Cook had previously been to the studio for separate Daytrotter sessions with his former band Megafaun and The Blind Boys of Alabama, as well as albums with Amy Ray (Indigo Girls), New York-based songwriter Doug Keith and Asheville country roots band The Honeycutters. The experience convinced him that Southland Mission yearned to be recorded in North Carolina, at which point he says the only answer was to take it to Echo Mountain. “It was the first time I was overcome with an emotion that I had made something beautiful - and made something that was so true to me as a human being and my existence on this planet. listened to it as, like, an outsider,” Cook says. “It was the first time I’d actually heard something complete that I did that completely came out of me, or came through me, and came out the other side. On the fourth day of total meditative focus, he listened back to his recordings - and what hit his ears brought him pure happiness. Each night, he ate a bowl of soup and slept between four and five hours, rising poised to resume playing. Knowing he was needed back in Durham in less than a week, he embarked on an experience he likens to being in a sweat lodge.Īccompanied solely by his dog, and making no contact with the outside world, Cook repeated a cycle of recording for four hours, then taking a 15-minute walk. After following a road that crosses into Virginia before winding back into the state he’d just left, Cook set up his gear and recording equipment. A year later, seeking the time and solitude to work on songs that his modest house and parental responsibilities to his young son didn’t afford, he blocked off four days at a friend’s cabin high in the mountains of Ennice, N.C., situated on a breathtaking overlook.
Cook debated using his many recording connections and “bro deals” in the Midwest and also considered going to New Orleans, where he planned to recruit exclusively local players.
In the album’s infancy, such priorities weren’t as clear cut. “It was really important for me to stay in North Carolina to make the record that I needed to make instead of leaving and going somewhere else.” “I think it’s kind of the recording heart and soul of a lot of the important and relevant music that’s come out of North Carolina in the last 10 years, which is why it was a big goal for me to get there and actually make my record there,” Cook says. But while label and PR descriptions, and even the insightful essay by Cook’s wife, Heather, vaguely refer to the location of those sessions as, “a studio in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” Cook himself makes it no secret that the mystery site is Echo Mountain Studios. The show also marked just more than a year since he had recorded his newest album in Asheville. That date coincided with the decade anniversary of moving from Wisconsin to Durham so that Cook could immerse himself in the N.C.
21, a venue the multi-instrumentalist folk rocker last played in April 2015 as part of Hiss Golden Messenger. The latest step on this Tar Heel odyssey is a return to The Mothlight Thursday, Jan. Phil Cook’s Southland Mission is thoroughly a North Carolina album, so much so that at any of the junctures in its creation when it seemed he would exit the state, he was promptly pulled back in.
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