Music

TAKING FLIGHT: Birdsong Inspires Upcoming Piano Album from Phil Cook

Chippewa Valley native’s latest returns him to his roots at the keyboard

Tom Giffey |

Phil Cook. (Photo by Graham Tolbert)
Chippewa Valley native, North Carolina transplant, and prolific musician Phil Cook. (Photo by Graham Tolbert)

Inspired largely by the songs of birds in his adopted North Carolina, prolific Chippewa Valley-born musician Phil Cook today announced a new solo album, Appalachia Borealis, which will be released later this spring.

The album is produced by Cook’s former bandmate, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and will be officially released March 21 on Sylvan Esso’s Psychic Hotline. Based on an early preview, Appalachia Borealis is a subdued, piano-driven record from the prolific Cook, known for his frequent cross-genre collaborations and his membership in bands such as including DeYarmond Edison, Megafaun, and Gayngs.

“The roots of the LP date back to fall of 2022, when Phil was living alone at the edge of a field and forest in North Carolina’s Piedmont region,” a media release states. “Every morning, he’d make voice memos of bird songs, slowly joining in. As he improvised along in real time, he built a body of compositions that would carry so much of his soul, especially by the time he recorded them at April Base in Wisconsin, two years later.”

The album consists of 10 originals plus an arrangement of Gillian Welch’s “I Made A Lovers Prayer,” which was released a couple of months ago. Here’s a peek at the title track:

A media release announcing the project described it “as stark, simple, and serene as possible,” created during a time of personal turmoil as Cook returned to his first musical love, the piano.

“ ‘Appalachia Borealis’ is my favorite song I’ve written, written in a dreadfully torrential downpour on a particularly lonely and difficult day,” Cook says. “A recording of loons calling on a lake at night enters on the last stanza, the moods exactly complementing one another respectfully. I don’t believe I could’ve written this song in my 20s or 30s and I certainly couldn’t have written it without experiencing some real losses in my life and the hole that remains in the aftermath. It heals me to play this song.”

The album was recorded in April 2024 at Vernon’s Chippewa Valley studio, April Base, where Cook has taken part in many projects over the years, including Bon Iver’s most recent EP, Sable.

The release of Appalachia Borealis will kick off a string of shows for the North Carolina-based Cook, beginning with the Big Ears Festival in Tennessee in late March and followed by a cross-county tour that will bring him to Eau Claire’s Masonic Temple on May 1.

Learn more about the album and the forthcoming shows at philcookmusic.com.