Written by: Dave Cantrell

Not that I’d ever have imagined saying it while flashing around in my late teens, twenties and in to my mid-thirties but I gotta tell ya, this getting old business, despite its bevy of well-documented woes – yeah, fuck you, arthritis and unending knee fatigue and, um, something else I can’t remember right now – has its advantages, not least among them the ever-deepening well of perspective informed by an ardent, half century-plus love of music and the capacious curiosity that comes with it. Which isn’t to suggest I’m some walking Smithsonian of popular (and/or less-so) music seeing as a stumbling memory, as curator, has the decidedly annoying habit of either taking down or repositioning exhibits on the daily, but when one has wound one’s way from the post-hippy early 70s through punk/post-punk through the early-MTV 80s through the 90s maelstrom of immersive indie/grunge/etc and into the wide open 21st C., with frequent, fervent detours into jazz, blues, experimental and other manner of et ceteras, one finds oneself receptive to pretty much all comers, the only criteria being an innate – which is to say immutabe – talent beating in the heart of the heart which brings us to Portland’s James Cook, whose latest venture Captain’s Audio Project sees its debut Waiting For The Moon drop from the veritable ether and in to all the standard formats (including vinyl) February 28th.

One of those born naturals (Cook first found a guitar in his hands at the age of twelve and, past a quick self-guided apprenticeship, began composing songs almost immediately, a deft prolificness that would quickly come to define him and lead him to having literally dozens of his own songs in his back pocket by the time he began high school, a good many of them influenced by his deep early teens dive into Jimi Hendrix. That trajectory, as it tends to, led him to this and that local band during which time it became clear to him that singers in that milieu tended to be far too full of themselves and unreliable to boot so what choice did he have but to free himself of that shabby reliance by taking singing lessons and that, my dear reader friends, is surely the definition of dedication), James would eventually find himself in art college in San Francisco where he came upon the prospect of the upright bass, a discovery that expanded the scope of his trajectory to include jazz and, crucially, that ancient and peculiarly American art form commonly known as jug band music, a twist of fate that pretty much brings us up to date so long as we includee the extent to which the discovery exerted something of a life-changing pull on Mr Cook that led him both to laying his hands for the first time on a resonator guitar – a detail that could not more, yes, resonate with the work before us today – and, eventually, past his time touring Europe with Jimbo Trout and the Fish People before forming his own band The Wags that cut a couple of full-lengths, upping sticks and moving to Portland where he’d form the soon-to-be locally renowned Trashcan Joe (so named for the inclusion of instruments literally saved from trashcans and dumpsters). So, foundation laid, let’s move on to the current effort being so masterfully lain down upon it.

With the homespun assurance of a Leon Redbone updated for the 21st century, there could not be a more suitable gem than “Really Hard To Find” to introduce this spanking new, well, project, bedecked as the track is with Cook’s adept picking (which isn’t to mention a singing voice that’s so calmly naturalistic as to justify in a single track those vocal lessons all those years ago), the plucky warmth of trumpet (Paul Brainard that also handles pedal steel duties throughout) and the kind of rialto cool of both Willie Mathis’s tenor sax and Scott Van Shoick’s trombone. From there the bounty rains down with a gently persuasive insistence that brooks no doubters.

There’s “Out On The Minam,” the sparse richness of that 1931 National Tenor Resonator guitar hovering above the yearn of that pedal steel and thereby recreating note for atmosphere James’s stint in the Wallowas ultra-remote Minam River Valley where your only access (unless you’d rather ride in on an elk or something) is by bush plane; there’s “There’s No Rain,” a lovely, damn near joyous spree which is no surprise seeing as the title refers to how it feels to be freshly in love and everywhere’s clement and warm no matter the weather; “The River,” as plaintive as it is plainspoken, the artist deftly equating the flow of a mountain’s river with both the rush of events within our lives and the overall cataract of our singular existence as it tumbles its way back toward its origin; personal fave “Satan Wrote This Song” with its horn-driven vamps of Waitsian oomph and the message of ultimate surrender to the devil that’s at the heart of every blues – or blues-adjacent – song there’s ever been or will ever be, which is followed by the intensely delicate title track that finds Cook the avid amateur astronomer back up upon the mountain, his only companion his trusty telescope as they both impatiently await the damned light-hugging moon to slip behind the nearest ridge so a true survey of the nightsky can commence and so goes the assured, unvarnished loveliness of this rare record until final track “Sometimes” finds the author offering, in the form of a dead-of-night love song, a note or two of finely dusted fatalism (“maybe in the morning I’ll move on / for now I need the darkness to dream about the sun // never losing means you’ve never won / there is no ending anything that has not yet begun“) to ensure, one presumes, that anyone within earshot understands that it’s how we handle the nascent unsteadiness that simply being born guarantees that determines just how steadily one ultimately lives one’s life.

As lessons go it’s a subtle one yet the very one that determines how much peace we find as we trundle towards the exits, and we don’t know about you but to us here at SEM, beyond the basic facts of a record’s musical merits (which this one, to reiterate, has in spades) we cannot ask anything greater from any album and thus we are, humbly and happily, grateful for Captain’s Audio Project providing us exactly that.