The longtime Triangle musician’s latest record, Appalachia Borealis, is deceptively simple — and showcases some of his most personal work
by David Menconi

Listening to Phil Cook’s lovely new album Appalachia Borealis, you’ll probably have at least one moment where you wonder: Are the bird songs you hear on the record, or outside your own window? 

In some ways, birds served as Cook’s collaborators on this album’s 11 piano instrumentals. Following an emotional split with his wife, Cook was living alone on a farm in Orange County, where he grew accustomed to hearing birds constantly. He took to recording them, and one day he started listening to them in his headphones while warming up at the piano. 

“Getting into that zone, I felt an immediate sense of calm with the sounds of the birds in the forest in my headphones,” he says. “Right away, I wrote two or three songs that are on this album. I realized that it was putting me at ease.”

While the 45-year-old Cook has made solo instrumental records before, he touts Appalachia Borealis as the most personal music he’s ever made, in that it synthesizes all of the other styles he’s played down to their barest essence. Cook has been a familiar sight on local stages the past 20 years, mostly playing keyboards, guitar and piano in groups including Hiss Golden Messenger, the freak-folk trio Megafaun and his own band. He also has an impressive list of sideman credits for everyone from folk-rocker Hurray for the Riff Raff to rapper Travis Scott.

But piano was Cook’s first instrument while growing up in Wisconsin, where he met Justin Vernon. Cook joined Vernon’s high-school band Mount Vernon and they were later bandmates in DeYarmond Edison when they moved to the Triangle two decades ago. Cook and his brother Brad have also collaborated frequently with Vernon’s Grammy-winning group Bon Iver. Their history made Vernon a natural choice to produce Appalachia Borealis.

“Justin’s voice is always what’s in my head when I’m writing,” says Cook. “Even when it’s instrumental music, he’s always in the room with me — the core memory of how I chase music. So it made sense to reach out to my phantom voice: I would like you to play a role where you’re the only other person there to listen and help me choose the most essential pieces this record could be. It was my favorite recording experience ever, so chill.”

Cook recorded around eight hours of piano instrumentals (some with audible bird songs from outside the studio), and Vernon helped him pare it down to 11 tracks and 31 minutes of music. The tight running time was by design. Cook cites the late English folk artist Nick Drake’s 1972 classic Pink Moon, which is just 28 minutes long, as his all-time favorite album. And like Pink Moon, Appalachia Borealis still feels like a full-album experience despite its brevity.

“I am so grateful to be alive and around as Phil has re-embraced the piano, his original instrument,” says Amelia Meath, frontwoman of Sylvan Esso, whose Psychic Hotline imprint released the album. “He explored all these other musical branches and knit that into this beautiful in-the-moment expression. We’ve always supported Phil in various ways and we’re grateful he keeps coming back to us.” 

A recent morning found Cook sitting at his piano at home playing some of the Appalachia Borealis tunes over the phone (with birds audible through an open window). Demonstrating a point about his approach, he riffed a bit on the album’s one cover, Gillian Welch’s 2003 song “I Made a Lovers Prayer.” 

“I can also play that on banjo, Dobro, harmonica, electric guitar,” Cook says. “There’s this awesome polyphony of expression available, and one of those will call to me. It’s like I’m incorporating the voices of other stringed instruments into the piano.”

Much of Cook’s current musical mindset can actually be traced to something he gave up: his piano’s sustain pedal, which he admits he relied on too much. When he took a piano lesson from Chuckey Robinson, a Grammy-nominated gospel producer who teaches music at NC A&T University, Robinson challenged Cook to stop using the pedal.

“Giving up the sustain pedal was like being on a trapeze without a net,” Cook says. “If you want to hold a note without the pedal, you have to really hold it. But it’s revolutionized my playing, really tightened up the sound. Using sustain only for effect when it’s really needed was such a simple shift, but it meant everything. And this is the most personal work my life could give right now — the culmination of this wonderful instrumental journey I’ve had through musical language.”

Indeed, it’s an evolution that’s been so satisfying, you shouldn’t expect to see Cook leading another band anytime soon. He’ll still do sessions as a sideman, which provides most of his income nowadays. But his own music will be a solo trip for the foreseeable future.

“I got a solid dose of bands, with an unbelievable set of experiences and memories I’ll always cherish,” says Cook. “But this is a reinvention, figuring out where it all comes from as I see, know and learn about myself with the space to understand. Playing piano solo is what I did my entire first 18 years. Going back to that feels like the right thing now.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.