Phil Cook’s career arc was already long and windy before he stepped up to release a solo album. Along with his brother Brad, drummer Joe Westerlund, and future Bon Iver singer Justin Vernon, Cook spent his early years studying jazz and experimenting with jam in snowy Wisconsin. Eventually, the four musicians formed their first great project, DeYarmond Edison, in 2002. Blending woodsy Americana with more modern elements, the members of DeYarmond Edison collectively moved from Eau Claire, WI to Raleigh, NC in the mid-Aughts and built up a local following. Vernon eventually split with the band and the rest of DeYarmond Edison reorganized as the psychedelic indie-folk outfit Megafaun. The trio rode the psych-rock revival wave for several years—touring with The Mountain Goats, covering Phish’s “Icculus,” and even getting Prince to a show by their R&B side-project Gayngs—during what Cook describes as his “grad-school” years. In 2012, Megafaun went on hiatus as the members of the trip focused on other projects and, though the trio has regrouped a few times, the project slowly faded into the background.
Cook has remained busy during that time, blossoming into a noteworthy producer and sideman for the likes of Kathleen Edwards, Amy Ray, The Mountain Goats, Hiss Golden Messenger, Matthew E. White and many others. He also worked with Vernon on The Blind Boys Of Alabama’s 2015 release, I’ll Find a Way, which reconnected Cook with the gospel music that inspired him to play music in the first place. In a direct way, those Blind Boys sessions helped spark Cook’s solo career, giving him the Southern transplant confidence to truly lay claim to his surroundings. His proper full-length debut, Southern Mission, which follows 2011’s instrumental EP Hungry Mother Blues, is a love letter to his North Carolina home, using elements of blues, rock, folk, indie and Blind Boys’ approved gospel as a backdrop for his deeply personal lyrics. Shortly before hitting the road for swing through the club circuit, Cook reflected on his new recording, Megafaun’s impact on his music and his recent collaboration with Bruce Hornsby and DeYarmond Edison on The National’s Day of the Dead album.
Let’s start by talking about your new solo album, Southland Mission, which is the first true full-length album to come out under your name. When did you decide it was time to make your own record?
Basically, a couple of things just happened. Toward the end of Megafaun, in 2012-2013, I was starting to write some songs that I just wasn’t bringing to the group. I think I was holding them for some reason. My grandfather also passed away and left my brother and I a small amount of money, a couple thousand bucks each. He wanted us to do something musical with it. I bought a nice mic and a preamp and a bass—the first recording gear that I ever really bought – and with that I started to do some things on my own. It took a long time for it to get to the point that it was really something. I was mostly just sitting down and mic-ing myself up and practicing. Ideas started to trickle down, as they do, and I found that it started to feel real when I started showing some things to my friends and family.
After that, I felt like this wasn’t just me screwing around. There was something actually happening there. So, at that point, I just started to take it a little more seriously. I realized I was making demos for a record. They all seemed to have this thread going through them that felt really, really good—like a Southern, gospel, soul and country music coming out every time I would write something. It just felt like it was cohesive. It was great. I also know one of the greatest fiddlers in North Carolina, my buddy Bobby Britt, so in the meantime, I had him one over and play.
My friend Andrew Marlin came over and sang some harmonies with me one night, and we were like, “Woah, this actually sounds great.” Once that happened, it was about finishing these demos and making something. I think my wife probably was most likely the one who said, “Hey, you better do something with this,” so I did.
I went up to Galax, Virginia. We have a family friend that has a cabin up there up in the mountains—an incredible peak up there—and I just brought all my guitars and my dog, Willie, and I was up there for four days. It was the longest time I’ve ever spent by myself. I was 35 at this point, and I’m like, “Woah! I’ve never spent more than two days by myself.” That was hilarious. But what was cool about it is, I just slept about four hours a day and sweated the whole thing out of me, and I didn’t look back until the last day. I was just putting down parts from the gut and singing lyrics from the gut. It was all very much about getting into a headspace that felt like I just kind of got out of the way of myself.
Once I stepped back and listened to it at the end of that weekend, it was really powerful. It was the first time I ever made anything musically that moved me in a real way. I think I finally said “yes” and gave myself permission to go to some places that I never thought I could go and had never gone before because I was uncomfortable, or I faked a couple of things, or whatever it was. There was just a real honesty at the core of it that I just thought was beautiful, and I never thought that about anything I’ve ever made in my whole life. I thought, “Okay, well, I guess this is really something.” After that, it was just all about putting it together, rehearsing, going into a studio, and making a badass record.
Sometimes all you need to do is remove yourself from other people to look inward, and that perspective comes through on the record. It feels like you are looking into the mirror.
A lot of people have figured this out way earlier, of course. I think I just keep waking up to the fact that I’m on a long arc. [Laughter.] People have got to be patient with me, and I’ve got to be patient with myself, because every time I try and rush anything it just blows up and falls apart. That’s part of it, too—I’ve just got to wake up to some realities and give myself real space to make something when I need to do it. I’m 35 and I’ve finally figured that out.
There’s an actual arc happening when you reach your mid-30s. There’s a part to the arc that’s realizing there’s a momentum and there’s a gesture that you are enacting as a human being that’s in the act of becoming. Enough so that you can change some of the momentums of what’s happening, and some parts you can start to kind of be like, “Oh, this is me.” There’s this feeling of, “I guess this is kind of who I am.” It’s this acceptance and it’s also an acknowledgement that starts to happen in your 30s.
Relix recently debuted the video for your single “Lowely Road.” Can you talk a bit about what makes that song, in specific, stand out?
“Lowely Road” was a song that to me, more than almost everything that I’ve ever done—and that includes all the Megafaun records—had something that was directly and indirectly a tribute to The Staple Singers on it. They made my all-time favorite music. It was about making a song that was really a tribute to how their songs make me feel and gathering messages that they sung about in their songs, just observing them and thinking about them for years and what I love about it. So that kind of boiled down to a really loving tribute to The Staple Singers, namely, absolutely, the most unsung Staple Singer, which is Cleotha. She was the oldest, and she sang the highest harmony, and she was really never interviewed or spotlighted—it was always Mavis and sometimes Pervis. But Cleotha was absolutely my favorite, and her harmonies were my favorite harmonies on all the songs. So I created a special spot for Cleotha-style harmony on that record, and all of that. We got a great crew live and it ended up being the most special moment of the show: we sang at the front of the stage in the auditorium, really kind of hushed with no mic. It was so rad, man, it was so cool. It ended up being pretty great.
Your music is the product of two distinct cultural regions: You’re from the Midwest, but you’ve called the Southeast your home for just over a decade now. Was there a point where you felt like you were writing like a Southerner instead of writing like a Midwesterner who’s living in the South?
It’s hard to say if there was a moment or anything like that. I think I always feel a little bit like an outsider. I think there’s an act of looking in from the outside where sometimes, on the inside, you don’t catch some of the nuances that people who just arrived see—some details. It’s kind of amazing that there are a ton of Canadians throughout history that have gotten something right about the swing and swagger of the Southern thing. Everyone’s in a band, and there are tons of incredible musicians that couldn’t be further from the South! They’re all the way up there in the winter.
But I think that, like anything, you just sit and listen and just pay attention to what your body wants to hear, what resonates with you. Certain music is going to resonate with you and your experiences more truthfully, and you don’t really have control over that to some extent. If you deny it, you’re denying yourself the flow. That, to me, is part of my transition in moving to the South, and something happened with the flow—I think I just always wanted to be able to create music from within that lexicon and that canon that felt still removed from it. I just felt like I didn’t have permission to do so or I would never have permission to do so. What I realized, at some point after working with some of my heroes, is that I am going to do the things that I am going to do and that you need to step out of the way of yourself and let them happen. I just had a great little rehearsal that I was just at with a 43-year old gospel group from Raleigh, North Carolina. It just put me in a great mood.
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.
