OUT TODAY: BEN COSGROVE’S NEW LP THE TROUBLE WITH WILDERNESS

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 

SPOTIFY // SOUNDCLOUD 

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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BEN COSGROVE RELEASES NEW SINGLE “THIS RUSH OF BEAUTY AND THIS SENSE OF ORDER”

BEN COSGROVE’S NEW SINGLE  “THIS RUSH OF BEAUTY AND THIS SENSE OF ORDER”  OUT NOW

  NEW LP THE TROUBLE WITH WILDERNESS  OUT ON APRIL 23RD  

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 

LISTEN: “THIS RUSH OF BEAUTY AND THIS SENSE OF ORDER” 

SPOTIFY // SOUNDCLOUD

Boston-based Ghost of Paul Revere keyboardist and instrumental folk composer Ben Cosgrove has released “This Rush Of Beauty and This Sense Of Order,” the newest single from his forthcoming LP The Trouble With Wilderness, produced by indie-folk maestro Dan Cardinal (Josh Ritter, Darlingside, Lula Wiles, Session Americana, The Ballroom Thieves) and set for release on April 23rd. “This Rush Of Beauty and This Sense Of Order,” was inspired by a poem by author E.B. White of Charlotte’s Web fame about gardening and gardeners: "Not sun, not soil alone can bring to border / This rush of beauty and this sense of order.” The poem speaks to the ways in which people have attempted—with varying degrees of success—to apply some degree of spatiotemporal organization to the natural world. 

“Gardens present interesting situations where all these organisms that want to explode, multiply, and take over are all ratcheted into straight and reasonable rows and columns and painstakingly maintained at certain sizes and shapes,” explains Cosgrove. “In this song, to reflect that tension between order and disorder, I tried to build a sense of joy, chaos, and expression out of a bunch of rigid, blocky chords and stilted gestures. It's tied pretty closely to the idea the whole album is about, which is basically that 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. “This Rush Of Beauty and This Sense Of Order” follows the release of album tracks “Overpass,” “Templates For Limitless Fields Of Grass” and “The Machine In The Garden.”

“OVERPASS”

SPOTIFY // SOUNDCLOUD 

“TEMPLATES FOR LIMITLESS FIELDS OF GRASS”

 SPOTIFY // SOUNDCLOUD

“THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN”

 SPOTIFY // SOUNDCLOUD

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. Cosgrove has spent a lot of his career in collaborations and artist residencies with national parks, performing solo across the lower 48, and all of his solo compositions have been centered around those kinds of areas - until now. With the new LP, he encourages us to recognize beauty in the smallest blades of grass breaking through pavement, and in structures that have been overtaken by the wildness of nature. You can hear this when you listen to the album's tracks, as he distills his observations and brings them to acoustic, percussive life on his keyboard. 

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.

CONNECT WITH BEN COSGROVE:  

WEBSITE || FACEBOOK || INSTAGRAM || TWITTER || BANDCAMP || YOUTUBE || SPOTIFY  

BEN COSGROVE’S NEW SINGLE “OVERPASS” OUT TODAY NEW LP THE TROUBLE WITH WILDERNESS OUT ON APRIL 23RD

BEN COSGROVE’S NEW SINGLE

“OVERPASS” OUT TODAY

NEW LP THE TROUBLE WITH WILDERNESS

 OUT ON APRIL 23RD 

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

LISTEN TO “OVERPASS” via SOUNDCLOUD // SPOTIFY

 Pianist/composer Ben Cosgrove has released “Overpass,” the newest single from his forthcoming LP The Trouble With Wilderness, set for release on April 23rd. Each track on the album is about finding beauty in everyday spaces - not just places "set aside" for their scenic attributes, like natural parks, but in the cracks of sidewalks and rusted building structures and anywhere else our eyes land. "Overpass" was inspired by a big interstate highway that ran between the town where Cosgrove sheltered-in-place last year and the river beside it. Of the song, he says: "I was struck again and again by the absolute jungles of plant life exploding from all its edges, particularly under all the various little bridges that carried the highway over little streams and roads and such. It’s centered on that guitar-like repeated pattern at the beginning, but as the song goes on, its focus broadens to all these hazy, raw, interesting textures at the edges of the melody – much like the plants growing from the concrete, or like watching the landscape change as you drive down a highway.” “Overpass” follows the release of album tracks “Templates For Limitless Fields Of Grass” and “The Machine In The Garden.”

“TEMPLATES FOR LIMITLESS FIELDS OF GRASS”

 SPOTIFY // SOUNDCLOUD

“THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN”

 SPOTIFY // SOUNDCLOUD

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. Cosgrove has spent a lot of his career in collaborations and artist residencies with national parks, performing solo across the lower 48, and all of his solo compositions have been centered around those kinds of areas - until now. With the new LP, he encourages us to recognize beauty in the smallest blades of grass breaking through pavement, and in structures that have been overtaken by the wildness of nature. You can hear this when you listen to the album's tracks, as he distills his observations and brings them to acoustic, percussive life on his keyboard. 

“I found I was spending a lot of time on stage 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. The new songs illuminate his 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 moments on the album recall the work of George Winston, Keith Jarrett, Nils Frahm, or Ludovico Einaudi, his extensive experiences performing with bands like Ghost of Paul Revere are evident in more percussive, rhythmic songs like “The Machine in the Garden,” "Overpass," 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.

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, tapped and plucked noises from all over the inside of a piano snapping wildly over a graceful bassline, or delirious, ecstatic arpeggios that slowly burst free of their constraints. 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. 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.

CONNECT WITH BEN COSGROVE:  

WEBSITE || FACEBOOK || INSTAGRAM || TWITTER || BANDCAMP || YOUTUBE || SPOTIFY