Monday 12 May 2014

Adam Cooke Q&A

Your name: 
Adam Cooke.

Where are you from? 
Ontario, Canada.

Who else is in your band? 
Adam Ostrosser - guitar & vox
Steve Pelletier - bass & vox
Mike Scime - drums

How would you describe yourselves?
Melodically driven, with a short attention span. Rock, funk, reggae, soul and pop tunes live side by side in harmony.

Who are your main influences musically?
XTC, Led Zeppelin, Lenny Kravitz, Cake, Beatles, Neil Finn, George Clinton

What do you hope to achieve in music?
I'd love to find an audience that really enjoys my music, whether it's online or live. Writing and playing original music is incredibly fulfilling, anyone that wants to come along for the ride is a bonus!

What has been the highlight of your career so far, and why?
I've played a couple of opening slots for 500-1000 people, and it's always a blast, especially when you get positive response.
The other highlight would be when I was in my first original band. We were in the studio and the producer was good friends with Daniel Lanois (the producer behind U2, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris). He dropped by the studio and laid down guitar tracks for two tunes when he was in town. While he was doing it he asked who the bass player was (which was me at the time) and he commented that he really loved the lines!

And what’s the moment you want to forget?
Ugh. Too many. Perhaps getting booked up at a Northern Ontario bar in that same band. We'd played once there during the week and the owner really liked us so he figured he'd put us in on a Friday. It was cheap beer night and the bar was full of very drunk blue collar rocker folks. At the time we were a folk/rock band with accordion and acoustic guitar. I knew we were in for trouble when someone yelled "SABBATH!" after our third original tune, which we were planning on playing all night. The culmination was us starting "Bust-a-move" by Young MC (in spite of my protests) and as soon as I opened my mouth and started rhyming the entire bar roared their disapproval. We stopped dead, finished our set and skulked off to our rooms, happy that we hadn't been strung up. Longest set of my life.

If you had to pick just one of your songs to represent your music, what would it be and why?
That's an incredibly difficult thing to do. My music isn't a mish-mash stick-it-in-the-blender type. There's elements of different genres in tunes, but I have straight up reggae songs beside hard rock riff songs beside disco/funk songs. It's incredibly varied.
As far as my favourite, at the moment it's a new song we're recording for the new album called "Bring the Spring", a riff rocker. It's huge fun and gets great response live.


Where can we listen to it? 
Ah, unfortunately it's not quite finished yet. Here's a link to one of my favourites from my last album 'Rock You Down' entitled "He said, she said"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5NA_usFFio




Anything else you’d like to say about your band/music that I forgot to ask?
Hopefully music listeners will take a little time and dig around my first album "Rock You Down" since it has so many different genres represented. Thanks Greg!

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