The crafty comeback of Emma Cook
When Emma Cook left the house that June day in 2013, she was a Toronto indie songwriter starting to make her mark. There were comparisons to Sarah McLachlan and Feist. The decision to quit her job to pursue music full time was paying off.
Then came that falling branch, and it all went black.
For three years.
“There were people working on the power lines further down, and a dead branch just got dislodged,” she recalls. “It was just an accident. Wrong place at the right time. I was just walking out of my front door.”
Aside from the headache and gash on her head, Cook thought she’d be okay. Then came the dizziness, nausea and other concussion symptoms. For days. Then weeks and months. As it stretched into a year, Cook wasn’t just afraid her career was over, she thought her entire life was falling apart.
“I thought I was never going back to anything, really,” she says. “I was so in it, I didn’t feel it was ever going to end.”
During those three years her social life came to a halt. No parties. No going out. She struggled to raise her two children. Her husband was exhausted trying to hold the household together. A close family member died of cancer and another to suicide. A long friendship came to an end.
At her lowest point she decided to buy a piano, hoping it would kickstart something. It was like the floodgates opening.
“It didn’t take a lot of effort,” she says. “Once I did it, it was like ‘Why haven’t I been doing this the whole time?’ I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been writing because it’s so cathartic for me. It’s always been a way that I deal with difficult situations.
“It’s funny to me now — why didn’t I go there? — but I was so far gone that I couldn’t think about going there.”
Cook found herself writing or playing every time the darkness tugged at her, until she had enough for an album. Released near the end of 2016, Same Old Song showed her songwriting skills hadn’t diminished, helping her land a licensing deal with Community Tree Music in Vancouver.
Back in the zone, she quickly had enough quality songs for another album. Living Proof, released last week, finds Cook taking big steps away from her folk past into more melodic pop, anchored by the hearttugging first single I Will Stay.
As Cook explains, though it’s an album about loss and recovery, it’s not directly about her head injury. What inspired it doesn’t define it.
“I didn’t write very many songs about the concussion itself,” she says. “It was (more about) the feeling that things erode. Our health erodes, our relationships erode…that was really the theme of the album. It came out of the concussion, but really none of the songs are specifically about it.
“It’s that feeling of how we kind of fall apart in life.”
Next hurdle: Touring. Cook kicks off a winter road trip Friday at Mahtay Cafe in St. Catharines, reconnecting with local fans who haven’t seen her in Niagara in nearly a decade.
The jitters of playing live again are over, she says. After an “absolutely terrifying ” first show after the injury, the joy of playing to a crowd returned. She still has to be mindful of lighting, and knows better than to push herself too hard. The tour will be eight shows spread across 30 days.
“I have some lasting symptoms that probably will never go away,” she says. “I have screen intolerance, which just means i can’t be on my computer for very long. Which is difficult because as a singer there’s a lot of social media, booking, all that stuff.
“I have to be super on top of my health. If anything doesn’t go right… .I’ll have a couple bad days, then it goes away again.” jlaw@postmedia.com