Multi-talented musician Phil Cook will issue an instrumental piano album, All These Years, via Psychic Hotline digitally on November 19 with a physical edition arriving on April 22, 2022. Cook also shared the first single, “Queen of Branches.”
Cook convened with his cousin and collaborator Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, Indigo Girls) to record All These Years in the familiar space of the NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham, North Carolina, something of a second home for Phil’s family where his wife Heather worked for years. The record sees the multi-instrumentalist on his primary instrument, capturing the songs on a one-hundred-year-old Steinway piano.
Press materials for the LP described All These Years:
All These Years is near hymn-like, a collection of prayers or meditations, improvisations threaded together by feeling, by the things that matter most. When Cook began these songs, he was in the headspace of meditating on the people in his support network, and those closest to him. Through composing the music, he began to reflect on specific and important presences in his life, and ends up capturing their essence via keys here. He distills decades of friendship, brotherhood, family, love, learning, and loss into flickering piano portraits — impressionistic and fluid and reverent. It’s not so much looking backwards as it is just looking around, reflections on all that is human and divine and present, and the roads we’ve taken to get us there.
The first taste of the album is a composition titled “Queen of Branches.” Cook himself detailed the song:
I love the recording of “Queen Of Branches.” It epitomizes the “hymn-provisational” style that weaves the entire session together. This is, above all, a document of sound and space. The way the melody dances with the bird’s song. The almost-biblical snake that wove its way across the sanctuary floor as I played. The sun fractals kaleidoscoping through the stained glass on an April morning. All of it captured perfectly by my cousin and life-long friend, Brian Joseph. This is the most honest work of my career.
“Queen of Branches” arrived with an accompanying music video by Phil’s friend Daniel Fox. Watch it below:
