You have had the opportunity to work with several musical legends and a number of other decorated musicians from your peer group. Who had the greatest impact on the way you looked at your own arc?

Oh, The Blind Boys. The Blind Boys of Alabama and the whole process of working on that record was a really huge one for me. The two singles on the record, which Justin and I selected, were songs that I’d been listening to and knew for decades, since I was in high school—stuff that I studied and played and how I learned music in a lot of ways. The connection point happened when I was playing a piece on the piano and I was just finishing up and Ricky, one of the Blind Boys, came up behind me and just said, “Hey, Phil, where did you learn to play like this?” He just said, “You know how to play the old way, and the guys all agree.” They were just songs I remember playing when I was growing up in Eau Claire with two feet of snow on the ground outside, and this pretty great scene.

Having him say that really encouraged me to really play in the style that I’d learned—the old gospel way of playing piano and such. That was literally the first time a light bulb went off where I thought, “Wow, here are my heroes, and I’ve felt so separated from that music for so long.” I could hop right in and start doing it, so they’re the ones who really pulled me aside and said, “Hey, this is naturally in you! You’ve got to just let it out.” That was the first time I’d ever done that. As soon as that was done, I started getting ideas left and right. It just started coming out more. It just started happening. It was just a thing where it was like, “Phil: You’re okay! Do what you do.” It was pretty cool.

There’s something about spiritual music, regardless of the religious background of that music, that lets you meditate and open yourself up in a natural way. Shifting from the writing to the recording, can you talk about some of the people that helped you create the record?

First and foremost, my brother Brad. As soon as he stepped aboard, that was the hugest thing. Him producing that record with me was absolutely key to getting me to some emotional places that I needed to get to and to go in some directions I wanted to go as an artist. As I said, sometimes I get in my own way, and my brother is the only person in the world that can nip that off in the bud immediately. He just knows exactly when and how I’m not doing all the things I could be doing or not giving it the way he knows I could. That was the biggest thing for me, just having him there in the studio with me, really making sure that I was making the record that I wanted to make. It was such an honor, man—we just have a great community of players we have down here. It’s not really a scene—there are tons of different scenes, and it seems to me that the musicianship is of a high caliber. Anytime you’ve got a good amount of bluegrass players, jazz players, gospel players in a community, that music all carries a certain call for virtuosity that is great. It elevates things. So a part of just wanting to have a very musical record is I needed to reach outside my normal community of players that I usually play with to try to get some more sounds that I was hearing.

I reached into the gospel scene and the jazz scene to try to get some deeper vocals, some different tones and sounds from different singers that were more gospel trained in tradition. It just ended up opening up all these worlds of really how much good music there is all around us in this city at all times; it’s just happening. People often spend their whole lives in a trench of wherever they are, running in a circle of whatever they’re doing their projects with. At the same time, there’s another trench five feet over where another person is running their thing, and you’re not even really aware of each other if you’re not putting your head up and looking around. It’s really made the record sound way bigger and wider than this idea that I imagined.

Speaking of your musical community you have also been playing with Hiss Golden Messenger recently.

Mike lives about a mile west of me. [Hiss Golden Messenger mastermind M. C. Taylor] He’s got kids, too—our kids all hang out. In fact, Mike’s mom and my mom have become really good friends, so they hang out whenever Mike’s parents come from California. It’s awesome. We all just hang out and love each other and are really supportive of each other and it makes for better music. It makes for a better life.

My brother is just an incredible producer. He really is. I can’t wait to see all the things; the stuff he’s been doing with the new William Tyler record, and the way he just produced the last and newest Hiss Golden Messenger record that’s coming out. He’s incredible, man. And he’s just flying a million miles an hour in terms of his growth and how well he’s able to enact his ideas and encourage all the players around him. It’s just awesome. It’s just awesome.

It has been two years since Megafaun did a proper run of shows. What is the status of Megafaun at this point?

We just did a little bit of a reunion at our city’s awesome bar, and we had to have a benefit show to kind of save it. We got together and played some songs for that, which was great, man. The status of Megafaun, or basically how it is, is that we feel like it was a vehicle for Brad and Joe and I to spend a few years inside of a well-oiled machine in the industry and just observe all the different ways that people around us tour, function as a band, write songs, and go into a studio. Mostly, I just looked at it like it was grad school. We all worked really hard to be democratic about everything, and I think what that ultimately ended up doing was helped us actually see that we all have really deep, personal musical expressions that we need to get out, and that the band was kind of stifling that. We felt the democracy of that was stifling it a bit. I really think it was the best stepping stone that any of the three of us had up until we had to do the next thing we had to do. I couldn’t have made this record without them, and Joe couldn’t have made that Grandma Sparrow record, which is mind-blowing, without being in Megafaun for five years and touring in a band and just really thinking about what it is that he really wants. What is it that he really could do if he didn’t have to compromise his view with two other people? What would any of us do if we could do whatever we wanted?

It took a long time to figure that out for all of us. But Brad figured it out—he’s a lot more of a behind-the-scenes, production manager guy. It took him being in a band to figure that out. Really, honestly, it was just an excuse for three friends to get a little further on the road of life together and be around each other because we love each other, man. We always will.

You appear on Aaron and Bryce Dessners’ new Grateful Dead tribute project Day of the Dead. Your contribution is noteworthy for a few reasons—not only does your version of “Black Muddy River” feature a DeYarmond Edison reunion, but it also features Bruce Hornsby. I’ve heard DeYarmond Edison requested to cover “Black Muddy River” because of a particular version Hornsby recorded with his solo band several years ago.

Oh, yeah, Here Come The Noisemakers, such a great record, and that was seminal to me, dude. Hornsby is very, very, very deep. Hornsby’s influence goes all the way back to the beginning for me because he’s the first thing that I fell in love with when I was 14. So when I was a kid growing up in the Midwest and taking piano lessons, there weren’t a lot of things for me to latch onto. There wasn’t a lot of piano people who were out there doing things for me to look up to and be like, “Oh, I want to be that guy” like there are for guitar players. Really anywhere you grow up you can find that stuff. But I really found a home in his music, especially his later period stuff when he was putting out [mid-1990s albums] Harbor Lights and Hot House and really got into his live band and started being a lot more “out there” and playing festivals. That was my prime.

I met him when I was 14, and he just totally changed my whole life, man. He’s the reason I’m a musician, for sure. When I met Bruce Hornsby when I was 14, he sat down with me for way longer than he had to and just spent really quality time. He was very encouraging and excited for me and just sent me off all dreamy-eyed into practicing for the next ten years. When I got to record with Hornsby at that session, everyone was really excited. There was a level of it that always was like well. This is the thing. Looking at it on a shelf, I still have the Harbor Lights CD that he signed: “To Phil, practice, practice, practice. All my best, Bruce R. Hornsby.” I’m looking at it right now. I’m never going to get rid of that. It’s gonna stay right in my possession.

When we were recording, I was mostly thinking, “Holy shit” the whole time. I didn’t know what to do. Musically, I wasn’t having a hard time, I was mostly just super, super floored that I was in a room with Bruce Hornsby the whole time. But it ended up becoming really a great time. He’s such a great storyteller. He just has great stories for everyone—he speaks in incredible accents, does impressions that are spot-on of people and famous people and he’s just an incredible human being to be around. I got to tell him mu whole story. I got to sit down with him and just be like, “Hey, when I was 14 you changed my life. This is what happened…” He’s like “Hah! Awesome!” And then we went down and played the piano together for a while. That was what the whole day was about after the session was done. He and I just went and I asked him some questions and sat with him while he played stuff and I played stuff and that’s the shit, man. We’ll never forget that, man. And that tune we did is there in the middle, man, of Hornsby and the Dead. I love that tune. It worked out so well. I’m so glad we did it.

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