Phil Cook’s second solo album opens with an expression of the truest contentment. But first, "Ain’t It Sweet" spends a full minute stretching out: A steady guitar chug beckons a Wurlitzer’s gap-tooth whistle; low fiddle dips around skittish piano notes, before everything whips to a gentle crest. Only then do Cook, his brother and Megafaun bandmate Brad, and Justin Vernon blast the title, exalting like sunflowers at dawn—or a rural bar band toasting a lock-in. The sweetness is Cook’s comfort in knowing that, ultimately, he and his wife will lie together in the ground. He’s not singing about heaven, but turns the gothic foreboding of death-do-us-part into radiant, secular gospel: "Well we’re wide awake then we’re dead and gone/ But we find a way just to carry on."
That’s the stuff, right there—not that carrying on is as simple as just saying so; Cook spends much of Southland Mission attempting to find the way, just as the path to this he record was its own calling. "It had to come out of me," he has said. "I didn’t realize it had to come out of me, but it had to." A decade ago, Cook moved his family from Wisconsin—where he was a member of Bon Iver’s orbit—to North Carolina, lured by the music of the Delta, Bayou, and Appalachia. He played gorgeous, doleful folk rock in Megafaun, complemented the cohorts of Matthew E. White and Hiss Golden Messenger, acted as bandleader for the Blind Boys of Alabama, and produced for Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray. In 2011 he released Hungry Mother Blues, a low-key solo instrumental record that chased Ry Cooder and John Fahey. Southland Mission is a more full-bodied commitment. Whether simple banjo fare, outlaw stompers, or reeling strut, each one of Cook’s modes is an easy and infectious exertion. And like any good missionary, Cook’s fervor is infectious.
Although Southland Mission is studiously steeped in tradition, it wears it lightly. Recorded in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the warmth of the Durham, N.C. community behind the record (the likes of Matt McCaughan, Mountain Man’s Amelia Meath) beams through as its own kind of congregation, though there’s occasionally a homespun gospel duo here, too, in the golden tones of Sophie Blak and Jeanne Jolly. They’re crucial to the record’s two-part centerpiece: chastising Cook for procrastinating on "Sitting on a Fence Too Long" before coming to "Lowly Road", a bluesy spiritual reckoning, which ends with a call-and-response as the duo welcome him home. Like Hiss Golden Messenger’s Lateness of Dancers, Southland Mission handles doubt with the possibility of redemption, reinforced by the record’s persistent, joyous uplift.
Cook navigates the extremes of the squeezed middle class on Southland Mission, staring down what it looks like to fight or flee. "1922" is a cover of a Charlie Parr song about the Piedmont musician’s parents’ Depression-era experiences, where "ain’t it sweet" becomes "ain’t that the way it is." Fed up of giving all his money to the government, a boy leaves his dead end job, gets beat up in a new town, and, dead broke, has no choice but to go back home: "Times are hard here and I can’t roam/ But I ain’t got nothing more." Every verse ends with Cook addressing some "boys," like it’s a tale of bar stool bravado, though choice is never treated as an act of heroism on Southland Mission. "Nothing sacred, nothing saved/ Get your ass on the morning train or get the hell out the way," he sings on "Great Tide", an empathetic epic that swings between tender moments and brisk, reeling jubilation.
Ultimately, choosing to stay and stoke life’s intimacies wins out over fleeing. "Anybody Else", a duet with Frazey Ford, sees Cook resisting easy reassurances in favor of a deep and nourishing love. "Gone" is a parable about how you might as well give it all you’ve got when you can’t take anything with you. To have is not necessarily to hold, and when possession is transient, belonging is all you have. Southland Mission lights up tradition with rare and overt joy and palpable gratitude. It’s an open invitation from a man who’s found home. Say yes.
