February Update

Hi everyone,

Greetings from Colorado! I'm currently on tour with a great band from Maine called The Ghost of Paul Revere, who have hired me to play a couple of extra instruments with them around the country this month. It's been an absolute blast so far, even though we all got the flu in Cincinnati and spent a difficult week shivering/sweating/hacking/spreading pestilence around the Midwest. But we're all better now, and if all this sounds appealing to you, here's a list of all the places where I'm playing with the Ghost this month.

The rest of this should just be a roundup of recent good news. I was extremely flattered to discover that Sound of Boston recently named Salt to their list of the best local albums of 2017. "Don’t be fooled by the serene scene of Salt's cover," they wrote. "This is a sharp inhale on a cold winter day: tense & beautiful & alive at once. Ben Cosgrove's music conveys its feeling as urgently as if he were screaming—except his language of choice is soft piano keys & guitar strings."

Last month I had the pleasure of sitting down with John Dankovsky of NEXT New England in Connecticut for a conversation about my music and a couple other subjects that are adjacent to it -- you can listen to us talk here. Their weekly program covers a satisfyingly broad swath of New England-y subjects, and I recommend subscribing to their podcast if, like me, you're into that sort of thing.

I was also thrilled to participate in an episode of Red Line Roots's Old Spruce Sessions a few weeks ago, wherein editor Brian Carroll filmed me playing my song "Pine" in the old train station in White River Junction, Vermont. You can watch that here.

In other news, I turned 30 recently and celebrated by corralling a bunch of my friends and forcing them to play their songs with me onstage at one of my favorite venues in the country. It was so much fun that I felt almost guiltily self-indulgent. Bree Candland, who writes a lot about live music in Maine, described the night on her blog. Unrelatedly, I also played for a roomful of about a hundred kindergarteners in Chicago last month, and here is what a few of them thought that looked like.

My good friend Holly recently published a gorgeous essay about Hawaiian navigation, which is a subject I've been interested in for ages. I'm also reading a really nice book by Robert Adams about why good art is good. And I've been listening to this album over and over.

Upcoming shows are here, and several more will be added to that list in the coming days. Please come to a few! In general terms, I'll be around the northeast for most of the next couple months, and then coming back out west again this summer.

Oh, finally: I always forget to mention this, but all my music is available on Spotify, and you should follow/listen to it there if that's where you listen to things. Here's where that is.

Thanks, as always, for all the support, and hello from about 6700 feet.
See you soon, everybody.
Ben