Elizabeth Cook CD Release!

McGonigel’s Mucky Duck presents Elizabeth Cook. CD Release!

Never in her decade-and-a-half recording career has Nashville’s Elizabeth Cook been one to paint pictures of a perfect world in her songs. Frequently, though, she’s softened the blow of stories about barely scraping by with fabulously keen wit or disarmingly detailed sentiment.

Those writerly skills — along with her self-awareness, hip hard-country delivery, comedic gifts and ability to project magnetic personality — have made her a treasure of the Americana singer-songwriter scene, not to mention a fixture on the Grand Ole Opry, a beloved satellite radio host and a favorite Letterman guest.

Cook’s engrossing new album, Exodus Of Venus, arrives a full six years after its predecessor, Welder. Between the two came a tumultuous stretch: She lost a parent; parted ways with her husband and collaborator, Tim Carroll; and dealt with all manner of upheaval in her life and career.

Listening to this batch of 11 new songs, it’s as if she’s emerged from a dark night of the soul and felt the need to push against the limits of her expression, stretching her range from novelistic narrative to richly impressionistic sensual and spiritual imagery and immersing her performances in the dusky, blues-inflected mood-setting of her current guitarist-producer, Dexter Green.

“It’s where you can enter that dangerous territory of clichés and cheap poetry, so I was careful to try and keep my true voice,” she wrote of her newly developed dark and dreamy side in an email interview with NPR. The risks pay off — Cook hangs on to her subtle sense of humor, letting it sneak up on the listener in her funky, down-home boogie “Methadone Blues.” – NPR

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