One day, I went to the piano when we were having lunch and I hit this note. I call it “hymn-provisation” because it is spiritual but also the songs feel like hymns and prayers to me.Īt Brian’s house, there was this creaky, 100-year-old upright piano that had duct tape on the hammers. None of the songs are technically difficult. I think four of the songs were compositions and the other ones are all improvisations. There’s so much spontaneity and trust and openness on the record. When you were recording the album, did you have the songs already composed? I called Brian and said, “We’ve got to do the record here.” When I went to that piano, I hit a note and it was like immediately my heart opened as soon as I played it. They had just gotten this Steinway L from 1923. It’s also about this sacred space in downtown Durham, NorthStar Church of the Arts, where my wife worked for a long time. We both were using each other to process inner questions in our story, walking and talking and just leaning on each other. He had recently survived cancer and was going through a divorce. When I started to spend time with my cousin-I did two weeks of pre-production in his studio in Wisconsin-what we were doing was cultivating this space between us. I said, “I think I want to make this piano record with you.” He laughed so hard and said, “That’s what I was calling you to tell you. I called him, and he said he was just about to call me because he had a dream about me. I had a dream about my first cousin, Brian Joseph, who is a mixing engineer. I had some really meaningful phone calls with friends and started to share this journey with people that I’ve known my whole life.Īt some point, all these cosmic things started to happen. I had an incredible spiritual journey there. It had an incredible window overlooking Grandfather Mountain and this big valley.Īlmost every single hour was spent journaling, walking in nature, or playing all day every day, early morning till late at night. I stayed in a place that was built by a musician that had a studio room. Last fall, I wrote an Arts Council grant to go do a writers’ retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains. How did you go from those early morning improvisations to this album? I am still hanging in that balance all these years later. When I discovered piano, I found a balance. The outside world was a lot for me and I lived in my head quite a lot, and still do. The world is still even more overwhelming of a place when you’re an adult then sometimes it can be when you’re a kid. It was a way to kind of have an inner dialogue while I was taking in all this information and all these layers from the outside world-my home, my marriage, my kids, my community, my neighborhood, and then we’re going broad field into society. Your relationship with an instrument is an extension of you. I thought about my relationship with the piano and how I wanted to grow in that relationship. I would do a daily meditation, and then I would sit at the piano and improvise before dawn. I got a keyboard and headphones, and I started waking up at six. When I came home, I had these goals in mind. What was it like going back to the piano after years of focusing on other instruments? I knew for like the last four years that I wanted to redo this when I’m 40. He reapproached everything, he wrote his own technique. He informed me that when he was 40, he took a year off to relearn the piano. Bruce is now somebody that I talk to on the phone every other month. He was a big hero of mine, and he was very encouraging. When I was 14, I met Bruce Hornsby at a music festival. When I arrived back home, I was freshly 40 years old and I decided for my 40th year that I would rededicate that year to the piano, which was my first and main instrument. So that was not a shock to me and didn’t alter my life or my plans. PHIL COOK: I had already planned to be home in 2020, to take that year off the road. The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox.
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