Phil Cook on Appalachia Borealis, Inspiration from Birds, and working with Justin Vernon

Creative evolution takes many forms. For some, it can manifest with subtle changes in processes. For others, that evolution can be more dramatic or overt-think a band more thoroughly revamping their style or sound. For Phil cook, elements of both exist. Cook, the Wisconsin-born multi-instrumentalist, has undergone many creative shifts-both subtle and more overt over the course of a multi-decade musical life.

Like his friend, frequent collaborator, and fellow Wisconsinite Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Cook has carved out a reputation as a musician whose artistry is always evolving. From his early more experimental work with DeYarmond Edison and Megafaun to his more americana-tinged solo albums of the mid 2010’s onward, Cook’s artistry has been as reliably dynamic as it is brilliant-a testament to his talent and vision.

Even when considering Cook’s dynamic reputation, however, you could be forgiven for being surprised by his post-covid output. Over the course of two full lengths in that period (2021’s All these Years and 2025’s Appalachia Borealis), Cook has delved into yet-unexplored territory- Instrumental Piano recordings. The records, in many ways a far cry from Southland Mission or People are my Drug (strong albums in their own right), build on Cook’s considerable creative streak while taking the music to radically different places.

The Vernon-produced Appalachia Borealis in particular, is a towering achievement for Cook. A set of eleven piano meditations spanning thirty minutes, Appalachia Borealis is emotionally vivid, raw, and very very beautiful. Consisting of originals and one cover (a stunning rendition of Gillian Welch’s “I Made a Lover’s Prayer”), the album has a warmth and humanity that is rare and special.

Building on and branching out from All There Years, Appalachia Borealis is one of 2025’s finest albums thus far, and one of the finest in Cook’s increasingly deep catalog. On Wednesday Night, Cook returns to Minneapolis for a special show at Icehouse. The intimate venue should be very well suited to the music Cook is presenting.

Below is an interview with Phil Cook. The Following has been edited for consistency.

Music In Minnesota: You’re from the Midwest but have been primarily based out of North Carolina for a long time. You Recorded Appalachia Borealis in Wisconsin. I’m curious why you chose to record this particular record back home, so to speak.

Phil Cook: My Family is all still in Wisconsin, including all of my cousins, and many old close friends, so I have many reasons to return to Wisconsin every year. Of Course, enlisting Justin Vernon to produce the record-his studio is in Wisconsin, I knew he would have the facility and the piano to be able to pull this off. So it was more of a people decision first, and then the location followed suit. Every part about it just made sense.

MIM: You mentioned Justin, who produced this record. You guys have that musical relationship going way back. Can you speak to your relationship with him, and what he brought to the recording and to the record?

PC: The nice thing about Old Friends is that the good ones are the ones that you just pick up where you left off. There’s never any time where you really need to catch up. On another level, when Justin met me, when we were teenagers, I was Just playing piano. He knew me on my primary home instrument. I gravitated away from the piano when I moved to North Carolina and was away for twenty years for the most part, at least as far as a daily relationship with the instrument. So, when I returned to that, there was something really great about knowing that I have really good people around me. So not only does he know my original voice, where I come from, he knows every member of my family. He knew all four of my grandparents. And so, it’s a sacred relationship, and a very safe emotional relationship in terms of playing solo piano, which is very bare and wide open in its nature. Anything solo, there’s just one thing happening. We’re not going to be doing any editing in post-it’s gonna be what it is. The performances are the process that I wanted to capture. So, he was a very very natural perfect choice for somebody who could hold me accountable to myself, and hold the space in the studio so I could just go there real hard.

MIM: On the subject of Piano, I’m curious about what brought you back to piano. You’ve played guitar and done so much else for such a long time. What most inspired you to return to those proverbial roots?

PC: I think a couple things aligned. Around 2017 or 2018, I got a chance through Justin and our old band we used to have called DeYarmond Edison to do a Grateful Dead Track on this big compilation that the National Put Together. And They Paired DeYarmond Edison up with Bruce Hornsby, my first original hero I met when I was 14. He was the reason I really play music; he was the spark. So, returning to that, I had the chance to communicate and collaborate with him, and reintroduce myself to him as a professional musician twenty-some years after I met him. When I met him originally, he was forty-one, and the record Harbor Lights was his representation of his fortieth year he took to just re-learn and re-teach himself how to play piano. Even though the whole world knows him as a piano player, he felt a need to reinvent himself on the piano. He wrote his own curriculum, he taught himself from the ground back up and the results are the Harbor Lights record, and that’s the record tour I met him on. In my mind I said, “I can feel there’s a revival with the piano coming in my life.” I had started to play more, but I hadn’t practiced in twenty years. I had been playing keyboards with Hiss golden messenger for a few years with guitar and banjo and stuff. And what happened was, with the pandemic in 2020, and turning 40 right before 2020, I already knew I was going to come home. All those things intersected, I was home that whole year and it just made sense. I had a piano in the home, but since I was quarantined in a small house with my family, I bought a keyboard and ended up using headphones so I could stay up late and keep playing. This allowed me to get up before the whole family was awake and really play for a couple hours before everyone woke up. That whole resulting record was All These Years, which was my first ever record of piano composition. Everything on that record for the most part was recorded between six and eight AM.

MIM: You alluded to your process. Another interesting aspect of this record is that not only is it influenced by piano, I know birds were an influence. There are birds interweaving through the album, and I know they were an important part of the inspiration behind the recording and your process. How did birds inspire the album?

PC: I’m certainly not the first artist to be inspired by nature, and certainly not the first artist to be inspired in composition by bird songs, but I was living in a very quiet place in the country all through 2023. Out there, In that quiet, I was taking a lot of walks in the woods every day. In that process and that stillness, I realized it was my other safe space outside of the piano, my other sanctuary. So, being in there, the piano felt like the world falls away when I’m really in my element there. And In the woods, I feel like I fall away, so it’s a nice balance. To be in a place like that and feel that, you start to become friends with it in a way. Youre open to whatever it is, you have a love and respect that you’re entering the woods with. That’s a space where my ears began to pick up-there are so many songbirds in north Carolina-I just really began to hear them. Their cadence, their tone, their texture, their rhythm, all of it, you can pretty much learn a bird song on piano. It’s way up there on the top keys, but there are pitches, So it was natural for me to start recording the bird sounds for posterity, but it turns out it was very useful for me to put birds on a loop in my headphones while I was warming up. It not only calmed me down, because I used the piano meditatively as well as compositionally, it really brought me to a very calm space. I just realized that layering one sanctuary on top of the other was very conducive to my muse. It felt like I was playing piano in the woods. I was able to just close my eyes, and it felt so ready to roam, whatever was happening and open. It felt like once I had composed all this music alongside, within, and in reaction to the bird songs, it felt only right to honor them by including them on the record where I had used them. So that’s where I had them play the songs in my headphones. I tracked the songs in my headphones, so that’s where I just had them play the songs in my headphones, and I tracked them with the songs In my headphones just like I had when I was home, and the result is on the record.

MIM: There are two songs I want to ask about on the record specifically. The title track (“Appalachia Borealis”). You’ve called it one of your favorite songs that you’ve recorded.  What about that song makes it so special to you? It’s a beautiful song.

PC: Really, for me, the voice is so primary, I love singing on every instrument. I’m trying to sing with the instrument in a way. In my life, I’ve also fallen deeply in love with harmony, singing, choir music, therefore gospel choirs, gospel groups and the way they arrange harmony. Also, I think the return to the piano allowed me to usher in all of the twenty years of the piano and structural piano classical repertoire training I had. It wasn’t necessarily spoken for in my banjo and guitar music, but it’s such a massive part of my upbringing and my adolescence and beyond. When I’m able to let all of my past in, it allows me to unlock all of the things I love about Chopin, Duke Ellington, and Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. To come and live in this space with this instrument, and at the same time, I’m able to bring the fingerstyle element of guitar and the limited number of strings there, but the fingerstyle element helps me to understand how to approach and roll some things. The song, compositionally, there’s really three voices happening at the same time. Simply and fundamentally, there’s a low, a middle, and a high part that are happening. The way that each of those voices have a role allows me to orchestrate everything into one instrument where I would normally have a banjo up top, a guitar down low doing the rolls, and I would sing the middle part. Now I get to put all of those into one instrument and synthesize not only one instrument but all of the instruments I’ve learned over my life into one voice on the piano. I couldn’t have done it without all of those things happening for all of those years, in different chapters of my life.

MIM: The other song I wanted to ask about is “I Made a Lover’s Prayer.” That song is so wonderful, and the voice is so lyrical. What inspired you to pick that particular song to put on the record? I feel like it fits well tonally with the rest of the record, along with being a beautiful melody and song.

PC:  I’ve loved that record since it came out, it’s my favorite record of Gillian Welch’s. It’s just been steadfast with me for a long time. That song in particular has emerged over the twenty years since it came out as being my favorite on the record. For me, there’s a beauty to not only the melody, but the chords, the starkness of it, the fragility of the lyrics and the fragile hope at the center of it. It felt very relevant to my life at the time. I didn’t pick the song, it came out because I was actually playing that kind of ostinato on the day my piano arrived that my piano arrived, my first piano at 43. The day it arrived I played It for hours and hours and I ended up playing that kind of pattern. The notes just started happening on top. I realized, again, there’s the base, undulating underneath, there’s the fluttering in the middle, which is my hands overlapping each other playing, and then the voice on top singing. Over the last five years, I’ve basically reinvented my playing style through a simple reductive act of removing the sustain pedal. From my playing. That was a very mindless thing I did for forty years. Removing it was like taking the net from the trapeze, it really made me learn what my voice is and develop new muscles. If I want to hold something, I actually have to hold it. That allows me to have all those notes flying by, fluttering by, and the melody can really sing because I Can hold it. Basically, in that song, I was able to sing on the piano in this way that made me feel like I’d been practicing that style for years. It felt like an arrival. What I get as I keep going down this journey are the ability to arrange a song like this and to perform a song like this in the way I do.

MIM: You talk about it as an arrival, and as a journey, and interestingly that (Gillian Welch) record youre referencing is title Soul Journey, With these last two records, I’m wondering what this piano adventure, what this looks like going forward. Is this something you feel compelled to keep pursuing?

PC:  It’s been enormously reconnective in my life, helping me synthesize a lot of things that were separate before. The synthesis of the piano has really helped me hone my musicianship in a really awesome way. I am absolutely planning on continuing my composition on the piano, and my relationship with the piano, but the journey itself of reintroducing myself to the public as the person I always actually was all along as a piano player really did show me the truth that reinvention is always a trust fall. But If it’s authentic to what you’re going through at the time, and really what’s inspiring you, that it’s going to reach people on a deeper level than if I’m doing things that are based off of anything that has to do with the industry. I am absolutely going to follow whatever that is, and if I need to reinvent myself further down the line in whatever form it comes, I have this experience to draw on now. So I completely am going to continue to release piano music, and I’m curious to see what happens down the road now that I have this under my belt.

MIM: You have this show at icehouse, which I think will be a great venue for what you’re doing. You’re reintroducing yourself in a way. I imagine a lot of people at the show may not have seen this iteration of where you’re at. What can fans old and new expect?

PC: They can expect a reintroduction. They can expect for me to show up with a full presence. They can expect to witness me amidst my process, and I open the fourth wall a lot during the show. I will stand up and interact with the audience throughout the show. I will speak with people and draw on the room and incorporate that into the show. It’s really important for me to incorporate that as I reintroduce myself to everybody including people who have possibly seen me before fronting a rock band. They will see a version of me that is way more fully integrated in my personal life and the authenticity and centeredness that has arisen and emerged through that process I’ve been through in the last five years. They will see and understand what it is to be in a room that has a real vulnerability and grounded realness to it. I want people to feel connected to themselves during the show, just as I feel connected to myself. I want them to feel like they had an experience there that wasn’t recitation, or anything that was a stop along the way. I want it to feel like a breath of fresh air, because that’s how the shows have been feeling.