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CARY COOPER + Journal + Favorites + Links + Quotes |
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"It is never too late to be what you might have been." BE SURE TO CHECK OUT CARY'S MYSPACE page! 2007 FINALIST Rocky Mountain Folks Festival Songwriter Showcase NOMINATED 2006 for 3 Just Plain Folks awards including: Female Singer-Songwriter Album of the Year Female Singer-Songwriter Song of the Year New Folk Song of the Year WINNER 2004 Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk Competition EMERGING ARTIST 2004 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival Showcase TOP TEN 2004 Mountain Stage NewSong Festival Songwriting Competition RUNNER-UP 2004 Boston Folk Festival Songwriting Competition NOMINATED 2004 for 3 Just Plain Folks awards including: Female Singer-Songwriter Album of the Year Americana Song of the Year Children's Song of the Year In other words, Cary Cooper has hit her stride! But in order to put things in perspective, it helps to know the whole story. Let's start at the beginning. Cary grew up in a small town near Dallas, Texas with young parents who wore bell-bottoms, wore their hair long and listened to Peter, Paul and Mary, Jim Croce, and The Limelighters. The oldest of three children, she entertained her sister and brother and all the neighborhood kids by putting on plays and organizing backyard circuses. She was always the star. "In the third grade I decided I wanted to be a songwriter. I enlisted the help of my best friend and started a band called The Kittens. My biggest dilemma was trying to split my time equally between songwriting, choreography and costume design. But later, the bigger problem became trying to teach my tone-deaf friend to sing. The Kittens quickly disbanded in order to save the friendship. " In addition to voice and piano lessons (she was her piano teacher's worst nightmare), Cary cultivated a love for dance. Beginning ballet at age 3, she continued to dance thru her college years where she was a member of the internationally touring Texas Tech Pompom Squad. Also during that time, Cary taught dance camps for an organization in California, United Spirit Association, where she met and danced with Paula Abdul, Teri Hatcher (Desperate Housewives) and Tina Landon (choreographer for Janet Jackson, Ricky Martin and Britney Spears). While dance proved to be her primary passion during adolescence and her early adult years, music was definitely her secret pursuit. "During college, I roomed with an incredibly talented musician named Felicia Brady. Felicia was a piano performance major but was also a songwriter and fabulous singer. Because I was "the dancer" and she was "the musician", I never told her that I too wrote songs and loved to sing. Late at night in our dorm room, I would listen to her sing and she would watch me dance. Whenever she would leave in the morning to go to the music building to practice, I would run down the hall to my other friends' rooms and sing them the songs I had just written. Afraid of not living up to her (or more truthfully, my own) standards, I eventually quit writing altogether." After college, Cary worked in the fitness field for several years (including a position as physical training instructor for student pilots at Reese Air Force base) before she stumbled onto a career teaching English as a Second Language to first and second graders. "My favorite part of teaching ESL was that I got to sing with the kids all day. I taught them all the songs I learned as a child, and when I eventually ran out of songs to teach them, I started writing my own songs for them to sing. I'm not sure how conventional it is to learn english with Puff the Magic Dragon and Bad Bad Leroy Brown, but it worked like a charm! " When Cary stopped teaching to be a work at home mom, she began to seriously ponder what was missing in her life. While attending her first house concert in Wylie, Texas, she figured out exactly what it was. "When a friend invited me to go with her to a house concert, I was a little leery and almost said no. I mean, what the heck is a house concert?? But curiosity got the better of me and I said yes. From the minute I set foot inside "Tom Noe's Home for Wayward Women", I knew I had found the home I was searching for. I could hardly keep from crying throughout the entire show, and went home and immediately started writing songs again. That was spring of 1999. After a full summer of writing, I went to my first Wine and Music Festival in Kerrville, Texas. Another life altering experience. I knew very little about the festival, except that "the people from the house concerts" all went. So I spent most of that first festival secretly stalking Bill Nash knowing that he would know where to go and what to do. Thank God for Bill! While at Kerrville, I learned of their songwriting school, and vowed that come hell or high water, I'd be there in the spring. I even felt brave enough to finally visit Felicia in Boston (who was now a working singer-songwriter in the Boston scene) and confess to her that I was writing. " In the fall of 1999, Cary bought a guitar and taught herself to play, and kept her vow to attend the songwriting school at Kerrville the following spring, even though she was a week away from giving birth to her second child! Later that same summer, in the middle of a divorce (and with a six week old baby in tow), Cary went back to Kerrville and had a chance meeting with Tom Prasada-Rao. "I had written a song that I couldn't play the way I wanted to on the guitar and kept bugging all my Dallas friends to help me with it. The question I kept asking them was "can you help me play this song the way �that Tom Prasada-Rao guy' does?" And of course, they all said, "if you want it to sound like Tom Prasada-Rao, go ask Tom Prasada-Rao for help!" And of course, I said, "I can't go ask Tom Prasada-Rao. He's like ELVIS!" So once again, Bill Nash came to the rescue and asked Tom to help me on my song. This was the slow beginning of what turned out to be much more than a simple guitar arrangement." When Cary started to perform her music around Texas, and set out to record her first CD, she turned to TPR for some advice. This led to their first collaboration. It also ultimately led to love. "Falling in love with Tom Prasada-Rao was the last thing I ever expected to do. Our working together on my CD, Gypsy Train, was certainly no indication that love was where we were headed. The most we ever said to each other during production was, "what song do you wanna work on today". The equally profound response was usually, "I don't know, what do you wanna do?" Toward the end of production in 2002, I attended my first International Folk Alliance Conference in Jacksonville, Florida. Tom graciously offered to show me the ropes a bit and led me around the exhibit hall introducing me to folks in the business he knew. That led to the beginning of our friendship. When we got home from Folk Alliance, we started spending a lot of time corresponding via email. A few months later, mutual friends convinced us that maybe there was more going on than a budding friendship. As it turns out, we didn't need a lot of convincing." In the summer of 2002, Cary and Tom wrote their first song together. They've been writing together ever since. In the fall of 2002, they recorded their first duo album and in addition to their solo endeavors, started performing together as The Dreamsicles . Slowly but surely, they're winning over old Tom Prasada-Rao fans and gaining new Cary Cooper and Dreamsicles'fans everywhere they go. In addition to Cary's Just Plain Folks nominations, The Dreamsicles were also nominated for three awards in 2004 including Contemporary Album of the Year, Contemporary Song of the Year and Best Cover Song, and two awards in 2006 for New Folk Album of the Year and New Folk Song of the Year. Following her good fortune in 2004, Cary released her second solo album, "Yellow" in 2005 to much praise from critics and radio dj's alike. She and Tom also released the second Dreamsicles CD, "Luv Songs For Grown Ups". She is very grateful to be living her dreams. "When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision - then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid." Audre Lorde
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