If Sam Cook-Parrott is anything, it’s prolific. With a catalogue of one album, three EPs, and a bunch of other ‘albumettes’ floating about under the name Radiator Hospital, his primary band–and that’s not including other bands he associates with like Photographers and Strawberry Heritage–Cook-Parrott’s bubblegum punk projects are leaking out of Grand Rapids and into music scenes across the Midwest.

With music on websites such as bandcamp and cllct.com, and with a recent release, Welcome To The Jungle, under local cassette/digital distributor extraordinaire Already Dead Tapes, Cook-Parrott has implanted his sound here in Kalamazoo.

My first contact with the artist was when I was cobbling together a film project, and his song “Michael & Barbara” caught my ear. I had discovered Cook-Parrott after local Strutt Booking Manager Andy Catlin shared the song on his site disclaiming “Dude writes wicked songs!” Well, how can one resist “wicked songs?” The bounding guitar and pleading vocals of “Michael & Barbara” seem reminiscent of a lonely kid on his couch trying to shake away some depressive doldrums with his only two friends: a guitar and his television—something that fit the mood of the solitary record store I was trying to portray. I got a hold of Cook-Parrott and he gave the go-ahead for using “Michael & Barbara” in my film.

Later, I would wrangled a few words from him in a subsequent interview, intrigued by the at-home, cassette-like hiss, and sci-fi femme fatal fascination  that has been a consistent theme for all of his records.

While working on multiple projects such as Winter Break and Strawberry Heritage the (latter formed with Frontier Ruckus member John Hanson) CP explained that Radiator Hospital is his main project and subsequently how it began. Like so many others, the project had its origins in another band. “I had a band (Cookie Bumsted), in high school, that was like me and a bunch of friends. That sort of died out–not everyone was interested anymore,” he said.

Sam Cook-Parrot, for those that are not familiar.

Afterwards, Cook-Parrott wanted to revitalize the songs Cookie Bumsted had played.  “I thought it would fun to record all these songs we had and record in a different way, playing the instruments myself. Prince did it all himself. The Toms, a band from from the 70’s and 80’s, did it all themselves–that is the stuff that influenced me. Except it sound nothing like that; it ended sounding like typical lo-fi.”

This inspired Cook-Parrott to write on his own, eventually forming Radiator Hospital as a solo project with that same bedroom, lo-fi sound. “I ended up making a band that was bed-room rock and then sort of a punk band playing all these songs.”

As a result, Welcome To The Jungle, I Want To Believe, Can You Feel My Heart Beating?, and Nothing In My Eyes, amongst a flurry of random collections of singles and compilations, were produced under the Radiator Hospital sigil. Most of the earlier work was written by CP on his own, but eventually he just “wanted to play the songs live,” and formed a band around the music.

Radiator Hospital gathers much of its inspiration from the femmes of fiction. From the likes of Agent Scully (X-Files) to Rachael Tyrell (Blade Runner), female characters from film and television emblazon his album covers in a style reminiscent of The Smiths trademark: an old picture with a band-name. Cook-Parrott says he “likes the imagery of it, the idea of it. I am into cool sci-fi stuff, for the covers of the records [the women] are really strong image of this really beautiful girl looking at you.”

All of this is an “homage,” explains CP, “about how these people are a part of my life–even though they aren’t because I don’t know them.”

“There have been periods of time where I have spent days or weeks just watching X-files and writing songs.”

There is a fascination with fiction in CP’s writing, a desire for a world that only exists in the static glow of a television, and which he attempts to convey with the hiss-hum of his lo-fi pop. “I love the melodrama—stuff like ‘this moment is the most important moment of all time’ or ‘if this kiss doesn’t happen we’ll all die,’ and of course that isn’t how it is, but sometimes you do live those moments, as silly as that may be.”

For those interested in checking out Radiator Hospital, Strawberry Heritage, or any other of Sam Cook-Parrott’s work, just visit radiatorhospital.bandcamp.com or strawberryheritage.bandcamp.com, or see him play June 25th at the Old Dog Tavern with Strawberry Heritage.