David Cook

David Cook (and yes, the same David Cook who launched into stardom following his American Idol Season Seven win – breaking several Billboard chart records when 14 of his songs debuted on the Hot Digital Songs chart and 11 of his songs debuted on the Hot 100) certainly knows his way around a good song. His first album, Analog Heart, came out pre-Idol, and his last album, Digital Vein, nicely book-ended that chapter of Cook’s career, a chapter during which he sold more than 2 million albums (including his platinum-certified eponymous album) and, collectively, more than 5 million tracks (including two platinum-certified singles) worldwide.

David continues to find success, not only for himself, but also as a writer for other artists and touring throughout the world. 2018 brought an exciting new EP from Cook – Chromance. “I was a ‘rock’ guy, but the further away I’ve gotten from that, the more I’ve opened up and found inspiration in the peripherals. I wouldn’t have had the courage earlier in my career, but now I have the confidence to go after the sound I want.” A fan of both Massive Attack and Nine Inch Nails, Cook always admired how they pushed the envelope and brought pop elements into rock music. “I used them as a bedrock for Chromance and how I wanted the record to feel.”

If putting out his 2018 EP wasn’t enough to keep Cook busy, that same year he headed to the Great White Way for his Broadway debut as Charlie Price in KINKY BOOTS. “I’ve had conversations about finding creative outlets outside of being a musician, but the timing was never right.” While Cook was excited about his first starring role, he was also aware the message behind KINKY BOOTS was timely and relevant. “I was honored to be part of the show and get to work with so many amazing people. I love the collaborative aspect of theatre too, the idea of being part of a creative team and working it out in front of an audience each night.”

Another passion of Cook’s is his work in behalf of organizations such as the National Brain Tumor Society, a Washington DC-based nonprofit that drives cutting-edge research and treatments for brain cancer and brain tumors. “I’ve been very involved with this cause and am very grateful that my career has allowed me to do that. I lost my brother Adam to a brain tumor in 2009; every year I am part of the Race for Hope-DC and, together with my fans, have raised over $1.5 million for brain cancer and brain tumor research through this and other fundraising projects. Far and away, that is the proudest of all my achievements.”

Cook is well aware, and grateful, for the breaks American Idol has brought his way, and for the opportunities he continues to have. He has no plans to slow it down. “I love creative endeavors. I like starting with nothing and then finishing with something that didn’t exist before. That’s my favorite thing about creating new music. I love being able to put something artistic out in the world for people to enjoy.”

In 2020, David released two new singles. The first, “Reds Turn Blue,” is a nod to the manic highs (reds) and lows (blues) of anxiety, something David has struggled to overcome since his season seven win on American Idol. As David told People.com: “This song became a therapeutic process for me, as a way to personify my anxiety and make it something other than me — which, in an odd way, has helped me navigate my relationship with it.” To capture that struggle, David worked with artist Justin A. Nixon to create a visual that was, “sci-fi and sinister” but left open-ended to represent “that constant battle between anxiety and myself.” And the second, “Strange World,” is “my homage to this year,” said David. “Staring out of windows at the world outside, feeling disconnected from it, and trying to find those moments that would normally exist outside, inside. “Both singles, along with the driving Fire are from his EP The Looking Glass, released in April 2021.

In April 2022, David released his latest single, “TABOS” (This’ll All Be Over Soon). The single’s release coincided with his return to the American Idol stage to perform for their special 20th-anniversary reunion show.

In July 2024, David released his latest single, “Dead Weight” co-written with long-time collaborator, Andy Skib to coincide with his summer tour.

The story of Little by Little, the new album by Ward Hayden & The Outliers, began like so many Bruce Springsteen songs do: in a car with the radio on, hurtling down a highway, headed for distant destinations. Except that instead of one of Hayden’s longtime favorites like Hank Williams taking him on a journey through the airwaves, it was a voice whose sour rhetoric rubbed him the wrong way and ultimately inspired action.

“It was born from something negative,” concedes Hayden, a rueful tinge shading his words as he relates the story. It all started when he and his band were driving to a gig in the heartland of America a couple of years back. “The person being interviewed on the radio was someone who rose to fame in a Massachusetts hard rock band in the ‘90s who then did the classic thing of turning to country for the late stage of his career,” says the Outliers’ singer-songwriter. “And he was telling his audience, his fans, not to listen to Bruce Springsteen. And although I don’t feel I’m a very angry or hotheaded person, my initial reaction was disbelief that anyone would say that, or disavow one of the most meaningful collections of songwriting and work, and do such a disservice to their own audience just because they didn’t completely align with a few things Springsteen had said away from the stage. It felt like an exploitation of our differences, and he was using a meaningful and significant generational touchstone in Springsteen to further divide people and profiteer from negative sensationalism.”

After all, with a legendary career in music that at this point spans more than half a century’s worth of creating quintessentially American tales of small-town striving and big-time heartbreak, Springsteen, Hayden says, is “a universal tie that binds, someone who transcends age and country and generations. Everywhere we go, everywhere we’ve toured around the world, his name comes up. And I know how much his music has meant to me.”

Hayden knew what he had to do to counteract the negative: Offer a balance to the negative bluster by working resolutely to create a positive reaction with Bruce’s music as the vehicle. That small but symbolic act of appreciation and resistance initially came in the form of recording and releasing a trio of Springsteen songs: “Glory Days,” “Brilliant Disguise,” and “Dancing in the Dark.” Little did the band know the gesture would be a creative catalyst and roadmap for the foreseeable future. “What ended up happening was” – here Hayden brightens with a broad grin – “we couldn’t stop, and the project took on a life of its own. We literally went nuts. It was too much fun.”

So much so that Hayden and The Outliers wound up with a clutch of 16 finished Springsteen songs, all interpreted Outliers-style, that they decided to split down the middle into two separate, yet thematically linked albums. Their respective release dates will likely coincide with the Outliers always-busy touring schedule so fans will have fresh, new music to latch onto live and on record. Little by Little dropped on April 18th, with the second installment, Piece by Piece (both titles are gleaned from Springsteen’s lyrics to “Racing In The Street”) due later this year, right around the time the band heads for Europe & Scandinavia.

“We could have done 16 more songs, but we started to run out of money,” Ward says with a laugh. “So we had to pump the brakes at some point!” On top of that, the sessions proved so fertile that the band also came away with an entire album’s worth of brand-new original Outliers’ compositions that will also see the light of day at some later date. Little by Little is comprised of an eclectic mix of cherished chestnuts and rare gems (such as the previously unreleased “County Fair,” a slice-of-life studio outtake that later appeared on Springsteen’s Essentials collection). But if you’re under the impression that these guys merely fired up a greatest hits karaoke machine, you’d better think again.

As any fan of this prolific Massachusetts-born band knows, whether you’re a newcomer or whether you first heard Hayden when he first arrived on the Boston scene as the charismatic leader of the multi-Boston Music Award-winning outfit Girls Guns & Glory, the music on Little by Little is outfitted in the inimitable Outliers’ style. That is to say, with a marvelously effective, updated dose of Country & Western flavor; tasty instrumental flourishes thanks to Tyler Marshall’s and Sam Crawford’s restrained-yet-ripping guitar licks (the latter also employs lap steel guitar). And a supple rhythm section supplied by bass player-multi-instrumentalist Greg Hall (who co-produced the album with Hayden) and drummer-percussionist Patrick Brown, plus a select handful of the Outliers musical collaborators who lent their talents to this recording. All told, the musicianship here is so comfortably tight you could bounce a jukebox quarter off of it – that is, if jukeboxes still took quarters.

Of course, the sonic package is topped off by the Outliers’ calling card and ace-in-the-hole: Hayden’s emotionally resonant, supremely silken vocals. It’s a voice that, in the span of a verse or a moment, can effortlessly summon the highest of spirits or sink the saddest of hearts. And as if that wasn’t enough to draw listeners in, for Little by Little, Hayden even taught himself to play harmonica, which you can hear augment the wistful, twin elegies of “Used Cars” and “Promised Land,” the latter of which is slated to be the album’s first single. Taken together, what the whole shebang sounds and feels like, unmistakably, is nobody but Ward Hayden & the Outliers.

“Well, you can’t out Boss The Boss,” says Hayden, who spent his formative years on the South Shore listening to Springsteen and watching Bruce’s videos on MTV (back when the video channel actually played music). “We had always felt a little intimidated about trying to tackle his songs because some of them are so iconic. We knew that if we were gonna do them, we had to play them the way we play our music, and that was the first challenge.”

“We really chose the songs that meant something to us,” Ward says of the selection process. “A lot of the songs have been the soundtrack to growing up – back when you were hanging out with your friends in the kitchen, songs you’d listen to while driving home from school, or during the course of you just living your life. And with this collection, I felt we were able to say some things that I’ve not been able to say myself yet in my own work, and here we were able to cover some ground that I’ve been wanting to cover.”

Whenever Ward found himself driving around town, he’d listen to Born To Run, Springsteen’s audio book of the singer-songwriter’s acclaimed 2016 autobiography. A fan had gifted Hayden the “book on tape” after a show, and he’d constantly pop it in to listen. The memoir hooked Hayden and gave him a window into Bruce’s world, from the Boss’s hardscrabble boyhood beginnings in Freehold, New Jersey, to his eventual global superstardom. Most important, it gave Hayden a greater understanding and appreciation of the stories behind the legend.

“Youngstown,” the intended second single off Little by Little that chronicles the true tale of the demise of Youngstown, Ohio’s steel industry, especially hit home for Hayden: “I wanted to record that from the moment I heard it decades ago. That story, of industry booming and then busting a town has played out quite a bit, where townspeople give everything and then the town is kind of forsaken. Here in Massachusetts, it’s played out with shoe factories and textile mills and in the fishing industry.”

“In evolution, specialization is a key ingredient to extinction,” he adds. “If you can’t adapt to a change in environment, you’re left twisting in the wind, because for generations it’s all you’ve known. You’re not ready for moving on to the next thing.” It speaks a greater truth. “I think that it’s a very human, very American song. And few folks write those better than Bruce.”

The band recorded the bulk of the tracks for both Outliers Springsteen albums at 37′ Productions, a welcoming state of the art studio just outside Boston, with award-winning engineer Sean McLaughlin (known for his work with Elliott Smith) at the helm. The rest of the album was recorded over a six-month span during breaks between touring, with the finishing touches added with Hayden’s friend, fellow roots musician David DeLuca, who now runs Noise in the Basement Studio in Canton, MA. But before ever setting foot in the studio, the band members were able to rehearse what they heard in their heads, thanks to the generosity of Patrick Norton, who runs the venerable Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River, Massachusetts.

“What was great about the Narrows is that it’s an old mill building with a big, cavernous room that has a natural echo. The room helped shape the sound of the record because I like the way the music reverberated in that room,” says Hayden. Those echoes provided a visceral sense of sonic detail and nuance. “I was living and breathing these songs for almost two years, running the lyrics through my head, thinking about phrasing and finding the right delivery. I really wanted to capture genuine sentiment and honesty with my interpretation of these songs. I didn’t want to sing them if I didn’t really feel them, I needed a meaningful connection to the song.”

Call it honesty or authenticity. Just as Springsteen famously draws on his real-life roots for his material, so too has Hayden – especially after the pandemic hit in 2020 and the Outliers were forced off the road for an extended period. Ward credits Greg Hall, then a newcomer to the band, as an inspiration. “He could have withdrawn and I would have understood. But he was really excited about what we were doing and said ‘when the world comes back, we want to be ready, so let’s get to work’. I started writing as aggressively as I had in the early days, all the while I’d moved back to my hometown, running into people, and seeing sites that felt like monuments to my memories. That’s what (2023’s) South Shore record ended up being about.”

“We have a whole other record written that we’re going to record this year that’s a continuation of that experience, of leaving a small town, seeing the bigger world, and trying to figure out your place in both of those environments,” Hayden says. ‘Ultimately coming back home, figuring out where you fit in, and sorting through those emotions. It’s a journey I wasn’t expecting, but it’s been at the forefront of my mind and connected to a lot of the music we’ll be releasing the next couple years. Thinking about the path of life. These paths through life, the leaving and the coming home, the bigger and smaller picture, and our role in a world that’s so much bigger than ourselves. It’s where you find meaning, where you find value, where you find connection in the ups and downs that come along with that journey. I think it makes us human, it’s what builds us up and breaks us down, strengthens our resilience. Through the songs that capture that experience it’s where we find the inspiration to keep moving forward and continue climbing. And in this part of the world that shared experience is what makes us American & it’s that insight that gives us a unique perspective we’re able to examine, build into song, and share. These are the ties that bind.”