Ben Cosgrove - The Trouble with Wilderness (2021)

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. 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. This is obviously not something that I believe at all; in fact, 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. 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 all this in mind, I set myself to the task of writing a set of songs that would be about the wildness found in ordinary places, and focus on situations and environments whose human and nonhuman elements are more weirdly and complicatedly interrelated. (My timing turned out to be apt, too: no sooner had I begun work on this project than a tiny microbe brought the world to its knees, swatting down any illusions we might have had about the borders between the natural world and our own.) So this album 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 say exactly what is natural and what is not. There’s a song about wind turbines and another about piles of debris. The final track, a long pseudo-improvisation based on small alterations to one repeated, modular idea, is inspired by an art project of the same name by an artist named Gary Kachadourian, which presents a small series of richly detailed pen-and-ink drawings of grass blades and invites the viewer to use them to create a vast, immersive, and surprisingly organic physical environment of her own by photocopying the images hundreds of times and pasting them to her walls, filling room after room with a kind of artificial wilderness.

To record this music, I had the enormous pleasure of working with Dan Cardinal, a thoughtful and brilliant producer and engineer with a real genius for getting interesting noises out of a piano, at his studio in Boston. I'd self-produced my previous recordings, but with this project it felt right and important to be able to relinquish some control of each tune at some point or another: to carefully work up a song and then release it into the wild, in a sense, by inviting Dan and his battery of crazy machines to rough it up a bit. I also spent an excellent couple of pre-pandemic days with my friend Kevin Harper at his studio in Nashville, where we collected a few of the cool felted piano sounds heard here. I should also mention and recommend all the work of the landscape writers J.B. Jackson and John R. Stilgoe, the book Rambunctious Garden by Emma Marris, the anthology The Great New Wilderness Debate, and the essay by William Cronon from which this album takes its title, all of which were very much at the front of my mind as I was writing this music. Help and advice came from all corners throughout the process of making this thing, and I am deeply grateful to all of my friends and relatives who put critical ears and eyes on the album during the time it took for it all to slowly come together.

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; 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.


— Ben Cosgrove