At Work: Phil Cook
photo: Graham Tolbert
There’s a warmth, openness and joy to the way Phil Cook performs that makes you feel like he’s connecting directly with you, no matter how many people are in the room. “I’m not trying to dazzle people up there,” Cook says. “I want to be moved, and I want to move people. That’s what music has been for me my whole life.”
For the tour behind his latest solo record, the piano instrumentals set Appalachian Borealis, he’s found a new way of moving people— pausing after a full run-through of the album to take questions. “I’ve never had a Q&A that I regret,” Cook says. “Some of them are really heavy. Some of them have been really meaningful. Some of them are uproarious. I’m also processing my life in front of people in a way that allows me to bring myself to bear fully.”
Appalachian Borealis is a deeply personal record—made in the wake of a divorce and composed through a daily piano practice where Crook would improvise alongside the birds that would often sing outside his window in North Carolina’s Piedmont region. These calming piano meditations—produced by Cook’s childhood friend and former bandmate Justin Vernon and released on Sylvan Esso’s Psychic Hotline label—are simple yet evocative and more open to interpretation than the singer songwriter fare found on his solo breakthrough, Southland Mission a decade ago.
“It’s music that you live with,” Cook says. “I had to learn that— people had to teach me that about it. They have a relationship with it that’s very personal. They’re not putting it on at a party. They’re putting it on in the soft morning, or their babies are being born to it, dad—end of life, weddings, the beginning of life.”
The piano was actually the f irst instrument Cook learned, but it took him until 2021’s All These Years to make a record that captured those sounds. “I had this big journey away from the piano for 15 years,” says Cook, who went on to help start the seminal acts DeYarmond Edison and Megafaun, tour and record with Hiss Golden Messenger, produce The Blind Boys of Alabama and play on albums by Waxahatchee, Oliver Wood and Bon Iver. “I went everywhere else. I played every other instrument. And then I came back to piano. It’s always been there.”
When performing the Appalachian Borealis material live, Cook, 43, is often hunched over, his eyes inches from the keys, like when he was a kid learning the instrument for the first time. “There are so many snapshots in my mind’s eye of that really intimate view of the keyboard and being that close to it. All of music was right there in front of me,” Cook says. “I think I’ve been chasing that feeling my whole life, in a way.”
