Updated December 3, 2025 at 8:50 AM MST
Editor’s note: This segment was rebroadcast on Dec. 3, 2025. Find that audio here.
Musician Phil Cook has a new album out called “Appalachia Borealis.” It’s a suite of piano meditations that were inspired by and also feature bird songs.
The album began with Cook improvising at a windowside piano, taking in the sounds of the North Carolina woods that surrounded him.
Cook has been a prolific collaborator who has worked with a long list of artists, including The Blind Boys of Alabama, Mavis Staples, Waxahatchee, Megafaun, and Bon Iver. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon is a producer of this album. “Appalachia Borealis” is Cook’s sixth solo album and his second of songs for piano.
I understand one of your inspirations for this album came when you were working on your previous album and you noticed birds singing. You actually recorded a mockingbird on your phone. How did that birdsong spark your creativity for this album?
“I got to make a record downtown in Durham at this beautiful, tiny church that had a very tall nave, and it was a gorgeous 100-year-old piano. And there was a moment where I was playing a song called ‘Queen of Branches,’ and we listened back to the recording, and there was a bird singing just outside the church. And it really struck me how symbiotic the tone in the cadence and the pitch and the song this bird was hitting and duetting almost with the piano. It was a magical moment. It followed with me calling my childhood camp counselor, Alec Lindsay, who’s a teacher, professor of ornithology at the University of [Northern] Michigan. And I sent him the recording and said, ‘Please tell me, old friend, what, pray tell, is this bird?’
“He got back and said, ‘Well, that sounds to be a Northern mockingbird.” And it began a love affair with this particular bird and a fascination with songbirds in general. A mockingbird will live up to eight years in the wild. And they record up to 200 different variants–bird sounds, city sounds, anything that’s in their environment–and they recall them for their own use, for mating, for defense, for different things. But each one has their own unique reel. And wherever I am now, I tune in and always stop and I’ll listen to a mockingbird. And it’s branched out to others. But that’s like my main character. That’s been my main muse.”
What a great inspiration, especially for this new album. Let’s talk about the title track, “Appalachia Borealis.” You said in one interview you could not have written this without real losses. Mind if I ask what you were going through at the time?
“The hardship of the pandemic brought me home from the road after 15 years. And I was roommates with my wife again. And unfortunately, our marriage ended, and it broke everybody apart. The kids, her and I, and it was heartbreaking for everybody, obviously. A lot of people listening have had divorce touch their life and know how edifying that is. So ‘Appalachia Borealis’ came during the lull of my life as I folded in my wings and remained very still.
“What you hear in the background is a recording I made on my phone of a lake I grew up on in northern Wisconsin – the common loon. It’s like this sound of my life. It predates the mockingbird. It predates any of this stuff. It’s just a sound that’s so haunting. And it makes me miss my home in Wisconsin because I live in North Carolina now for 20 years. So, yeah, I know that I get to a place as an artist when you feel yourself crack open and you meet yourself exactly where you are. And often in those moments, you know, with the piano, I’m left with tears streaming down my cheeks as I’m playing. And I know that’s a sign to me that my body is telling me that I’m actually grieving right now, that anything that’s going on is working through me and I can feel it. It’s telling me, you know? So that was this song.”
This is your project in collaboration with your old friend, producer Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. And I think we can hear his influence in some of the songs, like the song “Buffalo.” Did I read that this song is meant to evoke the idea of a hatchling?
“Yeah. It feels wide open to me. It feels like I’m driving through white sands in New Mexico, through western Montana, through the woods and all the lakes in northern Wisconsin. The world is flying by, but it’s wide open and new. And then you go to the micro and you just see that possibility that evokes, when you’re in those precious moments where you’re present.”
In your career, you’ve worked with a wide range of professional musicians and bands–Hurray for the Riff Raff, Jess Williamson, The Blind Boys of Alabama–playing guitar, playing the banjo, marimba, the keys. This is not your first solo album, but as you go around and perform on piano, what is it like when it’s just you out there?
“Well, I remember my first recital. I was five. These are these moments that have, all this weight of expectation that usually is very crushing for, I would say, a majority of kids that are young and there’s a solo piano. The pressure and the recitation and then the nerves and all the awareness that you have to ingest at the same time is enough to turn a large number of kids off to what I think would be a wonderful opportunity to build a lifelong relationship with an instrument.
“But playing in a rock band helped me to actually understand the communion that happens on stage and the dialogue with the crowd, and how it all has to be there at the same time. Now, when I play piano, I, in a way, want to subvert the recital that I was a kid in, and break the fourth wall. I like to talk to the crowd. I like to tell stories, but I like to hear from people that have come to the show. The whole thing has felt so personal and honest and vulnerable. I get to play what I feel every night, and it’s up to me. But people get a presence from me and they get something very real from me. That’s my aim.”
Well, let me ask you about performing by asking you about one last song. One song on this album is your rendition of “I Made a Lover’s Prayer,” by Gillian Welch. When you’re playing that song in front of an audience, what are you channeling?
“Sometimes I get an image of a bird flying over an ocean, like fighting the wind. And rooting for it to make it across, you know. And how it feels in my hands, because my hands are interlocked on that song. They’re very close together and overlapping. They look like a bird on the piano, you know. And so that was less of an overt bird song and more like my hands are birds. And I wrote it the day I bought my first piano that was a real instrument. I was 43 years old. And the first thing that happened was that song, a song I’ve loved since that record came out, when I was 23 years old. That song, I can still tap into it now, and it just calms me down and taught me about what music can give me in my life. And I am in turn relaying and telling people how much I love this music, how much I love music in general.”
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This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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