Phil Cook
Eulogy
10 Buxton Ave.
Asheville, North Carolina
Nov. 2, 2025
Following his utopic DIY tour of the North East corridor documented in Midbrow here, Philadelphia-based musician Tyler Maxwell is headed South on a less idealistic mission: To survive as a working artist amid housing hardships and financial uncertainties at home. Follow along here as he writes about life as a performer and audience member traveling through Georgia, West Virginia and the Carolinas over the next few weeks in search of new sounds and scenes — and in lieu of, at times, a sense of security or stability.
Earlier this year, Phil Cook, a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter with a long and storied career already behind him, released his second album (via the label Psychic Hotline) of original solo-piano works, Appalachia Borealis, a follow-up of sorts to 2021’s All These Years. I’ve been a fan of Cook’s music-making for the better part of two decades now, since discovering his old band Megafaun many years back, but even for folks like me who’ve been following his work – he’s contributed to records by Hiss Golden Messenger, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Fenne Lily, even Kanye West – these piano albums have been a revelation. He seems to know this, too, telling the audience: “I’d like to reintroduce myself as the guy I’ve always been.” I was thrilled to get a chance to see him perform in his home state of North Carolina (coincidentally, on the 20-year anniversary of his first time ever setting foot in Asheville!), and would have been perfectly satisfied if he’d played without stopping, not saying a word. Yet the joy of this show was fuller and deeper because of how much he opened up: throughout the night, he emanated a deep emotional forthrightness, readily and continually stressing our shared humanity and cracking everyone up, a generous host who’s not just immensely talented but a great hang.
For the duration of his front-to-back performance of the Appalachia Borealis album, his feet never touched the piano’s sustain pedal. His hands were intently working at the keys throughout the set. Cook’s touch was incredibly light when it needed to be, then strong and pounding when the song called for it. He’s an incredibly sensitive and dynamic performer. Watching him, you feel him observing the music, too, responding in real time to moments in the music that inspire him: a close-clustered chord that hits just right, a rhythmic invention nailed and just-barely safely landed. I love Cook’s compositional voice in all his modes. Segovia famously thought a recording of Mississippi John Hurt had to be two guitarists; Cook’s performance of the brisk “Running” sounds, to me, like two guitarists and a bassist, like an entire Collections of Colonies of Bees song all by himself. (I’ve wondered if its fundamental 16th-early bass syncopation isn’t derived subconsciously from something off that band’s album SET). The song unfolds as though it were built up part by part with a loop pedal, but he’s playing the whole thing in real time, an impressive physical feat on top of being an infectiously catchy earworm. “Two Hands in My Pocket," which Cook dedicated to his dog Root Beer, was a wide and bright smile of a song, another two-handed rhythmic beast of a piece, his right hand especially dazzling with its incessant chasing of a sweet, fast-rising melody, like ceaseless hammer-ons on a guitar or a sunny game of catch. These pieces display a cheery, diatonic side of Cook’s world, whereas his utterly transformative version of Gillian Welch and David Rawling’s “I Made a Lover’s Prayer” sounds, in its entirety, like the closing filigrees of a high-romantic classical piece, seemingly louder and faster and more intense than the album version, the arpeggios in the bass swirling in intricate triplet patterns, like the hint of a storm slowly approaching. He takes their earthbound love song and makes it weightless, but no less romantic, reminiscent of Red Garland’s playing on smoky ballads. Later, the syncopated groove in “Ambassador Cathedral” was like someone repeatedly tearing away a tablecloth without so much as a stem bobbling on the surface — the whole room repeatedly trust-falling into an invisible downbeat. On this particular rendering of “Dawn Birds” — accompanied by Cook’s own field recording of the titular dawn chorus — he played adventurously, backed by the freedom of untamed bird voices, his fingers tapping out patterns way far afield of the grid, fully rhythmically loose and alive, his own neck twisting around, his own spirit swept away by the inventions.
There are so many musical ingredients at work in Cook’s style and his compositions — you hear Ray Charles, Randy Newman, Dr. John, Stephen Foster; ragtime, gospel, classical, blues and jazz; Steve Reich, Tortoise, electronic music. He never stays in one spot for too long. Some pieces are totally rubato and contemplative, exploratory in every musical sense, then others have such a powerful, all-consuming gospel-quartet drive that it almost comes as a shock when the piece abruptly ends. And his rhythmic pocket is simply breathtaking. He often plays with a hocketing interplay between the two hands, simply virtuosic with polyrhythms and hard-driving, hard-grooving syncopation. “Reliever," also from the new album, is a gem of a song, uncommonly gentle, its hidden, subterranean, phantom downbeats forcing the listener to come close to it, a piece that makes nakedly personal something as simple as how another human being feels time. It’s one of the things that Cook has unlocked with his return to the piano: the music always feels like a private, open-hearted conversation you’re having with him.
It follows, then, that Cook spoke with us at length, devoting an entire segment of the set to answering questions readily supplied by an eager and engaged crowd (myself included; I asked for his Culver’s order). Cook stressed a few times that the version of him we were bearing witness to was the same guy he is at home, whether with his loved ones or alone or anywhere besides on stage, and you could feel it; he was unguarded, open and present, riffing enthusiastically whether telling stories or answering questions. It came as no surprise when, responding to someone asking about his influences, he spoke of his love for stand-up comedy, calling it “its own kind of birdsong.” Cook is a wonderfully generous, jovial, people-loving performer, and if a solo, instrumental piano set sounds a little buttoned-up to you, rest assured, this was nothing like that. To hear this music up close and personal, so close that the squeak of his piano bench was occasionally disruptive, was a dreamlike gift. He spoke at one point of how he and his sons will memorize entire scenes from comedies like The Goonies so they can act them out and make each other laugh; Cook’s music, and the spirit with which he attends to it, made me think of a few lines from a poem I’ve got memorized:
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
