After each energized performance, Abi Tapia always hears the same question: “What does your guitar strap say?” The answer is a word that describes not only her music, but also a big part of her personality: “Wanderlusty.”

Abi Tapia happily calls Austin home, but to say she’s simply a Texas [...]]]>

After each energized performance, Abi Tapia always hears the same question: “What does your guitar strap say?” The answer is a word that describes not only her music, but also a big part of her personality: “Wanderlusty.”

Abi Tapia happily calls Austin home, but to say she’s simply a Texas songwriter wouldn’t give the whole story. The daughter of musicians, Abi was born in Alabama and lived until she was fifteen in various towns around the Southeast and Texas. She has since lived in the Midwest (where she was a Sociology major at Grinnell College) and New England (where she began her professional music career). Characteristics of all of these regions inspire Abi’s songwriting: The inviting warmth of the South, the expansiveness of the Midwestern Plains, and the pluck and determination of a New England Yankee are all mixed up with a nomadic restlessness.

While living in Maine, Abi found herself attracted to the sweet twang and straightforward approach of Country music. This sound drew her to Austin in 2002 where she quickly rooted herself in the city’s thriving live music scene. With its blend of country sincerity, cosmopolitan irony and plethora of skilled pickers, this openhearted music community is the perfect setting for Abi’s work. Here she writes lyrics that are at times simple and sincere, but can turn sassy in a flash, while her melodies seem pre-destined to be surrounded by licks on mandolin and Dobro. As host of the Cactus Café’s Monday Open Mic night, Abi sits on the front lines of the emerging songwriter scene, welcoming new musicians to town every week, hoping they find Austin as hospitable as she has.

But don’t assume she’s settled down. Perhaps because she’s lived in so many places, Abi has never been daunted and is, in fact, inspired by the enormous undertaking involved in heading out solo for a cross-country tour. Driving hours by herself, living out of the car for weeks at a time, and playing for strangers in each new town, she is fed by the thrill of exploring new places, meeting other artists, and the blessing of having audiences applaud her everywhere she performs. The diversity of the venues she has played keeps road life interesting. Some nights bring her to legendary listening rooms like Club Passim, The Bitter End, The Bluebird Café and Eddie’s Attic, while other nights Abi might be seen in crowded living rooms, libraries, a gazebo on a sprawling Texas ranch, or at a bicycle race finish line. Her songwriter’s sensibility allows her to appreciate details and subtle differences of each place she visits, so for Abi, even the shortest trip offers potential adventure and inspiration.

Tapia’s 2005 release, One Foot Out The Door, is a driving collection of songs about loving and leaving that is garnering rave reviews and comparisons to Austin’s best songwriters. The creation of this music was like a year-long road trip with Abi (vocals, guitar and harmonica) driving and Chris Gage (producer, engineer, guitars, keys and vocals) sitting shotgun with the maps. They picked up a few hitchhikers along the way including musicians who have contributed to albums from the Dixie Chicks, Eliza Gilkyson, The Greencards and countless others. With song titles like “Somewhere to Go” and “Nothing to Hold Me Down”, you can bet that this disc will take Abi Tapia to lots more cities and car stereos, and lot more people will be asking questions that can be answered with the word “Wanderlusty.”

Artist website: www.amycook.com

Everybody knows the stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Texas, and the celestial has always been proudly represented in Lone Star culture, be it bands (Explosions in the Sky), sports (Houston Astros) or the state nickname itself. Amy Cook also sees something unique up [...]]]>

Artist website: www.amycook.com

Everybody knows the stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Texas, and the celestial has always been proudly represented in Lone Star culture, be it bands (Explosions in the Sky), sports (Houston Astros) or the state nickname itself. Amy Cook also sees something unique up there, but the alt-folk singer-songwriter isn’t content simply marveling at the enormity of what lies beyond earth. On The Sky Observer’s Guide—written in a prolific four-week gush—she tells simple, bittersweet, earthbound stories, refracted through the panoramic scope of the heavens. Things like this happen when you leave the industrial clamor of L.A. for a humble, weirdly-named West Texas town like Marfa.
“I named the record at the very end after I realized, going back on all these songs, there’s a song about an eclipse [‘Coming Home’], one called ‘Bright Colored Afternoons’—it really was all about the sky, the weather, the planets, the stars,” Cook confirms.

“Marfa’s nothing but open sky and a million stars and I think that got me on those sort of analogies—thinking about the bigger picture of it all, putting yourself in the place of just being here on this planet, where you can cover the moon with the tip of your thumb like an eclipse. It doesn’t make you feel insignificant, but it changes your perspective to be somewhere with a wide-open sky.”

Although her songs popped up all over the teen drama continuum (Dawson’s Creek, Laguna Beach, Veronica Mars), Cook grew weary of the industry grind in 2005 and packed up for Austin. Along the way she took a timeout in Marfa and met Leisha Hailey of Showtime’s acclaimed original series The L Word. The actress and the songwriter made fast friends; Hailey not only got Cook her best show placement of all (“The one on The L Word is my favorite because [Leisha’s character] was doing a radio show and she said, ‘That was Amy Cook on Marfa Records,’ which was better than being background music at a party somewhere,”) but encouraged her to write The Bunkhouse Recordings (slated for re-release this year with bonus live tracks), a full-length so intimate that Cook and her acoustic are backed by chirping crickets and a restless dog. Falling in love with Marfa—a quirky convergence of Mexican-Americans, artists and musicians where Ray’s, the bar with the “best coffee in the world” is inexplicably called Lucy’s—was inevitable.
amy cook profile “For me, [Marfa] is one of the last places around where you can actually make small dreams come true,” says Hailey. “You feel like a pioneer: no judgment, no expectations. I was looking for someone willing to take the dive with me in this new label. When I heard Amy, it all became clear to me. I hadn’t heard someone with a voice like that unless I paid a high ticket price for it.”

Cook claims she excels in a community of collaboration and the gorgeous packaging to The Sky Observer’s Guide backs up the sentiment. Artist Amy Adler, who had previously curated Joni Mitchell’s only sanctioned art show, fashioned five 5X5 sepia renderings of Cook, in turn providing stories that inspired the deeply personal narratives.

“I think she feels a tiny bit trapped by the idea that art doesn’t have sound,” Cook notes of Adler, “so she wanted to do a project that kind of combined the two things, where the art influenced the music and the music influenced the art.
In the end we really did inform each other in so many ways. I don’t think I would’ve written the album without her, and she wouldn’t have done these pieces.
“At first she would send me stories about her life—which were really, really beautiful—and they just set something off. I toyed with writing about her, then I decided that these songs were really about me. Not that we have completely similar life experiences, but it was just certain things that she said and the way that she wrote them. She was writing a lot about her father, which got me writing about my grandmother.”
That reminiscence, “Pearl,” is beautifully typical of Cook’s oeuvre, soaked in delay, slide and strum, abetted by guitarist Brad Rice, bassist Bobby Daniel and drummer Nina Singh. From the upbeat drawl of “The Answer” to the sparse, cautiously optimistic “Sunshine,” The Sky Observer’s Guide is beset with an epic light and dark representative of its creator.

“The songs might be melancholy, but there’s always something sort of hopeful about them,” she shrugs. “Probably because it’s the way that I am.”