The new album from Ben Cosgrove
Listen now on all platforms / Order on CD or vinyl
"...a collection of piano-driven compositions that capture both the ethereal and dynamic aspects of wildness in a built environment. Drawing from influences that range from the great instrumental impressionists (Debussy, Glass) to more modern experimentalists (Nils Frahm, Brian Eno), Cosgrove’s newest venture is a striking still life of beauty sprouting from a concrete jungle." - WBUR
Four years after the release of his quiet, acclaimed piano record, Salt, the landscape-inspired composer and traveling pianist Ben Cosgrove has returned with The Trouble with Wilderness, a lush, textured, and expansive set of twelve new songs that consider the role of nature and wildness in the built environment. “I found I was spending a lot of time onstage talking about national parks and oceans and wilderness areas, and not enough about the places that people are more likely to encounter in their everyday lives,” explains Cosgrove, whose career has included artist residencies and collaborations with Acadia and Isle Royale National Parks, White Mountain National Forest, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Chulengo Expeditions, and the New England National Scenic Trail, as well as solo performances in 48 states.
He assigned himself the challenge of writing a set of songs that would allow him to correct this oversight, and quickly found the decision to be eerily well-timed: almost immediately after he began writing and recording demos, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic would force virtually everyone on the planet both to find a new appreciation for the world just outside their front door and to reconsider the impermeability of whatever boundary they might have imagined to exist between the natural world and the human one. It also put Cosgrove, a musician who has traveled constantly for over a decade, in the unusual and terrifying position of having to sit still. “It really made me kind of have to walk the walk, in terms of the ideas I was trying to illustrate with this new music. Instead of driving eight hours to someplace new each morning, I was going on these daylong rambles all over the outskirts of town pretty much every day for months. I was amazed to find what strange, beautiful, and interesting things I noticed as I passed all the same ordinary-seeming places again and again and looked at them more and more closely.”
The new songs illuminate Cosgrove’s unique position as a musician suspended somewhere between genres: “I’m either a singer-songwriter who doesn’t sing, or I’m a composer who behaves like a singer-songwriter,” he has said in more than one interview, and his chatty, disarming stage presence would certainly make him seem more like a folk musician than a classical pianist. In addition to his solo instrumental work, Cosgrove regularly tours, records, and collaborates with artists from across the worlds of folk, rock, and Americana music, and while some parts of the album recall the work of George Winston, Keith Jarrett, Nils Frahm, or Ludovico Einaudi, his extensive experiences working with bands like The Ghost of Paul Revere are reflected in the rhythmic, percussive, and even bluesy moments of songs like “The Machine in the Garden” and “This Rush of Beauty and This Sense of Order.”
“…I think the practice of formally or informally dividing the world up into a bunch of conventionally beautiful ‘natural’ parts and another bunch of utilitarian, unpretty, ‘unnatural’ ones is one of our society’s more misguided and lastingly harmful tendencies,” Cosgrove notes in the album’s liner notes (reproduced below). The songs on The Trouble with Wilderness, faithful to this concept, are characterized by their textural contrasts and striking juxtapositions: ethereal and asymmetrical clouds blooming above a churning and insistent piano pattern in lead single “Machine in the Garden”; tapped and plucked noises from all over the inside of a piano snapping wildly over a graceful bassline in “Cairn”; or in the final track, the delirious, ecstatic arpeggios that slowly burst free of their constraints over the course of its ten minutes. The production by indie-folk maestro Dan Cardinal (Josh Ritter, Darlingside, Lula Wiles, Session Americana, The Ballroom Thieves) both emphasizes the physicality of the instruments involved and elevates the sounds to places that are uncannily gorgeous and sometimes almost surreal: on songs like “Oklahoma Wind Speed Measurement Club” and “Wilder,” the heavy woodenness and intricate mechanics of the piano provide a raw and visceral anchor to the disorienting layers of ambience that unfold above it. “It's meant to sound mechanical, organic and ethereal all at once,” Cosgrove recently told WBUR, “and I think a piano is just the perfect instrument for getting at those three moods.” The result is an uncommonly beautiful set of songs and a massive step forward in Cosgrove’s idiosyncratic and increasingly mature body of work. Like the vernacular landscapes he looked to in composing it, the music on The Trouble with Wilderness sits on the narrow balancing point between order and wildness and manages to lean simultaneously into both.
"The Trouble With Wilderness is a deeply impressive album; I have listened to it many times in the course of reviewing it, and I am not nearly done exploring it yet. It is emotionally and intellectually satisfying in a space where it is hard to do either thing, due to the high level of mastery required to break through the sea of pianists. Cosgrove has a rare talent. Wilderness will definitely be on my top-ten best of the year. Highly recommended." - Independent Clauses
"...a beautiful and fascinating instrumental concept album that celebrates the certainty of nature’s presence in the most unnatural spaces." - The Maine Edge
"Composer Ben Cosgrove makes music that begs the listener to stop, drop and recollect. His neoclassical, instrumental compositions are immediately evocative and fully arresting. His work brims with technical mastery and emotional capital, evident in the recently released The Trouble With Wilderness." - Seven Days
"A musical work of art" - Mainly Piano
"'This Rush of Beauty and This Sense of Order' has the pop and verve of an indie-rock song, melded with mellow and post-minimalist composition chops. The final coda is absolutely a rush, punctuated by so much performerly enthusiasm that the ghost of Glenn Gould must have taken notice." - Independent Clauses
"[Cosgrove's] ability to swerve from cosmic-leaning melodies to charging rhythmic workouts shows he is basically fearless when it comes to his original compositions, and by now is ready to proceed on the paths he has built himself. And now that the wide world of nature is opening up to Ben Cosgrove’s exploration again, the skies are the limit. Just like this." - Americana Highways
(Links to full reviews and additional press coverage below)
ALBUM NOTES BY BEN COSGROVE:
“Not long ago, I came to the uncomfortable realization that I was spending an awful lot of my time on stage introducing songs by telling stories about the kinds of places that tend to show up on scenic postcards and not in people’s everyday lives. I’ve been writing and performing music about landscape for years, but it turns out that—largely by accident—a lot of that music has been about national parks, oceans, mountains, wilderness areas, wildlife preserves, and other landscapes whose beauty and identity are hard to separate from the implicit and erroneous idea that human beings have nothing to do with them. This is obviously not something that I believe at all; in fact, I think the practice of formally or informally dividing the world up into a bunch of conventionally beautiful “natural” parts and another bunch of utilitarian, unpretty, “unnatural” ones is one of our society’s more misguided and lastingly harmful tendencies. I realized I was ignoring an important obligation to remind my audiences that the built environment can be as insane, impressive, humbling, affecting, and worthy of attention as any theoretically untrammeled wilderness — and also that in a very real, Anthropocenean sense, pretty much everything on the planet is a part of the built environment at this point, so we’d better start learning to appreciate it.
With all this in mind, I set myself to the task of writing a set of songs that would be about the wildness found in ordinary places, and focus on situations and environments whose human and nonhuman elements are more weirdly and complicatedly interrelated. (My timing turned out to be apt, too: no sooner had I begun work on this project than a tiny microbe brought the world to its knees, swatting down any illusions we might have had about the borders between the natural world and our own.) So this album is about those kinds of things: weeds in the sidewalk, power line corridors, gardens, interstates, lawns, river crossings, urban growth boundaries, and other instances where it’s hard to say exactly what is natural and what is not. There’s a song about wind turbines and another about piles of debris. The final track, a long pseudo-improvisation based on small alterations to one repeated, modular idea, is inspired by an art project of the same name by an artist named Gary Kachadourian, which presents a small series of richly detailed pen-and-ink drawings of grass blades and invites the viewer to use them to create a vast, immersive, and surprisingly organic physical environment of her own by photocopying the images hundreds of times and pasting them to her walls, filling room after room with a kind of artificial wilderness.
To record this music, I had the enormous pleasure of working with Dan Cardinal, a thoughtful and brilliant producer and engineer with a real genius for getting unusual sounds out of a piano, at his studio in Boston. I’d self-produced all my previous records, but with this project, it felt right and important to be able to relinquish control of each tune at some point or another: to painstakingly work up a song and then release it into the wild, in a sense, by inviting Dan and his battery of crazy machines to rough it up a bit. I also spent an excellent couple of pre-pandemic days with my friend Kevin Harper at his studio in Nashville, where we collected a few of the cool felted piano sounds heard here. I should also mention and recommend all the work of the landscape writers J.B. Jackson and John R. Stilgoe, the book Rambunctious Garden by Emma Marris, the anthology The Great New Wilderness Debate, and the essay by William Cronon from which this album takes its title, all of which were very much at the front of my mind as I was writing this music. Help and advice came from all corners throughout the process of making this thing, and I am deeply grateful to all of my friends and relatives who put critical ears and eyes on the album during the time it took for it all to slowly come together.
Our relationship with the rest of the world could only deepen if we were to expand our list of places worth celebrating, to broaden our understanding of what nature is and where we might find it; I hope these songs can make the ordinary things around you start to pop with new color and clarity. It’s been a good reminder for myself, too, to keep paying attention to the details of the world around me, whether I’m in a park or a parking lot. For better or worse—and I think pretty clearly for better—there’s wildness to be found everywhere: even in the most constructed and artificial environments, there is always something beautiful, chaotic, and anarchic at work, doing its part to rattle the edges, to crack the sides, to burst forth and bloom.”
Listen to the full album now
PRESS
Outside/In (NHPR): “The Trouble With Music About Wilderness”
WBUR: “Ben Cosgrove Makes Music for the Life Between the Cracks”
Apocalypse Playground: co-interview between Ben and Boyce Upholt
YourForest Podcast: “The Trouble With Wilderness, with Ben Cosgrove”
Independent Clauses: “Ben Cosgrove’s evocative Wilderness shows off a distinctive, composerly voice”
Red Line Roots: “Ben Cosgrove: Space By Design”
The Maine Edge: “Ben Cosgrove’s New LP Shines a Light on Wild Things in the Material World”
RIFF Magazine: “Pianist Ben Cosgrove on Finding Natural Beauty Outside His Door”
CREDITS
Produced by Dan Cardinal
All songs written and performed by Ben Cosgrove
Ben Cosgrove - grand and upright pianos, Rhodes MK1, Wurlitzer 200A, accordion, Korg SV-1, Mellotron, Casiotone MT-68, C&G Organelle, Sequential Prophet-6, acoustic and electric guitars, upright bass, banjo, drums, and various percussion things
Engineered, mixed, and mastered by Dan Cardinal at Dimension Sound Studios (Boston, Massachusetts)
Felted upright piano on tracks 1 and 6 recorded by Kevin Harper at Kleesounds (Nashville, Tennessee)
Additional recording by Ben Cosgrove in Portland, Maine; Northampton, Massachusetts; Bath, Maine; Craftsbury, Vermont; Rindge, New Hampshire; and Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
Cover art: “IMPROVISATION 48x36” (detail), by William M. Crosby. Used by generous permission of the artist.
More of Mr. Crosby’s work can be viewed at portlandartgallery.com/artist/william-crosby
Design and other artwork by Ben Cosgrove
Copyright 2020-21 Ben Cosgrove / Correction Line Music (ASCAP)
www.bencosgrove.com
license
all rights reserved