Toronto-based musician Emma Cook will be making a stop at the Critical Pop-Up Art Gallery in 100 Mile House on April 21.
“I love coming to places I haven’t been,” said Cook, adding she was excited for the show. “They can expect hopefully a really good show, it’s definitely a listening show. It’s introspective, it’s powerful. I absolutely love performing, I love being on stage so they can expect to be engaged and leave feeling touched I hope,” she said.
The indie-pop artist just finished recording her fourth album, Living Proof, produced and musician by Dean Drouillard who collaborated with Canadian acts like Royal Wood, Amelia Curran and Matthew Barber.
“I wrote the album after a four-year battle with post-concussion syndrome, I had a bad concussion. It’s kind of the same range of loss and to struggle and what it means to be human,” she said on the album.
Her stop in 100 Mile House is part of her western Canadian tour in support of the album, which starts on April 17 in Jasper, Alta. and ends in Calgary on May 6. It will be here first stop in 100 Mile House.
Cook always thought she would be a singer.
“I just always loved music from when I was little. From when I was very little my mom used to say I would always just sing. I feel like I was just born with it and I always knew when I was little I’d be a singer”, she said.
Cook said she had a very hard time picking it out what artists who have specifically influenced her music.
The first single for the album, I Will Stay, reached the second round of the CBC’s Searchlight edition of 2017, a competition in where fans vote for their favourite talent involved in that year’s submission list.
She was also Toronto Independent Music Awards nominee and received an Ontario Arts Council grant in 2008 and featured on college, CBC and Verge radio stations after her second album, Hit & Run, was released.
The success of her second record led to the OAC supporting her third effort and an international touring grant from February to March in 2009, where she performed at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, one of today’s most premier festivals and one of the biggest stepping stones for young artists of any genre.
Overall, she has performed in over 100 shows in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. but it almost all ended after she fell off a tree. The fall resulted in a three-year battle with post-concussion syndrome after hitting her head and she stopped making music.
It wasn’t until 2016 when she teamed up with producer Mitch Girio for her third release she made her return to the scene. The team-up resulted in the Same Old Song. The titular song was about her recovery from her accident and debuted at #3 on the fark charts in Edmonton.
The Critical Mass Pop-Up Gallery will open up their doors at 7:30 p.m. and the show starts at 8. Tickets are $10.
brendan.jure@100milefreepress.net
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