![]() And as much as I walked away from church, when something is a part of you in your childhood, you can’t just walk away from it. They saw a little kid with glasses in Wisconsin, and they told me to keep being who I want to be. What I ultimately got out of a childhood in church was this great community that was really supportive of me being who I was. That’s the togetherness of space that I think the center of this record is. So yeah, I do feel that the fraternity, the brotherhood of man, is the heart and soul of how gospel music plays a role in my life. It made for a really beautiful moment at a hometown show. And the rest of the song we sang “She gives us all her love.” I was like, “Well, this is how we’re gonna perform it from now on!”Īnd that’s the kind of spontaneous moment that you have to pay attention to as a musician, to be open when something passes by and be like, “That’s it! Cool! Switch directions. Funny story, we sang our version of that song for the first time and halfway through it a woman in the front row looks up at me with a little smile and goes, “How do you know it’s a ‘he’?” and immediately switched the entire perspective of the song. Yeah! It’s my favorite Randy Newman song off of Sail Away because it’s the one time he lets his sardonic humor-guard down for a very simple song about gratefulness and generosity, and I like that a lot. Speaking of fraternity, “He Gives Us All His Love” stirs me to feel universally connected to humankind, more brotherhood of man than fatherhood of God. We start out “He Gives Us All His Love,” and I was like, “Bass, I love ya.” And when we listened back to it, that’s exactly what the vibe of the entire record is, that fraternal kind of vibe. There are little moments that happen all over the place. We were laughing and smiling at each other. ![]() Then after we were done we had a nice dinner and went into the control room and listened to the record that we’d just made. ![]() I am surrounded by musicians that I trust more than anyone else in that moment on stage or in the studio, and we made that a bubble. We trusted the people across the house were doing their job.Īnd that’s where this record starts: trust. We played for two straight days and didn’t leave the room. So we brought the whole crew up, and we holed up in a live room, the four of us – drums, bass, keys, and me. Most everything was made in a studio in Wisconsin, which happens to be owned and operated by my old friend Justin Vernon. He knows when I’m hiding and helps me stand up tall and be who I have to be to do the thing.įrom there, all the musicians in the band – we essentially made the record in two days. So my circle starts with my brother, as a producer who knows me better than any other and helps me deliver the most honest statement that I can make. I can possess those things, not all at the same damn time, but if I’m surrounded by other people, I feel safer to be that multiplicity. If I’ve learned anything, it’s to surround yourself with people that know what they’re doing, have a lot of experience, and have something to say. There is a definite space that People Are My Drug lives in. On his new album, People Are My Drug, Cook invites us to marvel gratefully and joyfully at the greatness of so many people whose creativity and communal originality have flourished under oppression, as well as those who hold the weight of the world within their silence. than Benmont T., and a vocal delivery that’s loose and expressive. But this Wisconsin kid and his band never stray far from a black gospel blueprint, incorporating backing choirs, tinkling piano stabs, organ that’s more Booker T. At times he veers into Appalachian instrumentation, reflecting his current North Carolina surroundings, and there’s individuality and innovation aplenty. The motivation for Phil Cook’s unapologetically familiar gospel sound is simple: he LOVES that style of music and the people he’s learned it from.
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