Laura Monk – Vocals, Guitar
John Monk – Bass
PJ Engeman – Percussion
Dan Foster – Lead Acoustic and Electric Guitar
Interview with High Cotton
by Sarah Powell
High Cotton brings their fans an eclectic range of sounds from country to jazz to fifties rock. High Cotton has a familiar sound with a refreshing spin of originality. Each song is a journey from fun, upbeat stories such as Tattoo to heartfelt, reminiscent songs as Pictures to jazzy tunes as Song for the Big Easy. John and Laura Monk, PJ Engeman, and Dan Foster bring the music to life by telling the story behind High Cotton. Their passion in their collaboration and performance of their music is expressed through their stories and while on stage, which allows them to connect with their fans. Laura describes High Cotton coming together as “quite a serendipity kind of deal.”
High Cotton began as a duet of John and Laura. Laura tells how High Cotton came to be. “I’ve kind of been in a lot of bands throughout many years. I had been in a cover band that had just broken up. I was in a band with a really good friend of mine that I sang with and she was moving away. Everything was just ‘Oh my God, it’s all falling apart.’ I always continued to do original music but really wasn’t performing at that time. So here I was with no one to play with. John and I were married and at the time John would write the lyrics and I the music.” Laura realized one day “Hey, I’ve got John right here. I think I’ll buy him a bass guitar for Christmas and then I don’t have to play by myself. So that’s how we got started playing together with the goal of doing obscure covers and incorporating our original tunes.” John remarks comically “Up until that point, the only thing I had played before was hooky so it was quite an adventure and a lot of fun. In starting out with the bass, I found out quickly that it only has four strings and there’s only so much you can mess up.”
After John and Laura had been playing about a year, PJ joined High Cotton providing the percussion. PJ describes his experience, “It was interesting. I had actually seen what turned out to be John and Laura’s first gig and had remembered them and saw a poster some time later before I contacted them. I actually contacted Laura and said ‘If you’re ever interested in adding some percussion, maybe I can do that without messing up your sound too much.’ So that’s kind of how we got together…They weren’t actively seeking a drummer.” PJ laughs, “I just said I’m joining”. Laura adds, “What’s kind of funny about that is John and I had actually been saying ‘You know, I think we need to do something, we need to add something else, either some percussion or a lead guitarist.’ So we were kind of toying with how to go about doing that. Out of the blue, I get this email from PJ and this is very important for a singer to hear a drummer say ‘If you ever think you might want to add some nonintrusive percussion, let me know.’ For a singer to hear a percussionist say ‘I can be nonintrusive’ that’s a really big statement so that made him very intriguing.” PJ elaborates “I went on their website and heard all their originals and realized percussion would work, but it would not work in a traditional loud rock sense. That it had to be right. I loved the originals, which is really kind of one of the reasons that I contacted them. I knew the music that they were doing was really good so it was nice to try to be a part of that.”
More recently, Dan Foster joined High Cotton as the lead guitarist. PJ knew Dan before joining High Cotton. PJ describes that “We had jammed a bit together. We had played mostly jamming and traded a few songs, but we didn’t do anything seriously. We didn’t play out. It was more of a good way to get together and just play. What Dan was doing and what he was writing, he comes from a sort of different musical style – more Allman Brothers rock oriented. He brings that style to the table. When we decided to think about a guitar player, I had thought about Dan and actually hesitated to contact him for a little while because he was also starting a business which is very time consuming… I finally did contact him and he was really excited about the opportunity. We had auditioned a few guitar players. He fit musically and he fit personality wise with his desire to contribute. You know that part of the band that you have to have to make it work. He just fit that puzzle piece.” Laura agrees, “He fit our band philosophy which when you’re twenty-one it’s probably a normal band philosophy, ‘Everything the band makes goes back to the band. It’s all about making the band get established.’ Most people our age when we were talking about how we run the band when it got to the point of getting paid, they all wanted to get paid. All band expenses are covered, but no body really brings home a check after a gig. Aside from the fact that Dan’s personality as a really nice, laid back guy, good playing ability, just a nice attitude, he bought into that and that was very important.” PJ interjects, “That’s true… he basically said ‘I just want to play.’”
Laura tells the story behind the name, High Cotton. “I am a southerner – born and breed. All these guys are northerners. They’ve been in the south for a while but their roots are northern.” PJ adds amusingly “Bless our hearts.” Laura continues “Of course, the time the name came around it was just John and I. We were trying to think of a name.” John comments “We wanted it to be cool.” Laura explains “Actually, John had come up with a name but we had forgotten what it was.” John jokingly mentions later that the name was going to be Spider Girl. To everyone’s relief, it did not stick. Laura continues “So I was thinking one day, ‘Hey, I got it, let’s call ourselves High Cotton.’” She explains, “It’s an old southern expression. When you had a plantation and the crops were good and everything was going great and you were growing cotton, you were in high cotton. Things were really good as the plantation owner. If you were the slaves and the cotton was good. It was growing well, it grew very tall. So if the cotton was tall, you were in high cotton because you didn’t have to bend over as much to pick. So it was a phrase meaning ‘success and good things’ … it doesn’t really say country, doesn’t say pop, but maybe encompasses everything and have a little southern thing going on at the same time. Good times. Sometimes we run into people who know the expression… most of the time we run into people that don’t know so we get to tell the story and that’s kind of fun.”
High Cotton shares in their passion for music. Where their passion comes from is depicted by each band member. Laura describes that her passion for music “comes from the joy truly – I know it sounds corny – but there is such joy in singing and playing a song that came from myself or any of these guys. And singing it with conviction and having people hear it and grasp the message in the song. Or maybe they’re not even doing that as much as they are just listening and enjoying the sound. The passion in creating, or birthing, this song and music and having it be enjoyed by other people, they give back that joy. I work with an older gentleman… a very dear man. He summed it up for me…he said ‘Laura, when you’re singing and you’re up there performing, there is nothing but pure joy on your face and that comes out.’ I feel it within and I’m thrilled that it’s coming out to other people.”
John shares his story. “When I was in college, I decided that I wanted to be on the radio so I did everything I could at the time to try to make a career out of radio. At that time, not all that long ago, they used to have people on the radio who actually knew stuff about music, and I wanted to be like them so what I started doing was, I would read liner notes from all the albums I used to play and I’d learn everything I could about the musicians. I never played anything. I just liked the music. I tried to learn everything I could so I sounded like I knew what I was talking about on the radio. When you learn about all these interesting people, you see names pop up – same names on different albums. Then you can find all sorts of connections. Then I’d go through phases about the kind of music I would listen to. I went through a punk phase. I went through a reggae phase. I went through all sorts of different phases. And when I was in these phases, I’d go and find everything I could about all sorts of music that pertained to what I was listening to. You start to develop a real deep appreciation for the music and then low and behold, a few years later, I find myself actually playing it which I never thought I would do. I thought I was way past that. So it’s a real big, huge appreciation of what goes into putting a song together and now here I am doing it.”
PJ describes that his passion began at childhood, “I was fortunate as a kid to grow up with music in the house. My parents neither of them played an instrument, but they had music playing all the time. As a matter of fact, my father was from the north but went to school in the south and developed a love for country music. I had country music in the house before it was cool. So I had the exposure to music at a very young age. Another thing which my parents did which was really good, we the kids –my brother, my sister, and I – we wanted musical instruments and they just went out and got them. I had a drum kit very early on. We had guitars in the house. We just had music in the house… It was just sort of normal to have it… To take a detour here to tell you, this is actually a true story… my uncle, my mother’s brother, played in a jazz band, a trio. He played vibes and fiddle and the bass. He was a really talented person. We were watching him rehearse one day, and I was standing next to my grandfather. My grandfather looked at me as they were rehearsing… and he said ‘You know all drummers are crazy.’ And that was the Christmas I got the drums.” PJ laughs, “There must have been a message there… As soon as I could play a chord, I tried to write a song. That was just the way it was. That just carried on. Just try to write songs and be around it and play and be exposed to it. When I heard John and Laura’s stuff on their website before I knew them… I got excited listening to their music because I realized how good it was and how it was to play it… Being part of the creative process and appreciating their abilities to do that, it’s not easy and it’s work. So part of the passion is to develop that and to make something out of nothing. It’s amazingly fun and satisfying at the same time.”
Dan describes that his passion comes from “the feeling you get when people appreciate something you created – either the performance or the song.” Laura describes her observation of Dan’s passion “He loves the Allman Brothers – a big influence on his life. He loves to play. He comes alive when he’s playing. It may not be that he’s jumping around, he just gets so into the music. He just really feels what he’s playing. I think he thrives on it and he’s really talented… Now we’re very excited because we are getting to his work and it’s great. We’re having a great time developing his songs.”
Their passion is the foundation for their collaboration in creating music together. John states “We all contribute equally to the writing.” Laura also describes that “We’ve done things where we’ve all collaborated… where we’ve done all the lyrics and all the music and different combinations of. It’s really great because you definitely get a lot of different styles and sounds within the realm of a CD.” PJ enthusiastically agrees “Yeah, it’s kind of neat… there’s a lot of excitement around working on the originals and arranging them. It’s kind of unique to have everybody in the band write and contribute like that. It’s fun.” Laura adds “It’s quite a treat to be able to play and to create with three different people. I would honestly say that everyone is equally excited about each others work.”
Learning the back story of some songs that speak to each member’s thoughts or emotions creates a connection with the fans. Laura describes, “My favorite song that we’re doing right now – because it always changes as we develop something – is not on this CD [“Pictures”] but will be on the next one. It’s called Roseca. It’s kind of an old school folk song. To give you the Reader’s Digest version of how it was inspired, we played with a band called the Pine Box Boys in NC. They look like undertakers from the Appalachian Mountains back in the late 19th century. They are just so funny when you see them. Their beards are real long and everything. They opened for us. All of their songs are about murder, death and mayhem. And you’re going ‘did they really just say that about that girl’s heart in that song.’ But they were so good. So after we played with them, we kind of got this idea, ‘why don’t we write a murder ballad?’ Kind of in the vein of Tom Dooley and all those folk songs that used to spread the news of the day because people didn’t read. So John came up with the words to Roseca which is a girl’s name. It’s a murder ballad about this guy that loves her and kills both her parents because they don’t want her to be involved with him. It has great harmony and we put a melody to it and arranged it… I’m really excited about getting it on the next CD. It’s filled with great harmony, great leads. It’s kind of perky but of course the message isn’t really a perky message so it’s kind of a surprise story if you really listen to the words.” John explains that “It’s actually the name of a town in Georgia. We got the name for the song because we were driving home from a gig in Chattanooga and we got off at that exit to get some gas. Roseca, wow! That’d be a good name for a song and there you go.”
John shares “I don’t think I could ever ever ever get tired of playing Song for the Big Easy especially when we’re really grooving. It’s just so much fun… One thing that would be really cool is if we could do that with a real horn section, a keyboard player, and about five or six other people on stage. It would be really neat.” On a side note, PJ describes that Song for the Big Easy “is really an emotional reaction to the Katrina situation and the way the city and the people responded to that. That’s really the core of the song.” One other that I always have a special place in my heart for is the last song on the record Dirt Nap Lullaby. I don’t know how to describe it, I just like it. It’s simple with some personal stuff in it…We used to cover a Warren Zevon song; it was the last album he put out before he passed away. “The Wind” is the name of the album. He had a song on the record called Keep Me in Your Heart for a While which is basically a love song to his wife that he wrote while he was dying. He had this horrible condition that he’d known for three or four years that it was going to kill him and no one could do anything about it. So we were covering this song Keep Me In Your Heart For a While one night we were getting ready to play it and Laura was trying to introduce the song. Well, it’s a very sad song and it’s really hard some times – especially if the mood is kind of upbeat – it’s hard to change gears and introduce a sadder song.” Laura states as she did in the introduction of the song “It’s a really sad song but it’s really pretty. It’s like a lullaby.” John responds “Yeah, a dirt nap lullaby and then there’s another thing. Hey! That’s the name of our song. And then a couple days later I was just trying to get these ideas in my head and you kind of full around with it a little bit. The next thing you know, there it is.” Laura states reassuringly “The song is about dying, but that everything’s going to be ok. It’s like a lullaby.”
When PJ is asked about his favorite song, he explains that “I struggle with that one because to be very honest, several people paid us the ultimate compliment, I think which is to say to us ‘you know, my favorite song on your CD keeps changing.’ I know myself, with my top ten albums that happens. That’s the way it is, so it’s tough. I would have to say probably the song Laura wrote called 12 String for a couple of reasons. One, it’s just a great song. Period. It’s just a terrific song. It has a terrific emotion and attitude to it. The music, the vocal – we talked about joy earlier – that vocal is at the top of that feeling of joy about the subject matter and of course the song itself. And the other thing, I think that might have been the first song that I kind of said to them ‘hey, would you mind trying this?’ so we tried something a little different. And that collaborative part – I had nothing to do with writing of the song – but just to try something a little different with it was great. And that’s really the essence of what we really do – collaborative, leave your ego at the doorstep is great. Just to be able to throw things out there. Just to be able to take somebody else’s idea and use it or don’t use it, but the whole process is terrific. 12 String for me really sums up the way the band works and it’s a just a great song. But again you ask me tomorrow, that could change.”
John shares in PJ’s experience “That is actually one of the really cool things when the record first came out… every person that we would meet, someone would name a different song as ‘this is my favorite’. It just says a lot. It’s really a good feeling… We do have a ton of material that one of these days we really need to get serious about working on again but if we only had to keep playing songs from “Picture”, it’s one of those situations where I really never get tired of playing these songs. It’s sort of like having a job that you really like. Of course, not many people have that opportunity. We come to High Cotton LLC every morning and you really actually enjoy showing up for work.”
For Dan, it’s “a toss up between two new songs; Little Lies, [the words by John and Laura and the music by Laura] and Hallelujah [the words and music by PJ]. Both songs have such good melodies and strong harmonies. Both songs bounce around in my head all the time.”
“Black Mountain is very reminiscent.” Laura describes, “That’s actually written by a good friend of ours, Trish Little. I was in a band with Trish when I lived in North Carolina. It’s a true story – most of it. Not all of it, but the basis of it is. It’s kind of a reflection on the band that we had together back then… and the friendship that we had. It broke up because I moved away. Things changed. It was a reflective process on her part. Thinking back over those times, which at the time she wrote the song she was grieving. If you’ve ever had a band that you truly love and it broke up, it’s like you’ve lost a real part of yourself… She basically did everything – the lyrics and the music. We kind of changed it a little bit in our arrangement of it but it’s a very emotional song to sing. When she sent me a cassette tape of it, I told her ‘Trish, I’m crying. This is so great. Can we play it for our next CD?’ She said ‘Oh yeah, that’d be great.’ So she came down to do the harmony for it which is a real treat to have her there. It’s really dark, but she was writing from her heart. She’s happy now.”
Pictures also the name of their latest CD is a reminiscent, heartfelt song from Laura’s heart. She describes that it’s “about a daughter and her dad… John’s dad had been sick for quite a while… my dad passed away about twenty years ago. John’s father was getting worse. We were making plans to go see him for which we were pretty sure would be the last time. So John had gone to bed, and I was sitting around with the guitar… I looked around and I had this picture of my dad. You can try to write a song that you feel is saying something but it just won’t happen. If it’s right, it will just come out of you. It was like really, really late… two in the morning. I did this very mechanically. I wrote this song of this picture and thinking about all these things. Saying it several times to myself before I went to bed. I did not shed a single tear while I was writing the song. I got up the next morning, and I said ‘John, do you got a minute? I think I wrote something that might be pretty good. He goes, ‘Sure, sure.’ I sat down and started reading it to him and I get maybe through two lines and I am a mess – just crying all over. All of a sudden, the song just hit me. My dad and I used to take walks around the neighborhood just like that. It’s really how our relationship was. I was pretty much a goody goody. I didn’t do many things bad. I was often fortunate enough that when I did, my father found out and not my mother. He was very forgiving.”
Another song that speaks to John is Borrowed Time. He describes that the song is “a collaboration between me and a guy named David Childers from North Carolina. He is one of those singers, songwriters with a pretty wide reputation. This was back in the days when things weren’t going my way pretty much on a daily basis. This was before I had the privilege of spending everyday with Laura. I had a particularly bad day. Really bad day. Did I say it was a bad day? It was a bad day. I was sitting around writing the lyrics for God knows what reason. At the end of this really bad day, I actually sat down at the table and the lyrics just started coming out. I couldn’t stop them. It was one of those things where the words were written in about ten minutes and I just sat around for a while. David put the melody to it. He was still performing but he never did that song. He recorded it for me, so I had a cassette tape of him performing it. Once we got this started, we ended up putting our own version together. It was just one of those really bad days. It pretty much sums up what I was going through… but nothing lasts forever.” John also describes of a time when a listener shared his interpretation of a line in Borrowed Time. “I used to be part of a song writing group because I was sort of like this lyricist without a musician so I thought I’d take some lyrics to these meetings and try to hook up with somebody. I played the song in one of these meetings once and there’s a line about ‘I see my dreams through rented stars’ and actually when I wrote it I thought about when I’d go out at night and walk around. I was actually living in an apartment and I think at the time I owned two or three pairs of shoelaces and that was about it. So I’d go out and walk my dog at night. I looked up one night; it was a nice bright starry night. I looked at the stars and thought ‘These aren’t my stars. They’re someone else’s stars.’ So at this meeting, after listening to the song, this one guy said ‘that’s a really interesting line about ‘I see my dreams through rented stars’. He thought I was talking about renting a movie and watching a movie, which I thought was kind of interesting.”
As Long As I Don’t Lose You is another song where serendipity plays a part. John describes “Sometimes it is crazy how it comes together… you’re looking for the right words and you can’t find it and then a month and a half later, the first line in the song ‘Well, I lost my shadow to the noonday sun’… We actually had a gig where we were playing at a wedding. The wedding was outside, and we were playing at the reception. It was in the middle of the day. I was actually just sitting at a table outside on the patio and I looked up over me and the sun was directly over me and said ‘Wow, it must be noon…there’s no shadows.’ That’s how the song gets started. It’s like that. It’s like getting off an exit to get gas and you see the name of a town.”
On a lighter, carefree note, Song for a Mountain Weekend was inspired by a weekend vacation where John and Laura went to a bed and breakfast in Hiawassee, Georgia. John describes that the message behind the song is “Don’t get too bogged down in whatever you get bogged down in. It’s kind of a light, happy feeling.”
In the introduction of Tattoos, PJ explains it “describes different tattoos and what they meant at the time… I wondered if I could write this quirky country song.” Laura expresses that “It’s a great fun song to sing. That is so not me so it’s really fun to put that persona on. It’s like being an actress – playing the role for the song.” At times, people come up to Laura sharing how much they can relate to the song.
In each of these songs, the fans grow a little closer to High Cotton as they share in their experiences. Some are just lighthearted, fun songs written ‘just because’ while others carry a deep, profound meaning – all drawing on High Cotton’s passion of bringing their fans the best and continuing to hold their attention a little longer.
High Cotton is in the process of getting back into the studio. They are planning on taking their time with the next record. Dan states that “The album “Pictures” was well received by our fans and set the bar very high for the new album. We will be working hard to ensure the quality of the material and the production is first rate.” Laura describes the feel of the latest recording project, “We are going to be a little truer to our live sound, a little more real. As we get songs finished, we’re going to post them on our website to download and sample. Be watching for the tease of what’s new.”
High Cotton can be heard around the world. Laura states “We always say that our music is much better travelled than we are. We get played a lot in Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia.” In the near future, High Cotton is hoping to tour more during the summer. They are currently working the festival circuits.
A message to High Cotton’s fans…
“We really have fun. We love doing this. We really love each other. There is nothing better. We will perform for people who want to hear it.” – Laura
Keep on rockin’ High Cotton!