By Gabby McIlhinney
Sam Cook-Parrott has been Radiator Hospital for almost fifteen years. And while playing with the same full band for about a decade of that, he showed up to WKDU wielding only a cassette deck a day after dropping his sixth album, Distorting Time. Come for the tape machine, stay for the story about a possible outlaw ancestor whose skin reportedly became a pair of shoes.
I’ve been a Radiator Hospital fan since high school, back when Spotify functioned as my whole social life. When I joined a college radio station, the song I played for my on-air test was “Long Distance Dedication,” off the actual vinyl copy sitting in the studio that day. That’s also how I made one of my best friends. Sorting CDs together, we realized Radiator Hospital was a shared favorite, and a trip to see them play together at Foto Club (RIP) sealed the deal. She’s my roommate now.
For a project going on 15 years, this era looks nothing like the ones before it. Cook-Parrott played with the same band for about a decade, and the last show that lineup ever played was, coincidentally, the exact show that made me and my now-roommate friends. With the natural difficulty of keeping a band together that long, he figured he’d start something new afterward, maybe under a different name entirely, until a tour offer from Saint Seneca came along last fall. Cook-Parrott wanted to do it solo and ride in the van with them, which meant figuring out a way to perform alone that wasn’t just guy-and-a-guitar. The answer was singing live over pre-recorded cassette tapes, hands free, with a new song arrangement each night, “It’s about as lo-fi as you can get.”
The tape format ended up shaping the whole record, since he knew how the songs would need to work live before he’d finished writing them. It also came together fast. Lame-O, who put out the record, gave him a deadline to make a summer release possible, and Cook-Parrott said he tends to work better with one. “It’s fun to make music with no end goal,” he said, “but also it can be clarifying to know what you’re doing it for.”
Distorting Time takes its title from an Oblique Strategies card, the Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt deck of cryptic prompts meant to jolt you out of a creative rut. The card just says “distorting time,” which Cook-Parrott liked precisely because it can mean several contradictory things at once, an instruction, a description, a state of being, depending on how you read it.
Two songs in particular come with stories attached. “Ballad of Big Nose George Parrott” is about a real-life Wild West outlaw Cook-Parrott has family lore tying him to, distantly enough that he hasn’t run a DNA test to confirm it. Big Nose George was hanged for robbery and murder in the 1880s, and, in death, became considerably more famous than in life. His skin was reportedly tanned into a pair of shoes later worn by a sitting governor of Wyoming, and his skull became an ashtray. Cook-Parrott wrote the song to give his possible ancestor a slightly kinder legacy than “guy whose body parts became furniture.”
“Wildman Dance,” explicit, not one for the radio or your mom, per Cook-Parrott’s own warning, was inspired by Leo Ornstein, a composer who was writing dissonant, atonal piano music as a teenager in the 1910s and lived to be 108, long enough to watch decades of music descend, in some tangled way, from what he’d started. Cook-Parrott admitted he doesn’t know a ton about Ornstein’s actual life and mostly ran with the shape of the story. It got him thinking that if Ornstein made it to 108, there’s no reason Radiator Hospital couldn’t run another fifteen years past this one. I’m holding out for the Radiator Empire.
Genre labels have never meant much to him, lo-fi, twee punk, whatever fits that week, since the songs have always been flexible enough to show up differently depending on the format, whether that’s a full rock band, a baritone ukulele, or now, a cassette deck. Outside of music, Cook-Parrott pointed to two recent reads. Robert Rodriguez’s “Rebel Without a Crew,” about shooting El Mariachi for $7,000 with no crew, resonated as a guide for making something feel bigger than its budget, and a biography of the band Shoes, whose career reads as a string of near-misses that never tipped into stardom. “You can only be so inspired by music to make music,” he said. “You should look at paintings to make music, whatever it is.”
What’s next is mostly just more touring, a West Coast run this month, then a longer stretch starting in October that swings back through Philly. Beyond that, nothing locked in. Cook-Parrott floated the idea of maybe playing with another human again someday, then immediately backed off committing to it. Who’s to say.
Catch Radiator Hospital at @radiatorhospital on Instagram, and stream Distorting Time for free at radiatorhospital.bandcamp.com, no subscription required (thank you moral streaming). Keep listening to college radio.
DJ Gabby Mack hosts Fish Food on WKDU Philadelphia 91.7 FM.