OUT TODAY:
BEN COSGROVE’S NEW LP
THE TROUBLE WITH WILDERNESS
An impressionistic ode to the life that grows between the urban cracks…Cosgrove works solely in abstracts, using minimalism and deeper concepts to paint portraits with a soft, muted palette - WBUR
The expansiveness and thrill…is illustrative of Cosgrove’s musical vision. The push and pull of dynamics, the utilization of the whole range of the piano and the dense, sweeping pianism makes ‘Templates For Limitless Fields of Grass’ well… limitless - Sound Of Boston
THE TROUBLE WITH WILDERNESS
Today, Boston-based Ghost of Paul Revere keyboardist and instrumental folk composer Ben Cosgrove releases The Trouble With Wilderness, his new LP produced by indie-folk maestro Dan Cardinal (Josh Ritter, Darlingside, Lula Wiles, The Ballroom Thieves). The Trouble With Wilderness is a lush, textured, and expansive set of 12 new songs that consider the role of nature and wildness in the built environment.
“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,” explains Cosgrove. “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.”
“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,” he continues. “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 this in mind, Cosgrove created a set of songs about the wildness found in ordinary places, and focused on situations and environments whose human and nonhuman elements are more weirdly and complicatedly interrelated. The Trouble With Wilderness 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 determine what is natural and what is not.
“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,” Cosgrove relays. “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.”
The Trouble With Wilderness 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 TRACK LIST
THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN
ANORAK
OVERPASS
ARTERIAL #1
THIS RUSH OF BEAUTY AND THIS SENSE OF ORDER
OKLAHOMA WIND SPEED MEASUREMENT CLUB
CAIRN
WILDER
ARTERIAL #4
HADLEY
MELTWATER
TEMPLATES FOR LIMITLESS FIELDS OF GRASS
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