![]() As someone who has sought mentors my whole life, I am honoring the people who shaped who I am, not only musically, but spiritually, emotionally and personally.” He brings that forward in every note on People Are My Drug.Ĭook has firmly planted his roots in his adopted hometown of Durham, NC for the last decade, while simultaneously maintaining a musical presence in the upper-Midwest where he was raised. Cook notes, “I see life on a timeline that includes multi-generations. Since S outhland Mission, Cook has performed with childhood heroes including Mavis Staples, Bruce Hornsby, John Prine, Amy Ray and The Blind Boys of Alabama. Instead of standing on the shoulders of his heroes, Cook is humbly kneeling at their feet. ![]() Each track asserts that he alone is no greater than the sum of the people who have brought him to this moment. Having only recently stepped to the center of the stage as a solo artist, Cook now takes a moment, citing the power of community as his thesis statement. Side A alone, culminating with the shiver-inducing “Another Mother’s Son,” has the capacity to light a fire in even the coldest of hearts. ![]() Where 2015’s Southland Mission illuminated for listeners what Phil Cook hears in his head, this latest record lays bare the way that music makes him feel. With the arrival of People Are My Drug, Phil Cook is taking the spark from lights left on by musical heroes and offering a torch for listeners as they navigate their own dark corners. In present times, choosing to amplify community and positivity through art can seem like a radical act. Transforming pain and injustice into love and compassion is a rendering that has been universal to poets and prophets for centuries. There’s just so much divine, cosmic beauty, and meaning in that entire experience.” Cook will play All These Years in the Nelson Music Room at Duke University, an intimate recital hall built in 1912.“We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” The sounds of the street bled through those brick walls.Ĭook describes the resulting songs as “hymn-provisations,” telling the INDY Week ’s Dan Ruccia that making the album was “an act of me getting out of my own way and having it not be about anything other than what needed to come through in a moment. These ten pieces came to life on a long-cared-for and much-loved 100 year-old Steinway over three days at the church. Yet it was during hour-long stretches of improvisation in NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham where the music could open up to the presence of divine intoxication. Phil experimented with sanctuary in order to honor the ritual: he retreated alone to the mountains in North Carolina to write, sojourned to family abodes in Wisconsin to nurture. In a note accompanying the recording, Trevor Hagen describe the process: Recorded on a 1923 Steinway in Durham’s NorthStar Church of the Arts, All These Years is “a turn toward the minimal, the meditative, the powerful” ( Volume One magazine ) that finds Cook exploring his relationship to the piano, his primary instrument. Phil Cook returns to Duke Performances for an intimate performance of the entirety of his new solo piano album All These Years. ![]() Phil Cook Tuesday, Ma| 8:00 pm Nelson Music Room
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