First, there was a bump. Then it was a lump. But it wasn’t until the lump started to hurt that Shawn Hook began to take it seriously. Already an established songwriting talent, in the Fall of 2022 Hook was focusing on building up the “singer” part of his singer-songwriter vocation. A short tour of Western Canada was booked, with plans for a hometown finale in Trail, BC. He’d just completed two nights on Vancouver Island, and was taking a brief Christmas break in Burnaby, when the lump on the side of his throat started acting up.
“I didn’t think too much of it at that point, thinking more that I was just run-down, or that I had a cold,” says Hook from Los Angeles. “But come New Years Day, I was feeling kind of off, and the bump felt like it was getting bigger.” He went to see a doctor right away, and a biopsy was strongly recommended. The hometown show was set for Jan. 19, 2023. The concert was sold out, and Hook had been rehearsing and practising a lot, so he felt an obligation to go ahead.
“Afterwards, I basically collapsed,” he says. “I was so physically exhausted, mentally exhausted, and emotional about everything, and I knew in my gut that it [whatever was going on] was serious.” The next day he went to Vancouver for the biopsy, and got the diagnosis in Burnaby the following week. It was cancer of the tonsil.
Most of 2023 was taken up with successfully recovering, after successful surgery. Afterwards, Hook committed himself to vocal exercises, physiotherapy, and holistic treatments.
Select the image to play the YouTube video of the Shawn Hook song “Bigger Than The Night”
Until life threw that potentially deadly spanner into the works, Hook’s career as a singer-songwriter had been chugging along at a heady pace. Hook (born Shawn Hlookoff, in Castlegar, BC, in 1984) had garnered a reputation as a burgeoning music-maker after releasing his first independent album, 2006’s Both Sides (under his birth name). Shortly thereafter, he became the very first signing to the U.S. label ABC Studios in 2008.
Hook was invited out to L.A. to showcase for ABC. After returning to Canada, they started sending him some songs – just pre-written, pre-score music. Eventually, some were written by Emmy winner and multiple nominee Blake Neely. “Blake is a very accomplished composer; he does a lot of traditional scores,” says Hook. “They asked me if I would put together some lyrics, and melody, and vocals, put them all together, and put [a] topline to those compositions.”
That’s how Hook got his start writing for film and TV. “It was a pretty awesome start, working with someone of that caliber,” he says. “Having a company like ABC foot the bill, and have me come out to L.A., and work in the studio with Blake, on songs for this [then-]new show called Eli Stone. I was still very much hoping to start my own career. It was just one of those things that sort of fell on my plate.”
With ABC, Hook eventually began writing for other shows as well, including Greek, Samurai Girl, and Kyle XY. It was fun while it lasted. “Inevitably I was going down a path where I wasn’t as free as I wanted [to be],” he says. “They’d have a show, and they’d want a song that sounds like ‘this,’ or they’d say, ‘There’s a Coldplay song that we really like, but can’t afford.’ I did that for about a year, and started planning my solo career.”
Although his big break came as a co-writer, when Hook started making music as a young man, it was strictly on his own – convinced that they were the very best songs he was capable of writing. It was only when he moved to Vancouver in his late teens that he found a community of artists, and began to truly appreciate the value in collaboration.
“It really opened up my creative palette, and my understanding,” he says. “Going from a young [solo] songwriter, to knowing that sometimes when you’re in a room with somebody else, they can bring something that you weren’t really thinking about, but it’s still pure and authentic to the song you’re working on. That really helped me grow, but also picked up my efficiency and capability, professionally. And the songs I was writing were getting better. If you have three people in a room and you’re all on the same page, you achieve more. It’s not [just] a quantity thing, but also a quality thing, in my opinion.”
“If you have three people in a room and you’re all on the same page, you achieve more”
With the cancer in remission by the late Summer of 2024, Hook was ready to return to work. He wanted to go back into the studio with an old colleague, producer Jon Levine, who’d helmed Hook’s 2012 release, Cosmonaut and the Girl. “Jon was kind of a huge up-and-coming producer [back then],” says Hook. “He’d been in The Philosopher Kings, and since then he’s gone on to produce Dua Lipa, Bebe Rexha, Serena Ryder, Ke$ha, Alessia Cara.” The outcome of their efforts was the release of the six-track EP Beauty in Surrender on June 28, 2024.
While most of the songs on the EP were written before Hook’s diagnosis – penned in places as far-reaching as Burnaby, L.A., Hawaii, New York, and Nashville – less than a year later, Hook blocked out a week in December of 2023 to get back into the studio. “[Jon had co-written] a song called ‘Ghost Town’, by Benson Boone, that I really liked, and I wanted to know who did the topline on that. He said a guy named Nolan Sipe,” says Hook. So, the three of them went to work, and would share songwriting credit on the results.
“On the first day, we wrote ‘Winter Jacket,’ the first song on the EP,” he adds. “Working with Jon, he’s got so much experience, but he’s also such an awesome musician! Yes, he’s a songwriter, and he’s a producer, but at the end of the day he’s also one of the most talented piano players and musicians I’ve ever worked with. Whenever I get a chance to play live, I invite him to play piano – like I did in L.A. in March of 2024, when he came up and blew everybody away.”
With the record completed, Hook is looking forward to another big chapter in his life: He’ll be getting married soon. And he’s hoping to hit the road for some live dates, sometime in the Winter of 2024-25.