Bearings by Ben Cosgrove

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LINER NOTES:

I’ve always been a bit obsessed with motion. It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I’m usually somehow every type of restless at once: fidgeting excitedly while talking to someone feels directly related to the joy I take in walking all day around a city, or in driving a thousand miles to, say, play a show for a handful of people in a barn. It’s been a weird stroke of luck that this aspect of my personality lends itself so well to the work of being a traveling musician who writes specifically about geography: I often feel that I better understand and feel more at home in places the more I depart from and return to them, appreciating a new angle, new light, or new context each time I make my way across a landscape. I make sense of the world by moving around.

There’s a phrase in Gertrude Stein’s thrillingly weird "The Geographical History of America" that has always grabbed me, in which she exhorts the reader to “conceive a space filled with moving.” It strikes me as an apt and helpful way to look at the world: land shifts beneath you; water rushes around you; the sky whirls and ebbs; a rolling wall of lava violently and sloppily reshapes an entire coastline. We watch landmarks fade in and out of view while we’re whizzing down a highway, soaring through the sky, or walking through our neighborhoods. Motion is how distance and space — the shape of the world — can make coherent sense to us.

My music has always reflected this without necessarily focusing on it, and I decided that an appropriate way to get at the idea might be to try recording an album with a process that more directly imitated the way that I interact with landscapes. During the sessions that resulted in my previous album, "The Trouble With Wilderness," I had been struck by how many of the songs that I wrote more or less on the spot — “The Machine in the Garden,” “Wilder,” and the two “Arterial” songs, for instance — felt so vital and honest, while some other pieces I had spent months painstakingly pre-composing never even made it onto the album. I liked the idea of forcing myself to write a whole record on the move, leaving no opportunity to overthink these songs before they’d had a chance to breathe. And conceptually, there was something about having to find a song in the moment by moving around the piano — feeling out its contours like you might learn those of a landscape by walking across it — that felt important, and true to the way I engage with the world in the rest of my life.

This album comprises music about many different types of places: some of it reflects time I was able to spend learning the rolling landscapes and wild skies of Chase and Waubansee Counties in Kansas, while other songs are inspired by my experiences following volcanologists across Hawaii and northern California, intellectually hanging on for dear life while expert scientists patiently explained the violent, irregular, and liquid rhythms of the earth to me. There’s a song here named for a museum in rural Vermont, a piece inspired by the sounds of a rail yard in Cincinnati, and a riff on a folk song by a friend in northern Minnesota. But all of these songs — and indeed, pretty much all of the songs I’ve written for years, whether they’re about estuaries, highways, rivers, avalanches, storms, or something else — are fundamentally about movement.

I’ve never written an entire album in quite this way before, and I’m very grateful to the people who helped me do so. In particular, I’m indebted to Dan Cardinal, whose impeccable ear, generous spirit, and wizardlike mastery of audio equipment enabled us to expand these songs from simple piano textures and melodies into three-dimensional, inhabitable soundscapes without compromising their intimacy, and to Kevin Harper, who patiently and expertly engineered the initial sessions, in which I sat at his piano for days while slowly and stutteringly feeling out the edges of this new set of songs. Thanks also to my friends Harris Paseltiner and Paul Kinsman for lending their instruments in all the right places, to Charlie Parr for so warmly endorsing my take on his fabulous song, to Katie Ione Craney for the use of her striking and beautiful artwork, and to NASA, the GEODES team, Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, the Volland Foundation, the Tallgrass Artist Residency, the University of Maryland, and the National Parks Art Association for their remarkable support of this project.

Finally, and most of all, heartfelt thanks to all the people who continue to offer encouragement and support as my music and I make our way through the world. You’ve made my life into a wonderfully strange and gratifying adventure, and I’m very thankful to all of you for listening.

- Ben Cosgrove, Autumn 2023

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and landscape enthusiast.

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