The beautiful misery of Ian Cooke

By Josiah M. Hesse

Ian Cooke loves dinosaurs.

I was wondering why he chose to meet at the T-Rex lounge of Denver’s Museum of Nature & Science, but that’s the explanation he gives. “I like to come out here about once a month or so,” he said.

Surrounded by screaming children being force-fed chicken nuggets, Cooke sits contentedly in strikingly fashionable clothes, answering my questions with a shy smile. His beauty is at times disarming, but even more so is his candor and lack of pretense when answering questions. “I feel pretty strange about [previous interviews] in hindsight. I’m always like ‘whoa, I really poured my heart out.'”

The interviews Ian is referring to were surrounding the release of his 2007 album The Fall I Fell. Concerning the unreturned love of a straight friend, Ian Cooke poured out his heart not only in his stunning album, but also to the press. For the first few years of his meteoric rise, Cooke was bleeding love in every direction. This forced the then-21-year old Cooke to come out to his family. “I told my Mom ‘I’ve fallen hard, and it’s for a dude.'”

His parents were warmly receptive to his sexual identity, and his explosive fan-base was very receptive to his music and nakedly honest persona. In 2008 Cooke was invited to perform at Toronto’s Pride Festival (one of the largest in the world), and was suddenly appearing in SPIN Magazine and touring the world, opening for bands like The Flaming Lips and The Decemberists. The following year Cooke was voted “Best Band” in The Denver Post’s Underground Music Poll – which shocked him considering “I hadn’t put out a record in two years.”

It shocked no one when Cooke was invited to record two tracks for the Joanna Newsome tribute “Visions Of Joanna.” Between his playful vocals – swinging soulful chest voice to soaring falsetto – and his bouncy plucks and bow-strums of his cello, it is easy to see Newsome’s influence.

Playing piano since he was 5, Cooke has been immersed in music his whole life. From his strict Russian piano teacher to eight-hour training sessions at the University Of Northern Colorado, Cooke has worked hard to achieve a sophisticated musical vocabulary. Though he’s never very far from his childhood records: “Abba was a big influence. The Carpenters, Beatles, Billy Idol, Duran Duran. A good sample platter. And female alt stuff like Bjork and The Cranberries.”

While he will never shy away from his sexual identity, Cooke bristles at the idea of it consuming him. “I’m not specifically a ‘gay artist,'” he said. “I go out and hit the [gay] bars every once and a while. But I feel this separation between the music scene and the gay scene, and I’d like to see a bridge between them.”

Ian Cooke’s new album Fortitude is out this month. He will be performing Dec. 16 at an official release party at The Curious Theater. l

Ian Cooke’s albums are available locally at Twist & Shout and Wax Trax. They are also available on iTunes and bandcamp.