Appalachia Borealis by Phil Cook

In the Fall of 2022, Phil Cook suddenly found himself living alone in a small home at the edge of field and forest in North Carolina’s Piedmont. For most of Cook’s four decades, he had resided near the hearts of the midsized Southern cities and Wisconsin towns he had called home, near the groan of traffic and hubbub of coffee shops. Such close quarters helped make the gregarious Cook a prolific collaborator, from cofounding his own Megafaun to working with The Blind Boys of Alabama, Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger, and endless others.

But Cook’s closest neighbor now was a trailhead, his own alleyway into the woods of Orange County. So he went and listened, enraptured first by the stillness and then by the manifold birds. He began leaving his windowsill slightly cracked each night, so that the dawn chorus greeted him each morning. A zealous collector of voice memos, Cook began recording these tangled bird songs. He slowly joined them. With the sun finally high, Cook would listen to the day’s recordings and improvise in real time on the instrument that remains the first and most steadfast love of his musical life, the piano.

Appalachia Borealis—a deeply poignant and personal set of 11 piano meditations, built with the emotional range of a full and open existence—is, at least so far, the culmination of Cook’s career and life. Inspired by those windowsill improvisations, these compositions reflect not only the turmoil and sadness of a fraught time for Cook but also the hope, light, and joy of looking for the other side. You can sometimes still hear the birds whose tune and time helped to inspire so many of these songs; they seem to call out playfully during “Thrush Song” and extend their reciprocal greeting during (but what else?) “Dawn Birds.” Even when they’re not within earshot, their essence remains: that is, to rise and meet the day best you can, no matter how uncertain and strange the moment may seem.

When Cook left that cabin after a year, he moved into a home of his own in Durham, with plenty of space for his two boys to play and for something he’d never actually owned—a proper piano. Over the next several months, Cook spent untold hours with his Yamaha U3, drilling down on these pieces. During lessons with the Southern gospel great Chuckey Robinson, the pianist had challenged Cook to sustain fewer notes, to stop clouding and crowding his melodies by using the instrument’s pedals as crutches. His music suddenly had more clarity, with the sounds and the feelings they ferried given more room to function. This idea drifted into his burgeoning interpretation of “I Made a Lover’s Prayer,” a tangle of blessed unease from Gillian Welch’s 2003 album, Soul Journey. Cook dug into the danger and delight written into the words and the melody, into the idea that we twist our bodies into knots trying to understand what is best for our hearts.

At last, in April 2024, Cook returned to Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley, where he was raised and first fell under the piano’s spell. His lifelong friend and bandmate, Justin Vernon, had just finished an overhaul of April Base, the studio compound where Cook has worked on more than a dozen records during the last 15 years. Cook asked Vernon to produce Appalachia Borealis as simply as possible—merely to listen and offer feedback in two extended afternoon sessions, to talk about the right takes and make sure that they’d captured the heart of pieces that seemed to carry so much of Cook’s soul.

It, of course, got slightly more complicated, as the pair of pals experimented with the process. Vernon would add or subtract the bird songs to Cook’s headphones, seeing how they impacted his playing. Or they would route his notes through a massive new reverb chamber, Cook responding in gossamer improvisations.

But Appalachia Borealis collects their pellucid and intentionally plain realizations of those songs Cook wrote back at home, when he was defining anew what that word and idea meant to him. These pieces are sometimes so tender they are almost already broken, sometimes so resilient and spirited they suggest their own strange dance. “Reliever” is a hangdog hymn, the blues draped around a little theme that feels like the long sigh of old friends, unburdening themselves around a campfire. Where “Rise,” the opener, indeed embraces the uncertainty of a new day, the closing title track suggests acceptance at the end of one, of being OK with whatever it is that has passed. (Listen, by the way, for the long songs of loons in the distance, as if singing Cook to sleep.)

Likewise, where “Two Hands in My Pocket” is a galloping wonder of bright-eyed enthusiasm, “Thrush Song” is a muted contemplation at the intersection of past and present. All these feelings commingle during “Buffalo.” Cook pounds out pulses with his left hand and cataracts of notes with his right; a melody steadily emerges through the tumult as though a hatchling from an egg, a new life seeing the possibility of the world for the very first time.

Soon after the sessions at April Base were done, Cook took the files a few miles up the Chippewa Valley, to the home studio of his first cousin, the producer Brian Joseph. While Joseph mixed the record, Cook would occasionally step outside and notice the ways the birds sang there, too, how they seemed to greet every new exit. He recorded them and added them to “Ambassador Cathedral,” a pensive tune that feels like a cold walk through a stand of old-growth trees just as the sun reshapes the horizon. The birds and Cook’s piano seem to share the same very human interest: a curiosity about what will come soon enough, a willingness to navigate it.

Cook spent so much of his 20s and 30s on the road, whether touring in bands of his own or serving as a sideman. But for the last five years, he’s largely been off the road, working through intense changes in his personal life while trying to figure out what music mattered most to him. He’s done records of soulful rock, acoustic beauty, and piano contemplation. All of it funnels into Appalachia Borealis—mirth, smiles, tears, worry. These 31 minutes flow like a graceful chronicle of endurance. Cook will return to the road for Appalachia Borealis, opening these songs that started on a windowsill to a still-wider world and opening up about the woe and wonder that inspired them. These are songs of becoming, then, about gathering up everything that’s already happened and moving toward whatever else you might still be. On Appalachia Borealis, Cook peers into the dark, sees a way forward, and sets it all to exquisite sound.

"Appalachia Borealis" out March 21
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