On Track: Elizabeth Cook

“Yes To Booty” made it onto Elizabeth Cook’s new Don Was-produced album, Welder, because she ran her mouth. More to the point, it made the cut because she can deliver a song that’s funny, gutsy, unconventional and relatable under pressure.

“I really got myself in trouble with it,” she confesses. “Because what happened was, one day I had the idea for the song. And I sort of jotted down maybe a couple of lines. Right about that time, some of the people that work with me were putting some pressure on me about what I was writing.”

So Cook told them she’d just finished writing a song called “Yes To Booty,” which, of course, wasn’t exactly the truth. “Okay, I milk this all the way up to when we are making Welder,” she says. “It’s as if this song really exists. Even got put on a list of songs in Don Was’s leather-bound production bible.” Then the inevitable happened: When he wanted to record it, she had to own up to the fact that there was no song to record. At his direction, she took her guitar into the vocal booth and cranked it out on the spot.

The result was a song Loretta Lynn could be proud of –a hipper, rawer, hard-country cousin to “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin,” with a few zinger lines and an anthemic hook that scores laughs even as it hits home: “Come on, say no to beer and say yes to booty.” And that’s not even the album’s best offbeat song. That distinction would most certainly go to “El Camino,” a garage-rock, bossanova talking-blues about a sketchy yet seductive character. Those are balanced out by the emotional heft of songs like “Heroin Addict Sister” and “Mama’s Funeral.”

Cook met Was—who’s produced enough superstar projects to build a formidable discography, including Bonnie Raitt’s GRAMMY-winner Nick of Time and every studio album the Rolling Stones have made since the mid-‘90s—when they both performed with Todd Snider at Bonnaroo last year. “He just took a shine to me, found me peculiar or entertaining or something and wanted to do it, wanted to make a record,” says Cook. “I probably would have never been so presumptuous to ask him when I met him.”

There is, of course, another good reason why somebody like Was would want to work with somebody like her, an independent singer-songwriter and backwoods Florida native who lives in a funky East Nashville neighborhood and isn’t yet a household name: her singular songwriting. Of all the things Cook’s been known for—a decade of appearances on the Opry, a brief major label country stint, hosting a satellite radio show called Apron Strings—that’s number one for her.

“I’m not there because I’m this exceptionally great singer or performer or guitar player,” she insists, though some might beg to differ where her singing’s concerned. “…It’s like I don’t have any of those things, I don’t think. But what I am trying to stay in the sandbox with is my writing. That’s gonna be what I bring to the table that’s most important at the end of the day. I’d be very satisfied with that.”

The writing and co-writing Cook did during her early Nashville years when she had a publisher and a major label yielded some notable songs, like the ‘60s-style country-pop number “Everyday Sunshine.” But she really came into her own sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, warm-hearted songwriting thing outside of the mainstream, with her 2007 album Balls, and even more so with Welder.

“When I’m rolling with Rodney Crowell [who produced Balls] and Nanci Griffith and Todd Snider and Hayes Carll and Ray Wylie…all these guys…are like…serious songwriters,” says Cook. “And I can’t be writing no ‘Oh, here’s the river and the moon and I love you and this is the greatest love ever’ song. I mean, that’s just not going to fly. I couldn’t hold my head up.”