Well, maybe I'd over-served myself. He didn't really so much throw me down as I tripped over my foot and he was kind of like showing me to the door, so it made it look like he was throwing me out. There was me and just one other guy on the patio. I'm not a huge partier. The next morning it was just I had the Sunday scaries like crazy. I'm just so ashamed. At the time, I was 29 or 30. I don't remember how old. 29 I guess. I was like I'm getting too old for this. I can't believe that happened last night. I was just so disgusted with myself. Anyway, I'd written down though like that day or the next day, I wrote down hitting new lows and it's just how it felt. Just I'm hitting new lows. I'm getting older. I'm still hitting new lows. And I had to write two days later. I was still kind of feeling it. I told my buddy who I was writing with. I told him the story of what happened. I was like, "I got this idea. I'm getting older, but I'm just hitting new lows." He's like, what if it's, you're chasing old highs and hitting new lows?" I was like, "Oh my god. We have to write this right now." Then I kind of had some other stuff that was just scrambled and scribbled in my journal. It turned into a rodeo song. It fit the content so well. There's so much parallel between rodeoing and playing music. It's long jobs for a lot of times, a little pay and being away from your family and then you're getting older, you have to figure out like, "Okay, there's an expiration date like how long do you go." It was pretty fun to kind of take a step back even though I felt so much like a shame for where this hook of this song came from. It was kind of nice to like say, "Okay, I'm 15 years older now and I'm still rodeoing." That's what this song is about.
Doug Burke:
I think the first verse is one of the best verses I've read in a while or listened to in a while. This lyric, "These cheap motels are starting to feel like home. I got just enough to fill up half a dresser and the other half reminds me, I'm alone." I think that is the experience of checking into a cheap motel. You don't have a lot of clothing with you. You have enough to fill up half a dresser and you open up the other half and there's there's no girl with you or companion with you. It's such a great lyric because you capture that whole setting and scene and kind of the loneliness of that motel feeling because motels are lonely. You combine that with the melody here, which is sort of lustrous and velvety. It's just a really, really good song.
Ross Cooper:
It's one of my favorites. It's one of my favorites I've written.
Doug Burke:
Chasing Old Highs is kind of a feeling of drug addiction because they say that the first high is the only good high and then everyone after is kind of less and then every time you is hitting new lows until you hit rock bottom.
Ross Cooper:
Well, that's life.
Doug Burke:
Were you thinking about that when you're writing this?
Ross Cooper:
Not really. I mean yes or no.
Doug Burke:
Other than being hungover.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. Other than being hungover. But yeah, there is a truth to that whatever your vice is. And everybody's got a vice. If you think that you don't, you need to get a hobby. Everybody has a vice.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, mine's podcasting, I think.
Ross Cooper:
And that's great. I have a couple of vices. It hasn't been drugs or anything like that. But the amount of time, money, I've sunk into music writing, et cetera. But the feeling of chasing something where... I remember the first time that I sat in with the drummer. It was my best friend. We were, I think 11. 11 or 12 years old. It was just he and I. He was really good. His name is Jay Saldana. He's had some really great gigs over the years. I feel really lucky that we grew up as best buddies and we went on to do these different things musically. It's just so cool. Most of the time, when I talk to buddies, they're like, "Yeah, we had this little garage band, whatever and the drummer sucked or whatever. It's never a good thing. Jay, I still will call him for filling gigs or whatever. He's phenomenal and he plays for a long list of some great guys. So I still remember when he and I got together to play, and it was the first time I'd ever played with another musician. He was way better than I was. It's just like this feeling of like, "Holy crap. You're seeing kind of what your world might be." This feeling of like this smile that you can't really hold back. The feeling is indescribable. Getting kind of struck by that lot and early on, it's like you're always chasing that. Or the first time that you write a song that you love that other people can connect to.
Doug Burke:
Or you see the audience reaction and it's positive and you're like, "Hey, I like this. This is like a drug. This is a drug for me."
Ross Cooper:
For me, it's always been about writing the next song and just it being better than the last song. Having so much pride in the craft and what I'm trying to create, and honestly just trying to write a song. Because I'm my own worst enemy, but if I can look at a song and be like, "I'm so proud of that."
Doug Burke:
So I have some questions about some of the lyrics, "And I ain't drawn a high lonesome lately." Okay. What is a high lonesome? The first time I heard that expression was in a Jimmy Reed song. He wrote a song called high and lonesome.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah, different thing. It's what my dad had called like just old honest bucking horses, just horses that were good enough that you could pull a check on. Just nothing that's going to throw you anything too tricky or too trashy, and just kind of like there'd be horses when you get your draw or you'd see whatever that horse was next to your name. It just kind of gave you that excitement because you knew that you're going to be good points on that horse or that you're going to pull a check or whatever. Just be like good honest, bucking horses. So my dad would always call them high lonesomes, an old high lonesome. Just an old honest bucking horse. So we had a conversation about that when we were writing a song because it was my knee-jerk to write that. So my co-writer on the song is David Michael. He's from Orange Beach, California.
Doug Burke:
Okay. They don't do rodeo there do they?
Ross Cooper:
Not really, no. He grew up surfing and stuff. But he is one of my favorite writers because he knows how important vocabulary is, right? So throughout the course of writing the song, he had been asking a lot of questions about the vocabulary and kind of about everything about riding bucking horses and whatnot, which is great because when you have somebody that cares that much, that's a big deal. If you're going to write a song about race cars, the people that know... I don't know anything about NASCAR. If I tried to sit down and write a song about NASCAR, the people that know about NASCAR be like "This is a fraud." I told David, I was like I don't know if we need to have that line. It might be too insider. I don't even know who calls those old buckers like that high lonesomes. That's just what we always call them like being my dad and my family. It's like it might be a little bit too insider and he's like, "No, that's exactly why we need to have it in the song because it is."
Doug Burke:
Sometimes the audience doesn't need to know what it means, but I'm glad you're sharing that with us.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah, absolutely.
Doug Burke:
Because I thought it communicated a feeling that was pretty cool, a high lonesome feeling.
Ross Cooper:
That can bring in the conversation about poetry and decide for yourself too. So for those that don't know what it means and assign their own meaning to it, that's part of the poetry of songwriting too.
Doug Burke:
In that same verse, "Do I love this to a point I'd let it kill me? And if I do, then maybe she was right." I really like that because you introduced a girl in the song.
Ross Cooper:
Right. And the song is not about the girl. But it is, right? It always is.
Doug Burke:
It isn't always, but she's in the song for sure.
Ross Cooper:
She's in the song. She's in the song. Because there has to be that accountability I think in the song of like because there's a lot of those people that just go until they can't and don't think twice about it. But whatever you're leaving at the house, I think that's kind of the inspiration for the question of like, "Okay, I'm over the hill." If you didn't have anybody holding you accountable, what does it matter? If you're totally alone going up and down the road with nobody back at the house, who cares if you're wasting money? Who cares if like... Do you know what I mean?
Doug Burke:
Yeah. It's easy to be freewheeling if you have no responsibilities or no one else to love but yourself. But it's also hard to go through life that way too.
Ross Cooper:
I think it all depends on how you're wired, but for me, I couldn't do it. Obviously, I love my wife, but being married is one of the best things that I could have ever done, ever done.
Doug Burke:
So that's not the girl that's in this song. That was a different girl, okay who is telling you to quit it, if you want to stay with me.
Ross Cooper:
The girl in the song is I think is appropriate for the story of the song, right? So does that buy that verse? I know the answer, but I won't tell the answer. Was their relationship over? Is that why there's a reflection or is the relationship still going and what she said really be the catalyst of making the protagonist think about, maybe it's time to hang it up?
Doug Burke:
So Forever To Get There is actually one of my favorites on the new album. Tell me about where this song comes from?
Ross Cooper:
I wrote that with Big Joe Walker. Joe was coming up from Texas to write some songs. I think that was the first time we'd written together. I think I wrote it pretty close to when I wrote Freewheelin' because it's a similar thing. But it's a little bit more melancholy. Me and Joe were going through ideas. And man, I was kind of that weak. I was burned out. I'd been writing a bunch that week. I had this chord progression that kind of felt Beatlesy. It didn't feel like something that I normally wrote.
Doug Burke:
Are you talking about the climbing scale that goes into the chorus?
Ross Cooper:
Kind of. For the musicians out there, what happens is it goes from rep for the chorus. It builds on the four and then it goes to the four minor? So it's kind of like this Orbison, Beatles type of thing. It's a very classic sound. So that whole feeling, basically the long way to go and forever to get there, it's like I haven't got there yet, but I will despite everything that I've been through. It's still trying to have an optimistic take on like, "Man, it has been tough, but I'll get there. I'll get there when I'm supposed to." I wrote it and Joe was like, "Man, I think we got something here. This is pretty cool." I was like, "Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, cool, man. I'm glad that you're excited about it." It wasn't that I wasn't. I felt really brain fried. So the next day I came back to the song, I was like, "Whoa, I think the song is really cool." Then I came back the next day and I was like, "Yeah, I really like this song." And now it's one of my favorite. We started playing that song live right before the pandemic, the record was recorded for the most part. We just started kind of like, "I have to start working in some of the new ones before the record comes out." It was supposed to come out much earlier than it did.
Doug Burke:
I can see this having a sing-along chorus. I wrote that down in my notes like especially in the last chorus, you bring it down you. So I could see you say bring it down and have everybody singing along with you. It also has an element of call and response to the lines. Every line is a sort of, "I ain't found my pot of gold, but I've seen a few rainbows." It's like this sort of call and response thing.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. Well, it's a sad song, but trying to be optimistic you. Honestly, I don't think it's a sad song, I think it's a hopeful song. But when we first started working that song in the set, I remember the band being like... Obviously, we played in the studio but when we really played it live, we all just kind of looked at each other and like this is... It became our favorite song to play in the set, and I think it still is.
Doug Burke:
Why is that?
Ross Cooper:
Because there's so much dynamic to it. Musically, it's really dynamic. There are parts of that song when we play it live where almost you get as quiet as a whisper and then by that last chorus when we're really belting it, we're belting it. It feels powerful and you can feel it on stage.
Doug Burke:
And what's the audience reaction like? What do you see in the audience?
Ross Cooper:
Honestly, that one I keep my eyes closed, so I don't know. I used to be really bad about that, about I could get through a whole set and never open my eyes.
Doug Burke:
Why do you keep your eyes closed?
Ross Cooper:
Well, now, I keep them open. Now, I feel more like it was just anxiety keeping your eyes closed. It was like kind of your own spot, your own headspace. It would make me feel awkward if I would like to look at somebody in the crowd because as a fan of music if I was in a crowd when I made eye contact lead singer, I just look away just because it was my own personal thing. It's something to hide behind. But I've tried to hear in the last couple of years like keep my eyes open and really kind of not be overly aware of weird twisted facial expressions like really trying to tell the story and show what I'm trying to sing. I think there's strength in that. It's part of the song. It's part of watching a show. It took me a while to get out of my own way and be like, "Man, if I'm watching this show, I don't want to watch somebody's eyes closed the whole time. I don't want to see that." But on Forever To Get There comes from kind of a deeper place that I think most of the time I want to keep my eyes closed. It's almost like we're singing it for us. Like I'm seeing it for me and I want to feel it. So I think there are times where it's appropriate to keep your eyes closed.
Doug Burke:
You want the audience to feel the feeling that you're feeling, which is highly internalized. That's really interesting.
There's another ode to Lubbock I think on your album called South of the Angels. I like that title because it made me think what is south of an angel? You think the devil in hell is sort of on its way south perhaps, but Earth is south. What did you mean by South of the Angels, I guess. I was trying to figure that out.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. This is going to sound like such a stupid question just because I haven't thought about it before. What's it called? The northeast-southwest?
Doug Burke:
The compass.
Ross Cooper:
The compass, yeah. But not the compass. If you were to flip the compass on its axis and heaven is north, hell south, and we're just somewhere kind of right in the middle. We're somewhere south of the angels.
Doug Burke:
But not all the way south?
Ross Cooper:
Not all the way south. Not all the way south. If you were to kind of look at a compass flat, just flipping the compass upon its axis where right is east, left is west. North is up and south is down, right? So there's this guy in town, Billy McLaren who plays fiddle for Jon Pardi. He's a great songwriter. We grew up 15 minutes apart. So before I moved to Lubbock when I was eight, so I'm originally from this really small town called Ralls. Ralls, Texas. So a little bit west to Ralls, there's this town called Addielou. It's like 20 minutes. So Billy is from Addielou. The first eight years of my life was from Ralls. So it was just one of those things like I went through 20, at the time 28 years, 29 years of life before I met somebody in Nashville who's a great songwriter and a hell of a musician who grew up essentially 20 minutes down the road from me. So we had some mutual friends. We got together and we started writing. We just started writing this song about these tough people from West Texas. Just hard people, hard land and try to capture what makes this place special and what makes this place tough. That song started out as a rocker.
Doug Burke:
Well, it's not. I mean, it's really a distinctly different song on the album. It's very atmospheric. I would call it spooky. It's got this haunting sort of smoldery bluesy spookiness to it. What were you going for?
Ross Cooper:
That song started off as an up-tempo rocker that was in E major and it had a similar progression. It sounded tough. It wasn't a happy rocker. It sounded tough, but it was mainly just kind of a power chord kind of throwback late '50s inspired rock and roll song. We opened every set with it for like a year and then we got in the studio and it did not work. It did not translate. Sometimes that's how it happens and we tried everything. It almost got to a point where we're like this isn't working. I have plenty of songs like let's get rid of it. So we unplugged everything. We were sitting on the couch in the studio. This is one of those things like everything happens for a reason, right? So we kept the chorus progression, but instead of E major, I started playing at E minor. The original progression went E, D, A. Instead of that, I did E minor, G, A. Then kept the same chorus progression, finger-picked it, slowed it down and it completely changed the song. That moment was weird. It was like let me try this. So finger-picking it. The whole band sitting around. My producer sitting around. I play a verse and a chorus and everybody's like, "This is it. That's exactly what the song should be." And it doesn't need drums. It might not need bass. It felt right when we recorded it that way and I didn't know if anybody would get it and didn't care, because I loved it so much. I was glad that it was salvaged. We were beating our heads up against the wall because I think the guys all loved the song too and we just couldn't figure out how to make it work.
Doug Burke:
One of my questions on the show regularly is how do you know when a song is finished? And sort of correlated to that is what is the feeling or what is the intuition or what is the actual wisdom and knowledge of when it is it? That feeling that you just described, what was that? When you knew it was it, then you were like, "That's it"?
Ross Cooper:
Relief. Relief. For anybody that writes out there, there are some songs that beration falls in your lap, you write a song in 30 minutes and you know that it's the song.
Doug Burke:
And that's it. You don't need that sense of relief because you're not working it. But what was it about it in E major that you knew was wrong? What was that feeling?
Ross Cooper:
It wasn't that it was wrong, it was what we've done live is not translating to the studio. It doesn't feel special. Honestly, I was just throwing everything I could at it, finger-picking it and E major first and making it like... It was like, "No. Well, that sounds like a delta blues song." Which is fine, that's just not really our style. Then I made it minor and started slowing down the fingerpick. Because the lyric on it is pretty dark lyric anyway.
Doug Burke:
Oh, yeah. No, this is a sad, sad song. I haven't been to Lubbock, but honestly, this does not make me want to go there.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Should I go? Should everybody listening love it?
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. You absolutely should go. Why are there so many songs written about Lubbock? Why are there so many like books take place in Lubbock? There's so much alert to this place that you would otherwise not care about, it's because culturally it's so rich and so deep. Those people are what make that town worth visiting in that culture and being able to feel it. And probably a lot of people wouldn't be able to feel it. I do every time I get back to Lubbock.
Doug Burke:
You said a son of an old blue northern. What is that?
Ross Cooper:
Like, when that tough cold wind blows in.
Doug Burke:
It's a blue wind, huh?
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. It was like a blue norther like that cold northern that blows in. Man, when it blows in, you feel that chill in your bones. Again, winters in West Texas are tough. And for people that that aren't completely knowledgeable about Texas or have visited Austin once in their life or Dallas or whatever, I think a lot of people think that Texas has these really mild winners depending on where you're at, man. That's true I think in South Texas, but when you get in West, Texas, first of all you have to remember how big the state is. So when you're talking about the difference between Houston and Lubbock, you're talking about hours and hours and hours of driving. And completely different geographically.
Doug Burke:
Different climates?
Ross Cooper:
Oh, totally different. So Lubbock is really dry, it's windy. It's dry heat and bitter cold. You get a couple of weeks out of each year that are awesome.
Doug Burke:
You said heaven's where the cotton grows and God speaks a Spanish tongue. What's that mean?
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. So that region grows more cotton than anywhere else really in the United States. My dad runs a cotton gin. So cotton thrives in that climate and on the God speaks a Spanish tongue, there's a really rich Hispanic culture around West Texas. Our border is Mexico. Because of that, West Texas has this really rich heritage and culture. And that to me, it's kind of that sentiment of like almost flat land. If heaven is what you want it to be, then for me it's like I'm eating enchiladas with God. You know what I mean?
Doug Burke:
I bet the food is really good.
Ross Cooper:
Oh, it's phenomenal. It's phenomenal.
Doug Burke:
It's phenomenal.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
It's the classic Tex-Mex cuisine, huh?
Ross Cooper:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
That's where it came from, huh?
Ross Cooper:
It gets better and better the further west you go. Lubbock is five and a half hours east of El Paso. West Texas is a huge region. There's a lot of argument and speculation of where West Texas starts. Scholars and theologists have argued for years over where West Texas starts.
Doug Burke:
There's no actual boundary. There's no river boundary like the Mississippi to tell you.
Ross Cooper:
Correct. So that was the thing of just like I love that feeling of if I were to die tomorrow and get to heaven that there's going to be some semblance of West Texas because there are things that I absolutely love about it. There are things I hate about it like who loves 70 miles an hour wind gusts? Nobody does. Who loves 110-degree dry heat? Nobody does. But there are things that I absolutely love about it. There's enough that people love about it to keep them there. Absolutely. It's romanticizing it. Some of my favorite authors do a way better job than I ever could.
Doug Burke:
I like this lyric, head like a turbine and a heart of mesquite.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. A head like a turbine and a heart of mesquite. So the wind turbines, swept through West Texas.
Doug Burke:
They're everywhere out there, I imagine.
Ross Cooper:
I mean, they're starting to get them around Lubbock for sure, but they're more a little southeast of Lubbock. There are those big old turbines everywhere. Then mesquite, it's just such a hardwood. It's parasitic. It can take over anything.
Doug Burke:
Oh, really. It's like a weed?
Ross Cooper:
You'll go and grab mesquite, you don't want really mesquite overtaking your place. I guess it could be like a weed. I mean, yeah.
Doug Burke:
It just grows fast and you can't grow the cotton anymore and it sucks everything out of the soil?
Ross Cooper:
It grows really fast, thick. It's got thorns and it's hard to get rid of once it overtakes something. But the head like a turbine and a heart of mesquite is just kind of a testament to that place personifying those things that you see around West Texas. And just having a hard heart like having to be tough because of the place is tough. Head like a turbine, those wind turbines are so big. I'd heard that the distance between each tip is a football field.
Doug Burke:
Oh, really, wow.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. So when you get up on them and you realize how big they are and how powerful they are, it's using those things that you see in that environment personifying them and just being strong-headed and having a hard, tough heart. Hard mesquite.
Doug Burke:
Sounds like those are attributes to survive in Lubbock, Texas.
Ross Cooper:
Let's not treat it like it's Sahara.
Doug Burke:
It's not bad as it sounds. It's dramatized in the song.
Ross Cooper:
It's dramatized, absolutely. Absolutely dramatized in the song. But it is tough. It is tough. It's the hard-living out there. But because of it, it's like it molds the best people and some of the best culture.
Doug Burke:
One of your bounciest, sort of poppiest songs is Hello Sunshine on the album. Kind of radio-friendly in some ways.
Ross Cooper:
It didn't start off radio-friendly?
Doug Burke:
It didn't?
Ross Cooper:
No. The original chorus, I was trying to think about this other day I've written that song twice now with the same co-writer. When I first had a bunch of it written before I wrote it with a writer Mike Walker. I brought it into Mike and that original lyric, man, it was just a songwriter's lament. It was something that I loved and it still ended up being a song that I love, but it was one of those like, "Man, nobody's going to like this." I was writing a lot of songs that were just... They were just like... I can say this because I wrote it, but looking back, it's like, give me a break. Do you know what I mean? I get it. You're sad or whatever. That's how I feel now about how I was writing then. Sad songs are great. They're easier to write.
Doug Burke:
I agree with that. I think it's hard to write a happy song and it's hard to write a love song. People don't understand that for the most part. A great happy song and a great love song, it's much easier to write about pain and sorrow and suffering.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. Well, there's more of it.
Doug Burke:
It's hard to describe the joyful moments of life.
Ross Cooper:
That's right. I think it's hard to have perspective on the joyful moments because a lot of times we don't realize that those are the joyful moments. That's why you get so many nostalgia songs. That's why country music, pop-country music can focus in on one thing that makes people really happy and that be the theme for like five to 10 years because it works and those are the things that make people happy, right? So Hello Sunshine, it started as just a songwriter's song. Then Mike had the turn around on the hook. Hello Sunshine, it's been a long time come on in. When he said that, I remember thinking like this feels like a classic country song, reading it down on paper. It feels kind of Roger Millery. And that's how he wrote it the second time. It was more of a finger-picking thing. It felt like that kind of throwback Roger Millery thing. And that's really kind of how I play it acoustic. Then we got it into the studio and realized that it could kind of be this up tempo almost rocker type of song with thick harmonies in the chorus and it really worked in the studio. It's exciting for me because how we play it live in the band and how I play it live acoustic, it's two different versions of the same song. I think, it's kind of two different emotions. When it's full band, we play it how it is on the record, right? There's kind of this mood of like, it's a sunny day and I'm not letting myself get myself down today. You know what I mean? When I played acoustic and finger pick it, it's kind of more of a feeling like it's the first good day after a lot of bad ones.
Doug Burke:
Well, I like this about your songwriting is that you never leave the listener without some hope. You don't just like punch him in the face and leave him on the ground, you just throw a wrinkle of hope. This one is full of hope and sort of rose-colored promise and positivity, which I love that you actually found that in a song when some of the other ones are just sad, sad songs.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. Thank you. At my core, I'm a hopeful person and I've been very, very, very sad before. I'm always again, full of anxiety, but who's not. I do love listening to super deep, super sad artists. And there's some of those guys that just can pull it out of you and just make you cry. Those songs you're driving by yourself and you realize that you get that lump in your throat. It's like, "Man, those are great."
Ross Cooper:
There was a time where I was kind of under the idea that for me writing songs was like the sadder, the better. Personally, it became pretty exhausting. It's like I love those songs, but I need some happiness too. I need some hope.
Doug Burke:
We all do. We all do. I'm glad you gave it to us in Hello Sunshine.
Ross Cooper:
I appreciate it, but if you have a job as a writer, creator, artist or whatever, I think first, the job is to be honest. So if your life is absolutely sad and you're basically reporting on what your life is like that's the job of it. If you're a super happy dude and you want to put out pop songs and write pop songs or gal, or whoever you are. Then do that. Make your art be a reflection of who you are as a person and that's been something that I hope has kind of gotten stronger with me. The older I get the more songs I write because I don't know if it's always been like that. But here lately, it's the most honest representation of where I am in my life is I mean life can suck and we just had a pandemic and whatever. Do you know what I mean? We all been through it together. In a weird way, it's kind of unified us all through this like really horrible situation, but as far as the art is concerned being aware of the anxieties and the sadness and some of the darkness, but also I'm a hopeful person. I want my songs at least some of them to be a little hopeful. Some of them aren't admittedly. But on Hello Sunshine, probably when you compare lyrics to some of the other songs, you could make the argument that it's not as deep or whatever. But the song still means so much to me because I remember where I was at in my life when I wrote it and it was like, it was this silver lining after a bunch of clouds. It was this first kind of a breath of fresh air where when we rewrote it, I was like, "Man, I kind of feel good."
Doug Burke:
Yeah, that's a wonderful feeling to recognize. You've been sad for a while and all of a sudden you have an upbeat moment. And to embrace it and cherish it, and to write a song about it, I thank you for doing that.
Ross Cooper:
And being a songwriter can be pretty emotionally demanding and exhausting sometimes especially if you co-ride a bunch because a lot of times, you're kind of in a room with somebody who you probably don't know that well or maybe you do. It doesn't really matter. But then you're kind of almost like not forced, but you bury your soul in some of your happiest ups and darkest downs to somebody you may not know too well for the sake of the song like it's an emotional roller coaster. You do that a lot and it's like I think that's kind of the common thread amongst a lot of artists is if you do it long enough, man, you're constantly tapping into pretty heavy emotions.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. It's like you're on the therapy couch for 24 hours straight all the time day in and day out.
Ross Cooper:
And outside of psychology, it's like is there another job that really that's almost a requirement. So all that to say for the listeners out there is I'm very aware that I am... You sleep in the bed that you make. I write songs. This is part of it. I know that I'm going to be constantly tapping into sadness and happiness and, et cetera, but because of that, it does come with the territory where I would wager that there are more sad songwriters than there are happy ones.
Doug Burke:
Interesting. I wouldn't bet against you on that one. I think you're probably right. Frankly, I think it's harder to write a great love song and people don't realize that, but I talk about that on the show a lot. I really embrace a great love song and a great happy song and thank you for giving us Hello Sunshine. So 11 Miles, this one is more hypnotic and there's organ throughout the album. I really like the sad organ in this. I thought this song was a beautiful song about first love.
Ross Cooper:
It's about a lot of just first everything. The song is more about the loss of innocence than it's the collective feeling of the loss of innocence, the first love, et cetera. It's not about a single person. It's not about a single experience that happened, but it's about that feeling. About that feeling of like the last of your innocence.
Doug Burke:
And why 11 Miles?
Ross Cooper:
Our house was basically like 11 miles from town. 11 to 13 miles from Lubbock, but 13 miles doesn't sing that well. 11 miles is basically 11 miles from Lubbock or from where the city was.
Doug Burke:
Got it. Because I didn't associate this being in Lubbock this song. I get the thing about first and loss of innocence. The thing that catches me on this song is the percussion is really, really good. There's hard drums with lots of space and these sort of shimmering symbols on it. Who did this and tell me about how you put that together?
Ross Cooper:
Brian Cox has been my drummer for... And one of my best friends for a few years now. Brian is one of the guys, I truly believe I'll be working with until I'm done working. He's one of the best drummers. First of all, let me kind of brag a little bit on these guys. I'm really lucky to have a lights-out band.
Doug Burke:
They are killer and I will say like top to bottom, this band is tight and they're tight with multiple guitars because you're typically like on an acoustic if I'm correct?
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. I played a little bit of electricity. So Jeremy is not in my band, but Jeremy played most of the guitar parts. My now guitar player Mike Dunton played some guitar tracks. He played like the solo on Freewheelin'. Then Rob McNelly who's a first call slide guy played on a couple other songs. My bass player was my old bass player who I've been with for years and years and years. It was this whole thing... Okay. So first of all, hats off to those guys because... And I will brag on. They are a great band and it makes my job easy because I don't have to worry about how something's going to sound because I know how it's going to sound. But also there is the conversation that comes up and it comes up a lot when you're making records in Nashville and it's why would you not use the Nashville studio musicians. That's a good question. It's a fair question.
Doug Burke:
That's such a national insider question.
Ross Cooper:
It's a fair question. It's a question that has a good answer to. For me, if I didn't have the guitar playing that I had on this record, first of all for this type of record, for kind of something that's more on the alternative side, the Americana side, he's one of those guys that gets the calls. He is one of those guys because he captures a mood. But if you hire one of the first-call music row guys, pop-country guys, whatever, you don't get that feeling. You don't get the mood of the record. The mood changes, right? Let's say you call whoever to play bass, whoever to play drums. They're still not going to care as much as my guys do.
Doug Burke:
So there's a lot of caring in this album. You can feel it.
Ross Cooper:
Absolutely. They care about the parts. They care about their mark on the record. They care about the songs because they're the ones that have been outplaying them. And it helps too like I'm so lucky and thankful to get to work with these guys because it is the first time where I have my favorite band that I've had yet. And not everybody can say that. Sometimes either personalities clash or whatever. Or sometimes one of your road guys is not the best musician but he's on the road with you because he's a great hang. I'm lucky in that the guys that are on the record are great hangs and great musicians. And I've known them for a really long time. So yeah, they cared. You could make the case that you could first call a guitar player so and so, and he could come in and knock it out. But maybe the mood is not there. Maybe the feel is not there, whatever. And that's stuff that-
Doug Burke:
Makes a difference.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. For the record that we made and again, if I was making like kind of a top 47 pop-country record, my idea about it might change a little bit. But for what we're doing for these songs, the right guys were in the room. So Brian can do anything on drums. So he's one of my favorite drummers of all time.
Doug Burke:
So the drum part on 11 Miles, he just comes up with it first take?
Ross Cooper:
Actually, yeah. I've been producing this really talented gal here in Nashville named Ali Dunn here lately. And Brian played the drums on it. And Brian, he likes hearing the song coming into the studio pretty fresh and open-eared, and then just playing with what feels good to him, what feels good for the song. His talent level is so high and his technique is high, but his knowledge of music past and present is really, really huge too. So he's got a lot of references to pull from, and he knows how to fit the song, which is super important. He can also sing anything. He can sing any harmony.
Doug Burke:
Well, I haven't covered this with you on this episode but I love your voice. It's one of the joys of doing this is I did not know your music before it was sent to me. I put it on and I am a Ross Cooper fan now. I love your voice. It's a beautiful tenor and it's got soul, and real range, and tonality. You fit your voice to the song and it's just... I like listening to your music, if you don't get the point.
Ross Cooper:
Well, thanks, man. I really appreciate that.
Doug Burke:
So let's talk about New Orleans.
Ross Cooper:
Sure, yeah.
Doug Burke:
This is kind of like a dark voodoo, Cajun mysticism whenever you write about? No?
Ross Cooper:
No. Maybe a little bit. I don't know. We played that... I was just kind of being a smart aleck, but I think the reason... I wrote that song in New Orleans. Well, not entirely. This is an interesting story. We're out on the road. It was early 2019 we were playing in New Orleans. I played House of Blues with The Steel Woods, rock and roll band. Great show. But it's like raining. It was a little cold. And my then-girlfriend now wife, I remember at that point of when we were on the road, she was dealing with the stuff at the house. I was just kind of complaining about how musicians do. I was like, "Well, we drive a lot." And blah, blah, blah, blah. It was kind of like this, "Hey, buddy. Suck it up. You're out there doing what you've always wanted to do. It's going to be okay," type of thing. So after the gig, I just like went into the green room and I had my journal out. I just started writing what I wanted to tell her. It was almost just a journal entry, but it was almost kind of to her, but it was stuff that I would have said. Well, it was late first of all. I wasn't about to call her and just complain more about my day of playing music when she's dealing with her work and keeping the house straight, et cetera. So I wrote this all down on a page, just word vomit. Stream of consciousness, bam, there it is in the journal to just live and never let live. So then I was on the songwriter’s retreat. I was writing with two good friends. This guy, Randall King who's blowing up in Nashville right now like kind of traditional country, dance hall country kind of. Can sing anything. This guy is phenomenal. Then one of my favorite writers, Charlie Shafter, who's kind of that... He's only probably, I don't know maybe eight years older than I am. Seven, eight years older than I am. He's definitely kind of got that old guard sentiment of songwriting. He's respected by everybody. He is a songwriter's songwriter. So when we're drawing names out of the hat for this writer's retreat, we three get paired up, matched up. That type of riot in hindsight could have been pretty stunning. We could have got nothing. Probably the odds that we got something were pretty low because you have three artists with big personalities that do three things that are pretty different.
Doug Burke:
Just randomly drawn out of a hat?
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. There's like 11 or 12 of us on the retreat and we were doing groups of three that day and one group of four or whatever, however, it landed. So we kind of figured out like okay, what are we writing for? Which is important in those scenarios like you have to figure out, "Okay, who's putting out a record? Who's about to go in the studio? Who's working on something? Who are we writing for?" So I was in the studio and we figured out that we were going to write for me. So I have a journal full of ideas and I'm reading through, and I'm like this, this, and this. So we'd get something and Randall starts singing. He can make anything sound good because he sings so well and I'm like, "That's it. That's cool." Then Charlie is like, "Yeah, I'm not really into that." Then I read off something and Charlie is like, "Ah, this..." He's like, "Let's write that. That could be cool." Then Randall is like, "Yeah, I don't know." He's just trying to find the thing, and get us all on the same page. Then I was just like flipping through. I was like, "Oh, wait. I have this weird journal entry." It honestly sounds like psychobabble because it's like there's no punctuation. It's all stream of consciousness. Sometimes, you have to just write, write, write, get it out before it goes away type of thing. So there's no punctuation. Some of the lines rhyme, some of them don't. It sounds like psychobabble. I'm reading through it and I'm like, "This is just kind of how I felt after the show in New Orleans. It's almost kind of a letter to my wife. Both of them are like, "Wait, that's pretty cool." Then Randall started singing this thing it's like, "On the corner of Decatur in New Orleans, I'm calling." He picked up this melody and started singing it. And all of a sudden the song started falling together. Then Charlie and Randall just basically started taking like my page and then just like, "Okay, this line is the verse. This one pre-chorus. Verse, verse, verse." It was kind of all there and it was like, "What the hell just happened? What happened?" What was really cool, I loved that song, but what was really cool about it was getting other artists as excited about the song as I was because it was a song that we all could have recorded. All three of those would have been completely different, and of the same song and everybody was excited about it. That doesn't happen a lot. So it's kind of a cool moment when it does.
Doug Burke:
Oh, maybe, they'll record their versions and we'll get them all out there.
Ross Cooper:
Let's go. That'd be awesome. But to address your original question, so that's how the song started right. I think you'll dig this. There are some of those like little nods at the mysticism of New Orleans like the lyrics, "Such a night and I can't wait to leave," is that's a nod to Dr. Jon, Such a Night, right?
Doug Burke:
Well, you're definitely talking about the French Quarter with some zydeco band.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. And then there's a little like accordion walk down. We didn't want to make it like two on the nose like, "Here's a song about New Orleans. Cue the accordions, boys. Anybody got some spoons?" We didn't want to make it that, but we did want to have a couple of those like little nods thematically, I think.
Doug Burke:
Because it's not a song about New Orleans, it's about missing your home.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Being on the road in New Orleans and missing your home and missing your loved ones.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. Missing your gal.
Doug Burke:
So did you play this for your gal and how did she react?
Ross Cooper:
Yeah, she loves it. If she doesn't, she's a good liar.
Doug Burke:
I had this false notion that an artist writes a love song and then plays it for his partner and that somehow they would like break down in tears and like throw their arms around them and hug them. I found that that doesn't really happen with songwriters. It's just kind of like, "Oh, you wrote a song. Oh, it's about me. Great."
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. It doesn't happen all the time.
Doug Burke:
Because they're like, "Oh, you write songs every day. That's what you do. Oh, you wrote this one about me? Oh, so what?"
Ross Cooper:
Well, the cool thing is my father-in-law is a really great songwriter, which has helped me tremendously in my day-to-day because my wife is used to the lifestyle. She has I think a deep understanding of the life and career of an artist probably more than the next person does, because this is a completely different podcast altogether. But how many musicians do we know that hang it up early because their loved ones either don't get it or it's either one or the other, or how many marriages are ruined or how many... You know what I mean?
Doug Burke:
It happens all the time. It happens all the time. Rodeo and musicians are challenging life. I don't know where you're going to get hurt more, on the stage or on a horse? Buck and bronco. But you can get hurt in both jobs. You can get hurt real bad.
Ross Cooper:
Yeah. I've made that joke before that I'm just a glutton for punishment whether it be physical or emotional. That's why I'm in the careers that I've chosen.
Doug Burke:
If there's any song that you've ever written, and you don't have to answer this if you don't want, and you could have any voice record that song, what voice, the living voice would you pick to record your song and which song of yours that you've written out of your whole repertoire would you pick?
Ross Cooper:
That is a great question. That is a great question I'm going to try my best to answer it. There are voices that I love, but I've always cared more about the lyric. I've always cared more about the content of the song. But having said that one of my favorite all-time voices is Willis Alan Ramsey. For those of you who know who Willis Alan Ramsey is, he put out one record I think in '73. I could be wrong. I've heard tell that he's finally coming out with the long-awaited second album. If you've ever heard the song Muskrat Love, that voice, Willis Alan Ramsey. Satin Sheets, Geraldine, and the Honeybee. Just dang near every song on that record has been cut by somebody else. It is a top to a bottom great record, but his voice is so good. It's phenomenal. So maybe Willis Alan Ramsey singing Freewheelin' Feelin' could be cool because I think he would just knock it out of the park. I think he would do it slower and really lean into the finger-picking. Because that's another one that when I'm not playing full band, it's more of a finger picker.
Doug Burke:
That would be cool. There we go. That's one of the best answers to that question that I have had on the show Well, Ross Cooper, I have to thank you. Is there anything you want to plug or promote?
Ross Cooper:
Well, the new record came out a couple of Fridays ago. So I always say as long as you're listening to it, I don't care how you get it. I think the standard thing would say would go buy the record, but as long as people dig in, as long as you're listening to it, come see a show, when it opens up. Stay healthy out there. And honestly, this has been one of the most fun times I've had on a podcast in such a long time. So thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed it. The conversation's great. The questions have been phenomenal.
Doug Burke:
Well, thank you. We try to do our best to make a different deeper experience. This is not a radio interview where you walk in and they don't know your work, man. We don't take people that we don't like on the show.
Ross Cooper:
I appreciate that very much.
Doug Burke:
We like you, Ross Cooper. We like your work and we hope you do it for a long time. I got to thank DJ Wyatt Schmidt, our sound engineer in the sound booth. You're the best. And you can listen to him on a bunch of streaming media. He's doing a lot of live performances on the various platforms that are out there. So please do listen to him. And MCO and our social media directors. Thank you to my newest fan, Al Timson. Thanks for following us on Spotify, Al. We love all our fans. Please spread the news that we want more subscribers on Spotify and Apple. So tell your friends about how great this show was and please share it on your social medias. And please follow us on social media. We're posting several things every day on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Backstory Song. Thank you very much.
