Bonus: Co-interview with Boyce Upholt
Boyce Upholt (Photo by Rory Doyle)
Ben Cosgrove (Photo by Jake Lester)
New Orleans, Louisiana // March-April 2021
Boyce Upholt, a writer and journalist based in New Orleans, is a good friend of mine, someone I’ve known somehow or other for years now. We met early on in both of our careers, when an online journal he edited called “Land That I Live” published a handful of my essays, and we’ve been internet-friends and frequent correspondents ever since. Our interests run to very similar things, and he’s one of my favorite people to hash ideas out with, often from afar. (As he notes here, we’ve somehow only met in person a handful of times, most of which involved drinking a lot of beer and then yammering excitedly about North American geography long into the night.)
Boyce is a brilliant, thoughtful writer and very accomplished in his field: he’s been published in a long list of excellent journals and magazines including Oxford American and National Geographic, he’s held a very cool journalism fellowship with the U.C. Berkeley School of Journalism, he’s the winner of a James Beard Award(!), and he’s currently hard at work on a big book about the Mississippi River that I absolutely cannot wait for him to finish. I’ve wanted to interview him for this segment of my website for a long time now, but he beat me to the punch: he publishes a great weekly newsletter called Apocalypse Playground (I highly recommend that you subscribe to it), and he asked if he could interview me about The Trouble With Wilderness for this week’s installment. We compromised by agreeing to a kind of co-interview, or what he described as “an essay-as-conversation, conducted via GoogleDocs.” It skews a bit towards me and the new album, as per the original intention of the thing, but I was able to draw a bunch of interesting thoughts out of him as well, so I thought it was worth reproducing it here.
The edited transcript of that conversation (somewhat condensed, because we went off on some wild tangents in the original) is below. It was enormously fun to get to go long with Boyce on the record — particularly during this time when I’ve been doing so many interviews that are, by necessity, considerably shorter/faster — and I hope we’ll get to do it again soon. In the meantime, please follow Boyce on all his various channels, subscribe to his newsletter, and keep track of his writing. As you’ll see from this interview, we’re definitely kindred spirits working in different fields, and if you like my stuff, you’re sure to be interested in his, too.
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Boyce Upholt: Your new album, The Trouble With Wilderness, explores a set of spaces that you haven’t much mined before: not “big landscapes,” as I’ll call them — like the famous national parks — but sidewalk weeds and interstate overpasses and powerline rights-of-ways. These are spaces that are so familiar that our attention often slips right past. Why turn your attention here?
Ben Cosgrove: It was sort of a course correction for me: without meaning to, I'd wound up writing a lot of music about places that people simply don't come across in their day-to-day lives, and I was starting to worry that this might lead to some of my audience taking the wrong messages away from my work. My moral justification for what I do has always been something to the effect of "if, by sharing with people my own personal responses to landscape, I can inspire them to think more critically about how they relate to the places they inhabit and move through, then that could potentially have a positive impact on how we all treat the world." But then I was sitting on stage every night telling stories and playing songs about national parks and wilderness areas and oceans. I was concerned that I might accidentally be espousing a view of nature that I don't actually hold at all, and so I wrote this album about the wildness, beauty, and strangeness in the types of places someone might encounter just outside his or her front door. I guess I wanted to remind my audiences that these places matter too.
BU: The title of the album seems relevant here…
BC: Yeah! It’s borrowed from a famous essay of the same title by William Cronon, which talks about similar ideas. It it, he warns that imagining "nature" as something entirely separate from humanity creates a series of far-reaching social and environmental problems, not the least of which is an unhealthy and unsustainable relationship between us and the rest of the world. Imagining “wilderness” as the greatest, purest exponent of nature is a key example of this problem. I was also recently thinking about a thing John Cage once said about noise, which was basically that he defines it as a thing that’s irritating when you aren’t paying attention to it, and deeply interesting when you are; a few of these landscapes I was writing about this time around are kind of that way too. It can be hard to remember to pay close attention to these places we see every day, let alone to marvel at them, but the built environment — and I'd say especially these little expressions of nonhuman wildness within it that I was getting obsessed with and focusing on with this album — is every bit as worthy of attention, contemplation, and wonderment as the other places I'd been writing about, and I wanted to see what it would be like to make music about that.
I really like the "big landscapes" vs. "small landscapes" idea you mentioned. It’s not how I approached this project at first, but it's definitely what ended up happening: I'm used to writing about the sweep of a landscape, or the feeling of being a person in a space, and many of these songs wound up being about much smaller, eye-level situations, like how plants grow out of concrete, or how a rainstorm falls on a city block, or how an abandoned lot might get overtaken by weeds. It was a weird coincidence that I began serious work on the record just days before Covid lockdown began: it meant that instead of driving all over the place the way I normally do, I was holed up for months in this apartment I was subletting in Northampton, Massachusetts and really compelled to look closely at the world immediately around me in a way that I ordinarily never would have been. I remember, actually, being thrilled and inspired by this article you published with Outside right around that same time — I don't think I'd told you yet that I was working on something like this, and it was funny to see how perfectly on the nose it was.
BU: You told me about the album right after the essay came out, and it was a reminder of what I already knew: you’re a fellow traveler, following the same paths. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but it strikes me that we’re both white men who are enthralled by those big landscapes, inspired by explorers and wanderers, and we’re trying to reckon with how it is we came to that affinity. (For me, it feels inseparable from my whiteness and maleness: a whole culture is training me that the cowboy or the mountaineer is an ideal to pursue.) And we’re searching for a better way to conceive of our relationship with the rest of the world, all its human and nonhuman beings.
After the Outside essay came out, I had a brief correspondence with an environmental psychologist named Peter Kahn. He believes human beings need experiences in big landscapes, that being amid an unbounded landscape, being away from most human technologies, has a powerful and positive psychological effect.
It’s a tempting argument, if only because I have to admit that I still somehow feel like big landscapes are ineffably better than my messy backyard. If he’s right, though by encouraging wonder at small landscapes, we might be normalizing a world that needs some fixing. Do you still wrestle with some of this stuff, or is that just me?
BC: Oh, definitely. But at the same time… I mean, I certainly don't doubt what the psychologist told you (obviously, the story of our time is of humanity doing untold and basically unmeasurable damage to the world), but I also think that part of the solution to that disconnection has to be to encourage people to recognize and appreciate nature where they find it. One of the problems with only celebrating the big places is that it can give us a false moral license to mistreat or mismanage the environments we actually live in, and that's where the damage is done.
I think we both spent our childhoods in roughly similar places, and I wonder how much of my enthusiasm for forests and canyons and backpacking trips and such also came from growing up in a crowded, suburban New England town. As a kid, I'd gawk at all these amazing landscapes that, you know, Calvin and Hobbes were romping through, and contrast them with my own backyard, which was built on pre-regulation fill and had, like, glass and old car and washing machine parts protruding from it. I grew up thinking that all the "real" nature, all the profound and important and impressive stuff, was far off somewhere else, which is obviously untrue.
I think a lot of people wind up feeling that way, and in part, that's a result of the panicked fetishization of sublimely beautiful, theoretically (but not actually) humanless natural spaces that flashed up in the wake of industrialization. Much of that legacy has been positive, but it’s certainly far from perfect, and I do think there's a problem with the worshipful reverence we're trained to have for certain, very specific nature-aesthetics that are mostly derived from what, say, John Muir or Thomas Cole saw when they looked at a handful of places at a particular moment in time. It creates this weird dichotomy where places that don't conform to that aesthetic don't count, in our minds, as nature, and that psychology results in irresponsible treatment of the places that don't make the cut. (And in different ways, often of the places that do! The framing some of these sites as “untrammeled wildernesses” led to truly nightmarish treatment of the people who had been living in them for millennia, for instance.)
I guess what I'm coming around to is that to my mind, the argument that we need big spaces is absolutely true and important, but it also seems that the problem of improving the health of the relationship between people and planet can't be solved just by selecting a few of those places, clearing all the people out of them, and carting everyone there to visit. The little places matter too, and the more we can encourage people to notice and care about them — and particularly the ways that the big and space places connect to each other — the better off we'll be. I spent a long time writing about the landscape with a narrower understanding than I ought to have had of where beauty can be found in it, and I found that broadening my lens to include places where the human and nonhuman elements are more complicatedly interwoven was not just creatively liberating but surprisingly humbling and even edifying.
Anyway, it’s sort of weird to talk about some of this because after all, I’m a musician and not an environmental policy expert. This album is maybe the closest I’ve come to making an “argument” with my work, and I’ve got to confess, I’m a tiny bit uneasy about it. What’s your feeling on that sort of thing, as a writer and reporter? I guess I’m probably talking more about essays than reportage, but do you ever worry, in your own writing about place, about the line between “here are some things I’ve found that are true” and “here’s the answer, as I see it”?
BU: I like that dichotomy, because at first glance it doesn’t seem like a dichotomy. Like, “things that are true” and “the answer”: shouldn’t those overlap? But there’s a big difference between noting the facts and stitching them together to form a solution.
I’m sometimes asked to give talks about the Mississippi River, and afterwards there’s a Q&A portion whereI’m inevitably asked, “Okay, so now that you’ve shown us all this troubling history, all these problems we face, what should we do next?” And my standard answer is to laugh and say it’s not really my job to figure that out, which of course satisfies no one.
I do wind up making at least the beginnings of an argument in much of my work, but often it’s an argument about how there are these unseen ideas that have influenced how we’ve treated the landscape, the nonhuman world. It just seems inevitable that I wind up being a bit more didactic because it’s much easier to be declarative in prose.
BC: Yeah, it's weird. And maybe that's part of it — to write music about any particular real-world phenomenon I first have to zoom out to such a degree of abstraction that it doesn't feel quite right to try to make any implicit statement that isn't just, essentially, "hey, does this resonate with things you've felt before?" And I can hope people follow me from there, but really that point of connection and emotional resonance is the highest thing to aspire to. I try to aim for that even with music I write that relies on hard data: with this one, for instance, it’s set up with some ancillary information about how a ship's movement is measured, but fundamentally, the piece is reliant on the idea that everyone's felt a certain kind of ambient unease at some point, whether or not they've been floating around in the middle of the ocean before. Obviously there's some kind of message implicit in how you decide to put together any set of sounds that you'll share with the public, but generally, I am wary of creating art or music with any kind of very specific outcome in mind. At the end of the day, it’s someone else’s to interpret and you can’t necessarily set the terms of where they’ll meet you. In a weird way, it’s one of the best things about it.
BU: Perhaps what we’re circling around is the difference between inputs and outputs. There are a few things I’m pretty convinced of, and one in particular is that whatever solutions we choose to rectify our relationship with the nonhuman world need to involve us thinking about ourselves as members of communities — human communities and more-than-human communities — rather than as individuals. Still, I’m not interested in writing an op-ed that argues this. Instead, I want to use this as a way of examining the world — an input into the creative process.
An example will help. I had a story come out earlier this month about a libertarian dude who is trying to build a high-tech utopia on the oceans. Because the story is critical, he decided it was a “hit piece.”. But I didn’t come in intending to tear apart his ideas. I came in wondering which kind of utopia he was building. I’m inspired by language from the writer Erik Reece: There are “utopias of solidarity” and “utopias of solitude.” This was very clearly the latter, and it felt necessary to say so.
BC: Yeah, that’s interesting! I mean, obviously writing clearly and compellingly about what's wrong -- and doing the work to identify the places where those wrongs are happening -- is critical and necessary, and you’re extremely good at it; it’s just not a skill I’ve ever really had any natural aptitude for. In a way, I'm just very lucky to be in a position where the medium I work in is better suited to highlighting the very things that I'm naturally more inclined to notice and better able to illustrate. I think the only way I’m able to feel comfortable writing an album like this new one — which, again, is unusual for me in that it does implicitly recommend a course of action and to an extent, hopes for a particular response — is that the thing it’s advocating is just “don’t forget that these everyday things can be wondrous too.”
Actually, jeez, I’m realizing this is also true even when I write essays: with occasional exceptions, the thrust of my nonfiction is almost always “isn’t this thing strange/interesting/beautiful?” rather than “here is a problem that we should consider.” It’s possible that in both prongs of my work, the way I've unconsciously dealt with the problem of learning not to trust most of my own convictions or opinions has been to train my focus on the subjective things I feel are true, to suggest connections between those ideas and others that don’t initially seem obvious to me, and then to be very cautious whenever I step into territory where I begin to claim that I really understand anything at all about what’s going on beyond that.
BU: You mentioned the lockdown earlier, and I know you’ve lived most of your adult life on the road, touring. Do you think this new attention to — and wonder about — little places will lead to a change in how you move through the world, now that the world seems nearly navigable once more?
BC: It's hard to say. I mean, in many ways I'm lucky, because touring musicians have to move around all the time to make a living, and I know a lot of my peers in the field who really struggle with that in a way that I almost never do; for me it’s always felt like an added perk that I get this excuse for being in motion so much of the time. So I hope not to lose that, but I also hope that this year of training myself to be better at noticing and appreciating the little things will make me better at navigating life during the times when I do have to sit still in the future. I know that I'll have to find a balance between the two things at some point, and carve out a lifestyle that is slightly less insane than my pre-pandemic mode of what was essentially constant, nonstop travel, and I hope this will have made me better able to do that.
Where do you land on that? I know that we share a certain degree of wanderlust and, uh… let’s call it “geographilia.” And your work takes you all over, as well — the purview of your current book project covers a linear distance of some thousand miles, just for the Lower Mississippi — but I feel like you've also been much better than I have been at really digging yourself deeply into different places, communities, and landscapes over the years when you're not on the road reporting. How has it been feeling out that balance, and do you ever feel like you've got it fully figured out?
BU: I’ve always been half wanderer and half homebody. If I sit too long in the house I start to get an itch to at least throw the kayak on top of the car and find some open water. Somehow, putting a little distance between myself and my workaday surroundings provides psychological relief — making the world feel a bit more strange, in a very delightful way. But I find when I actually lay out my travel schedule, it makes me feel anxious to book more than a week away from home. So part of my “digging in” is just being attached to home. But part has to do with how I sidled into journalism.
When I decided to seriously pursue a career as a writer, I was working in schools in Mississippi and Arkansas. The only interesting thing I had to say, as far as I could tell, was what I was seeing in the culture around me. I had the curiosity of an outsider, but I had a resident’s capacity to sustain my gaze. I wasn’t just a NYC-based journalist “parachuting in” for a weekend. That forced me to be at least slightly more sensitive in what I was saying; I think — or I hope — I’ve managed to avoid some of the bad stereotypes that mark a lot of outsiders’ writing about the rural South.
Parallel to all this is my increasing worry about climate change. A study in Nature found that tourism accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions, mostly because of airplanes. In the month before the pandemic, I flew to Mexico City for a vacation, and then to Panama to report, and then to Oregon for another story. That last story was about nuclear power and climate change, and one of my sources was a climate-change activist. He was basically like, ‘what the hell are you doing?How can you take a stance in this story that we need to address climate change, and then be living like this?’ It struck a chord. Growing up, I always thought getting out to see the world was an unequivocal good. Broadening one’s horizons, and so on. Now, I’m less sure. Even the pandemic itself is being spread by our groundbreaking capacity to send humans hurtling across the globe. Wanderlust is feeling less like a way to build solidarity, more like a selfish luxury.
For the book, I’ve wound up studying a lot of Indigenous cultures that had (and have!) a very place-based spirituality: ancient mounds along the river, for example, where people returned again and again over hundreds and even thousands of years. That feels more and more like a model I want to explore. (Though, of course, even a few thousand years ago, pilgrims and traders traveled thousands of miles on the river.) I mentioned earlier that satisfying feeling that comes with “distance.” I’m wondering if we can rethink that concept now, find other ways to feel distant, to notice the delightful strangeness that exists much closer to home. My partner and I are trying to visit every park in New Orleans in 2021, and it’s taught me how little of this city I know. But I’m greedy, and I still want to see so much or the world — for fun and for work.
BC: Yeah, not surprisingly, I relate to all of this! I do think it's too bad that (not without reason) we have come to view a yearning to see and understand and belong to more of the world as greediness, though. It's a weird and unfortunate thing that mobility and climate change happen to be linked — I wonder if I'd still feel guilty about the whole perpetual-motion thing in a theoretical universe where our modes of transportation had developed in ways that hadn’t turned out to be so destructive. It's possible that I would; places are more idiosyncratic, rich, and interesting when people stay in them, and I've been shirking a responsibility to be a part of that for many years now.
But at the same time, there's just a personal element to all this: the plain truth is that I feel like I'm a better person when I'm on the road — I listen more closely, I'm more attentive, I'm humbler, I have more to offer other people, I have more meaningful interactions with people I wouldn't have met otherwise, I'm happier, I'm healthier, and I take less for granted. Ironically, my last big creative act before lockdown hit last year was to publish a big essay about movement and impermanence and how I'd come to feel that having a lifestyle and career that were so essentially transitory was the best use of me as a person, and maybe the most honest and helpful way I could think of to live my life. To be honest, I still feel like that's true, though this last year has been a great time to reevaluate it, and — like we were talking about earlier with the new album — to try and tweak my own understanding of this kind of thing, and find ways that the kind work I do might potentially be viable, helpful, and relevant on a more local scale.
So I suppose I'm just treating these decisions as personal ones, about how I feel I can individually be of the greatest use to the world and the other people in it; I obviously wouldn't urge everyone on the planet to spend all their time going somewhere else unless they felt this way too. That said, there is still a big part of me that believes that the more connected to the geography of the wider world that a person feels, the more likely they may be to feel a sense of belonging to a geographic community that they can't necessarily ever see all of at once, or to empathize with people who might live far away from them, and then to take better care of the world generally. But I'm also quick to acknowledge that no philosophy about this kind of thing can ever be universally applied; individually, I sometimes think the best we can do is remain self-critical and perpetually on watch for ways to adjust and improve how we each go about the business of being in the world. Avoid falling into a routine, that kind of thing.
BU: I tend to like binaries — like the utopia of solitude versus utopia of solidarity distinction above — because they help me see things I did not see before. But they also make it very tempting to decide that one side of the binary is good and one side is bad. You’re reminding me that neither homebody nor nomad is the “right” choice, for humanity as a whole or for any single person.
Sam Anderson recently published a beautiful essay about spending a week with the last two northern white rhinos on Earth. It is really a meditation on love. Love, according to Anderson, is like a “wonderful lamp . . . [that] fills the inside of our houses. It washes over our families and our pets. It extends, as we walk, to the town around us.” One of the challenges, though, is that the lamp “cannot leap, with any of the necessary intensity, across city limits or state lines or oceans.” He had to be in the presence of the rhinos to sense why their death was a tragedy. Travel, at least responsible travel, is a part of extending the range of our lamps.
And — to overly strain this metaphor — if you stay in one place, it’s easy to turn your lamp into a flashlight. To become overly attached to a specific place, in other words. I’ve met engineers that proclaim proudly that they’ve “protected” land along the Mississippi River because they stopped the river from moving. I’ve met residents who are determined to protect their patch of land against flooding, even if that has grave consequences for everyone else. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to protect their home and their assets, but here again I feel like the indigenous communities on the coast were and are wiser: though they’d gather again and again in the same places, they also knew that the landscape would ebb and flow over time, that no place was permanent.
This is in part what your essay is about: how strange it is we choose to hunker down in one place, given that the earth itself is this irregular rock that never sits still. (It’s a beautiful essay, by the way, and not at all hubristic. Any reader who has made it this far will be delighted by it. Readers, please print this pdf, and make sure it’s double-sided; then fold to produce a nifty little chapbook!) You also make the case for nomadism as a form of solidarity, a form of love, really: “Consciously or not, I’d subscribed to the idea that if I could just keep running fast enough, I could effectively be everywhere all at once, and wouldn’t ever have to let anyone or anything go.”
I’ve seen the positive effects of this approach. We’ve met, what, a half-dozen times in person? And yet you feel like a friend that I will always be in touch with. I have to say, though, that I sense a bit of doubt in that sentence!
BC: Wow, yes — and I have to admit that the fact that we've only met in person a few times seems completely insane to me!
I appreciate the kind words about the essay. It took me an unusually long time to write that: it contains a bunch of scenes that I'd been kicking around for a while and didn't know how to unite under one banner. It's really a collection of images and ideas that rhyme with each other, and for the most part it stays clear of getting too entrenched in any one of them, which I finally realized was the essence of what I was trying to write about in the first place.
I began writing it around the same time I was working on an album called Salt, which was basically a means for me to process a bad breakup by reminding myself that the world is constantly, shudderingly rearranging itself and the more geographically/interpersonally lightly I could live my life, the better able to float over those changes and shifts I would be. Clearly that philosophy was shortsighted in some ways, but I think both the album and the essay are good representations of where my head was at at the time. And I do think that's one thing that still appeals to me about movement: there's a certain weird stability to be found in a state of flux. But obviously, like you point out, that can't be the whole story. There are a lot of deeply important things you miss out on by avoiding stillness or settledness, and I suppose I'm trying to recalibrate my personal philosophy about those ideas now. So the doubt you're reading in that sentence is still there (but maybe part of the point is that maintaining a healthy level of doubt about whatever you're doing or however you're living is probably good, and maybe a thing to aspire to, itself.)
BU: Let’s get back to The Trouble With Wilderness, and the actual sounds on the album. I’d love to hear a bit more about the specific decisions you made as you translated your attention to small landscapes into this very different form.
BC: A lot of what I was trying to do in writing the new material required me to get out of a certain comfort zone I’d wound up in after the Salt album (I tend to naturally gravitate towards cascades of arpeggios and floating fragments and cloudy, pointillist textures, and that record, which was largely about movement and water and instability, called on that a lot). This time, because of the subject matter, I knew I needed some things to sound more grounded, tactile, and close, and for others to sound wild and surprising, like they were growing out of or breaking free of something.
To give that impression of orderliness and wildness weaving in and out of each other, I decided I needed to somehow make the music sound mechanical, organic, and ethereal all at once, and to do that — particularly on the album's first half — I spent much more time boiling down melodies to their bare essentials, hew to those fairly rigidly, and use each song's arrangement and production as the space where a certain kind of wildness can creep in, rather than its notes. I found that focusing on simple, geometric little melodies, and recording them in such a way where they felt real, physically grounded, and of a sonic world you could believe in, it felt like a good way to make music that was about small, intimate things rather than about the big, broad sweep of a landscape.
One of the most important decisions I made with the new album was to record it instead on real, acoustic pianos, and then to capture those sounds in such a way that the weight and heaviness and material reality of those sounds would be foregrounded: you can hear the wood and metal and cloth all doing their thing. So whereas a lot of the songs on Salt are intended to rush lightly over and around you — they were recorded solo on my little red keyboard that I travel everywhere with — I wanted the new one to feel real, and tactile, and grounded in a particular acoustic place that I could then move the listener in and out of for emotional effect.
Weirdly, I actually thought a lot about horror movies in designing the new album: some of them are so effectively frightening because they devote a lot of time and effort to grounding their subjects in a space that feels authentically real and raw and visceral, long before anything gets scary. As a result, when something strange finally happens, it’s all the more uncanny and surreal and — in its way — wondrous. I tried to do something similar here, thinking that if we were to mic the pianos extremely closely and dedicate time to convincing the listener that the instrument exists in a specific, limited physical reality, it could make the moments where those textures suddenly grow and change into something a piano couldn't do in real life — as in the climaxes of "Hadley," or "Anorak," or "Templates for Limitless Fields of Grass," for instance — all the more affecting. It felt like a good way to write about the chaos inherent in these man-made places we might assume we completely know, or understand, or have control over.
BU: It’s work that brings to mind that now-cliched axiom: that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. In your case, you're composing about landscape. We’ve been talking about imagining and reimagining our relationship with landscapes. What you feel like is by adding this extra medium to our experience? What lessons have you learned in doing this work?
BC: If there's one major lesson I've learned, it's that it's never a good idea to try to "paint a musical portrait" of a landscape, or to ever imagine that it's possible to depict a place with anything close to objectivity. It's just better, more resonant, and less cartoony to write about disorientation than to write about the plains, or to write about claustrophobia than to write about a particular cave. I’ve come to believe pretty strongly that this type of thing only works if people are engaging with my music emotionally first and intellectually second.
Really, I'm always trying to use my music to kind of figure out what my own feelings about a place or a landscape or another environmental situation might be, and then hope someone hears something of themself in whatever I come up with. I think there's tremendous value in identifying the way a space acts on you and then trying to evoke that set of feelings using a totally different medium, where they might be more accessible to someone who maybe felt them but may not have been able to articulate them. Or really, in any effort to demonstrate how any one thing is somehow like something else. It's why things like poems about art, or essays about music, or abstract paintings of landscape can all be so surprising and illuminating. Drawing those kinds of connections makes the world smaller. Honestly, I would love to see someone dancing about architecture.