Civil Service, Protest Songs, and the Private World of Ora Cogan

Ora Cogan grew up on an island in the Salish Sea, in a household where her father was a photojournalist, and her mother was a musician who co-owned a studio. She absorbed traditional folk and outsider music and left home at fifteen, spending years working labor and service jobs across Europe and North America while performing throughout both continents. She eventually anchored in Vancouver's noise and experimental scene, where she taught herself fiddle, toured with a drone-folk duo, released a string of records on independent and small labels over two decades, and shared stages with artists including Grouper and Mazzy Star. Cogan enthusiastically collaborated across styles without settling into any single scene.

A canoe journey with friends from the Heiltsuk Nation marked a turning point. Cogan stepped away from the stage and spent years working in environmental justice organizations, including a formative stint in human rights-focused photojournalism that included extensive documentation of the Fairy Creek old-growth logging protests in 2020 and 2021. After her father's death, she relocated to Nanaimo for its remote landscapes and eclectic music community, set up a recording space, and assembled a band with Finn Smith, Nancy Pittet, and Kris Bowering. She toured with Emma Ruth Rundle and One Leg One Eye and collaborated with Y La Bamba, Cormac Mac Diarmada of Lankum, and Backxwash.

Cogan spent the gap following 2023's Formless in cold-water plunges, long river swims, and late-night conversations about art and politics. The songs she wrote during that period became Hard Hearted Woman, her Sacred Bones debut and eleventh full-length album. The album draws from haunted balladry, psych rock, and a shadowy strain of country, and Cogan recorded it with David Parry at Dream Club in Victoria. She has described the songwriting process as beginning in the most private possible mode and arriving, through the presence of other musicians and live audiences, at something communal. Though she had initially aimed for something heavier and more guarded, her songs kept drifting toward vitality, and it holds as much wit as grief. In the album's press materials, Cogan wrote that "working on music right now feels necessary for a healthy nervous system" and that she hoped the same would hold for listeners.

Lawrence Peryer recently hosted Ora Cogan on The Tonearm Podcast. The pair discusses the making of Hard Hearted Woman, Cogan's relationship to folk traditions and their political dimensions, what drives protest songs toward something other than sloganeering, and what it means to find renewed purpose after years of service in other forms.

You can listen to the full conversation in the embedded audio player below. The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.

Lawrence Peryer: The record's been out a little bit, and I'm actually glad we had a little bit of time between the release and now. I'm curious how your feelings about the music have evolved and how your relationship with it has changed as you've performed it.

Ora: The creative direction for me with this record—and I think this isn't an uncommon experience for artists—is that I had a certain idea in mind, goals I wanted to execute, theories and methods, and concepts. All of that went out the window as soon as I started working cohesively.

I thought I was going to be doing something that sounded quite different. What I ended up writing and working on was a lot more personal, simple, heartfelt—more internal than cerebral in a lot of ways. It was frustrating. It was like, I want to do that, but I kept coming back to this other thing.

There was something coming through that felt more impulsive or intuitive that I chose to respect and listen to, because every time I sat down to work, it just kept coming up. Then I reflected on it—maybe that's what I need, and maybe that's what needs to happen. It seems to have resonated with other people in a meaningful way.

I'm still processing my relationship with the music. It's been both sorrowful and joyful—taking a lot of personal pain, grief, and grievances . . . wrestling with the world, sharing that with other humans, and trying to find some catharsis in the process.

Lawrence: It's interesting to hear you give that answer, because I noticed you put the word "artist" in air quotes. And yet what you experienced—the way you articulated the work of creating this, sharing your personal experience with the world channeled through your art—to me that is the artist without air quotes. That is the work of the artist. I'm curious: are you self-conscious about that word, or was that just a tic?

Ora: I think it's both serious work and a joke. Being an artist is serious, important work—and it's meaningful. But it's also not exclusive to some class of people. I think that's human work. I don't know what definition we want to use for art, but in my mind, it should be quite an expansive term.

Maybe sometimes it's relegated to professionalism—as if certain people have some kind of genius, brilliance, or masterful skill. A lot of the time, that just has more to do with who has the privilege to spend time working on that rather than working some shit job. I know plenty of ingenious artists who are indentured. I guess that's where the air quotes come from. I feel hesitant because of politics—because of capitalism and patriarchy. Everything gets reduced when we're talking about art under capitalism or in the context we're living in. So the air quotes are important. (laughter)

Lawrence: "Honey" was a song that I couldn't stop listening to in the last few months. And as I've spent more time with your music and learned more about you and your creative body of work, I'm curious about your relationship with political and protest songs. Because "Honey" doesn't scream stridence, and it's not sloganeering.

Ora: Maybe we're all a little burnt out on explicit didactic sloganeering. Everybody's allowed to speak their truth in their own way. I don't know how much space I want to take up in the room when it comes to this stuff. I've just got my own things to say. I want to support and uplift people who are facing oppression, fascism, and the rise of hate and bigotry. I think people from the communities being targeted probably have an awful lot more to say about all this than I do.

I'm going to use my voice because I've been asked to, and because we're all being asked to speak out and use our platforms, skills, and tools to fight for collective liberation and be part of a movement. In my view, that means working toward decolonization, toward justice, toward collective liberation—seeing the great cruelties in the world as systems of oppression, bolstered by widespread apathy and complacency among those who benefit from them.

When it comes to protest or solidarity, I don't see them as badges of honor. It's not about cult of personality, not about singular genius, not about how brave or stoic or exciting somebody can be. It's about doing the dishes. It's about all of us taking on activism or solidarity as a collective responsibility to each other and to the land—in a very harrowing time, just helping, supporting, amplifying the voices of people who are often not respected or heard.

For me, in a very personal way, that's somatic work. I'm trying to understand that gentler, subtler work of embodiment—being present with all of the feelings, holding all of that inside, and dealing with it as feels right to my spirit. Trying to do that in a humble way, being in my body while witnessing grave injustices in this world, and saying: There are dishes to be done; there are practical things to be done; there are ways to get involved. And then when it comes to art, there's this other kind of work that can be a little more enigmatic. How do I stay connected? How do I not get overwhelmed by how awful things are and tap out into apathy or complacency or a fight-or-flight trauma response? How do we stay here and respond like an adult—be present, try to hold a sense of humanity, joy, and connection while picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off, and, hopefully, go about the work of being part of collective liberation and justice?

I don't want to speak for anybody else, but I'm sitting here watching friends of mine face brutal legislation in the States that's taking away their human rights. Trans rights are human rights—in a specific form for a specific demographic, but they're human rights issues nonetheless. We're not cookie-cutter—everybody gets to be who they are.

So that's where "Honey" came from. It's kind of facetious—"hard-hearted woman"—thinking about how fear permeates people when they buy into bigotry, when they buy into hateful rhetoric, where they think somebody just walking down the street in their truth is oppressive to them. I think sometimes that comes from great fear. You see people who have maybe restricted their own spirits or their own hearts, and they see somebody else really living in their authenticity, and they feel attacked by it because they feel jealous and insecure about the ways they've condemned themselves to a binary, to some internalized hatred.

But I'm trying to understand it, and I could be wrong. The process of songwriting is listening, thinking, questioning.

Lawrence: I appreciate the point you made about trying to understand the source of the hatred. But when you were speaking earlier, the thought that came to me was this notion about how the people most entrenched in power have the greatest sense of grievance. I can't help but tie that to the zero-sum nature of capitalism. If you get something, somehow that means I don't get it, rather than there being enough for both of us.

Ora: Yes, absolutely. That is a zero-sum game—it's a competition. And weirdly, when you think about the way these systems of thinking, which are quite old, see nature itself that way, zeroing in on an interpretation of nature as a violent competition where everything's out to get at each other's throats.

Fear is a horrible filter to look through. It can motivate people to do the most horrible things. When you have a fear that's imposed onto the other—whether that's nature itself, or another group of people—when you project all of your demons, all of your shadows, all of your worst fears onto somebody else, you can really see a monster. It's good to keep that in mind, especially if you have power, because you can do an awful lot of damage if you've got a gun in your hand and you feel that way about somebody else.

So it's about unpacking that, undoing it, trying to understand it, and taking responsibility. I'm Jewish, I'm white, I'm in a relatively privileged position in the world—a position of privilege in an unjust society, a cruel society that was born out of colonization. How do you sit with that and take responsibility and do something beautiful and meaningful with life in a framework that actually makes sense and moves toward justice and liberation?

Lawrence: Was there ever a time for you when you envisioned a life that wasn't as an artist? Was there ever an alternate path you entertained or were pursuing?

Ora: When I was a teenager, I was studying silversmithing—I left home young and apprenticed in jewelry making. But I always knew I wanted to be a musician, so the answer is no, not really. I did that apprenticeship in hopes of making a living at something that would sustain music, and I tried to learn business and entrepreneurship by making jewelry, but I struggled with it. Mining silver—it just wasn't the right thing for me.

I worked loads of labor and service jobs—restaurants, cafes, landscaping, farm work, and some funny jobs too. I made nipple tassels for strippers. (laughter) That was a wild job.

In my thirties, I started working for organizations as a contractor doing media and communications. Since I was a teenager, I felt this heavy heart about the world—thinking about colonization and white supremacy, cruel systems of oppression, and wanting to do something to stand up against that. Much of it was grant-funded, but I was part of organizations advocating for human rights, climate justice, and indigenous rights. That was a huge part of my life and still is.

At another point, I got into photojournalism—focused on the same issues but with a different responsibility. With journalism, you're accountable to just stating what is as best as you can, in service of people making up their own minds. I came into it with my own values, but I wasn't telling my story—I was there to witness.

A lot of artists don't have a single path in life. Under capitalism, everything's a vocation—you're either valid as a professional, or you're a hobbyist. It's kind of a funny value system to put on things. At the end of the day, being alive on this planet with everything and everyone else—whether it's digging a trench or writing an article or writing a song or doing some dishes—it's all part of just being a human. The work that I got to do around human rights and environmental justice, I see as civil service. Doing the dishes. Picking up the trash on the side of the road.

Lawrence: What strikes me is that it feels like a different type of usefulness—not measured in productivity or economic output. It's like fellowship.

Ora: And it's hard to gauge that kind of thing. If you try to measure it, how do you know what's useful? How do you know if you're going to do anything meaningful to anybody? You hope that you will. There are a lot of people who set out to do good and have done an awful lot of harm. But I know that it's meaningful. When I go out with a band, and we're playing these shows, it obviously feels good for people. People are dancing, getting together in a room, doing something that feels cathartic and feels all sorts of ways for different people, because it's not a singular experience. But I know that there's something about this particular music that's helpful right now.

I wish I were the kind of person who could just respond to the best in life and focus on that. I've got people in my life who are such angels, and that's how they move through the world—they're able to just float above all the bullshit and keep on responding to the good. Something in me just needs to hold the pain. But I also need to get through to the other side, and I need to dance, feel good, have a good sense of humor, and feel some levity and joy. I think that's a lot of what music has been for me, and it's what seems to be serving a purpose—a lot of this starts with pain and anger, and it ends up being cathartic. Moving through that, being able to let it go, speak to this stuff, but also find a sense of joy and beauty in keeping my human soul alive.

Lawrence: Well, I'm glad you have your creative practice for that.

Ora: Even as a kind of meditation—like a spell, where you take something that has a lot of power over you, that you don't want to have power over you, and you change your relationship to it. That's magic.

I remember being at protests when I was working as a journalist, and there are these cops who show up—so tough and angry, with guns, pretty ominous. But then you get these kids who just don't buy into that fearmongering. They just show up with their sense of humor, and they're not falling for it. Like, no, I'm not going to give you power. I'm not going to give you what you're looking for. You see it with ICE, and the way that people are standing up in the face of these people acting as henchmen of a very cruel system—these brave people going and standing up for their community and other people's communities and saying, "No." Part of that is somatic, it's energetic work. It's in the music, it's in the art, it's in culture. It's in the ways people hold on to their dignity, humanity, joy, humor, and all of that.

Lawrence: I'd like to get some thoughts from you on folk music—the notion of folk music as basically recording stories that may not otherwise be preserved, that sit outside the official narrative or canon.

Ora: I think folk music is very much the music of the people—the history books of the people, the history that isn't recorded in texts and books. It's very much working-class history in many ways.

I feel less married to folk music now and more interested in its spirit. Folk music can be a lot of things. I think in some ways it's been whitewashed and reduced to a kind of LARPing—like you can put on a period dress and LARP as a peasant, or have a nice kooky time without talking about politics or reckoning with real stuff. What capitalism can do to a lot of art forms is suck out the spirit—scrape out all the history, the context, the significance of stories, the cultural relevance.

I want to give a lot of respect, meaning, humility, and honor to specific folk traditions that can be unique. You can't make a broad statement and say, well, this is what it is, because you're talking about individual families, songs that have lived within certain families, cultures, communities on their own terms in beautiful, meaningful ways. I don't want to engage with all of that like some kind of scientist. I mean, you wouldn't want to walk into somebody's family home at their dinner table and just start asking a bunch of questions about their family. Some things are private. They have significance, purpose, and meaning in communities. Understanding that can be complex and nuanced, depending on where you are and where you're coming from.

My friend Ian Lynch does a lot of interesting work with Irish traditional folk. He has a podcast I recommend called Fire Draw Near. He's living inside of that—he's Irish, he plays a lot of traditional music, but he also plays experimental music and heavy, kind of undefinable stuff. And the question of where the lines are, when it comes to folk, is interesting. What is our folk music now? Are you going to exclude people from that because they're not playing an acoustic guitar and wearing a fedora? Maybe noise is folk. Maybe punk is folk, or hip hop, or all these different forms that are an expression of the people in their communities. We can get caught up in compartmentalizing or reducing things in funny ways—making them palatable, defining them in constrained terms—when they should really be expansive and complex.

Lawrence: What does a song like "Katie Cruel" mean to you? It's in your repertoire.

Ora: "Katie Cruel" is an interesting one. As far as we know, it's written about a sex worker traveling with light infantry soldiers in Scotland hundreds of years ago: "When I first came to town, they called me the roving jewel, and now they've changed their tune, they call me Katie Cruel. When I first came to town, they brought me bottles full of honey. Now they've changed their tune, they bring me the bottles empty." I don't know why this song has haunted me for years.

I first recorded it in a kind of country style, over a decade ago. I recorded it in Spain when I was on tour. It got picked up by a DIY label there when I was in my mid-twenties. I met some great musicians from the punk scene there, and we got together to make a live record called Ribbon Vine and to record this kind of country-western version of "Katie Cruel." Over the years, I've kept coming back to it. It's still in my set, still something I want to play almost every night.

It's the same feeling as "Honey"—you can call me whatever the hell you want, I really don't give a shit. That sentiment: I will not let anybody reduce my friends or myself in the name of patriarchy or whatever the hell. That's my interpretation of "Katie Cruel" now. The way we do it, it's a dance song—fun, upbeat, uplifting. It's meant a lot of different things to me over the years. When you spend that much time with a song, it morphs and shifts and changes in your own mind.

At one point, it was about sexism, and thinking about sex workers—how that work is demeaned, how people who do that work are dehumanized, which is so dangerous and awful. Thinking about women, thinking about anybody who is reduced or minimized in unjust ways.

In another way, it was about aging. Thinking about that line—"When I first came to town, they called me the roving jewel, now they've changed their tune"—and thinking about friends of mine who are older than me, who talked to me about how when they hit their forties or fifties, people just started dismissing them. Nobody wanted to hear anything they had to say. Somehow, they lost their value in society because they're older women, and nobody cares about what older women have to say; they're not seen as beautiful or interesting. There's this fetishized thing about younger women, which is cruel for all of us, whether you're being fetishized or dismissed as irrelevant.

So hearing that in the lyrics, really feeling it—that spirit of: I am absolutely not going to let whatever this is, this force field created by an unjust system, define my worth or value or anybody else's. We're all valuable because we're here. It's somatic.

Lawrence: Yeah, I use that word a lot as well.

Ora: And it is feeling. Because that scrappiness, that facetiousness—it's actually just a gateway to dignity and respect. It's serious, and it's really funny at the same time, because I'm not going to just give away my power to this stupid thing.

On that note, it's so funny that so many people told me in my thirties, well, you gave it a chance, you gave it a shot, it just didn't work out, maybe you should try doing something else. And sure enough, I'm in my forties, and I'm having the best time of my life playing music. In the worst possible times, feeling a sense of purpose for what I do, a sense of meaning, feeling part of a global community and network of like-minded people—a time of my life when I've been told so much that this is when everybody drops off, that you're irrelevant, you have nothing to say or offer. And it's like, well, maybe that's not something you should pin on anybody—the idea that there's a certain time in life when we value people and don't. And it used to be talked about as just the way it is. Well, fuck that. (laughter)

So, yeah, "Katie Cruel" is a cool song. I don't know how long it's going to stick with me, but I've learned a lot from holding something like that for so long—it just felt like it was meant to be there, and it has that shifting meaning where I'm learning new things about life from this one song, just playing it over and over again.

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