Gia Margaret and Phil Cook Are Their Own Teachers

Gia Margaret is a Chicago-based composer and songwriter; Phil Cook a is Durham-based guitarist, producer, and composer, who released his latest record, All These Years, in 2021 via Psychic Hotline. Gia just put out her new record, Romantic Piano, on Jagjaguwar, so to celebrate, the two hopped on a Zoom call to catch up about their returns to their native instrument, the piano.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Gia Margaret: What’s up?

Phil Cook: Hey, what’s up! Where are you at today? Where am I Zooming into?

Gia: I’m actually at my friend’s studio. He lives down the street from me, and there was some maintenance work going on in my apartment, so I just figured this is a quieter place. But I do a lot of recording here. There’s a piano.

Phil: Oh, nice. Is that a U1?

Gia: Yeah. On most of my albums, I actually use that piano.

Phil: Oh, great.

Gia: Where are you? You’re just in your yard?

Phil: I’m at my friend’s house. I’m driving to Wisconsin on Sunday, so I had to get my car checked out, and they were like, “Oh, there’s some real shit wrong with it.” So I’ve just been on foot — I walked to my friend Kim’s house and I’m just hanging on their back porch. 

Gia: It looks really nice.

Phil: It’s a nice breeze. It’s great. It’s right downtown in Durham.

Gia: That’s cool. I hope your car is OK.

Phil: It will be. I’m glad it got sorted now, as opposed to, you know—

Gia: On the road. [Laughs.] What are you doing in Wisconsin?

Phil: Well, I’m originally from there, so my whole family are up there, and there’s a lake property we’ve had in my family for over a hundred years that I’ll be bringing my kids up to. 

Gia: Over a hundred years?

Phil: Yeah.

Gia: Wow.

Phil: Yeah, long time. 

Gia: That’s really nice. That sounds lovely.

Phil: Yeah, it is lovely. Do you have any place like that? I mean, you’re living in Chicago — a lot of people in Chicago duck up to Lake Geneva or whatever.

Gia: No, my family doesn’t have anything like that, but I wish. I’m always looking for more reason to be away from the city. But I actually just moved to Evanston, which is just a bit outside of the city, so it’s peaceful. I walk to the lake every day and I feel like I get that nature fix. But it isn’t quite the same. Like when I go to Washington state or even Wisconsin, I’m like, Why am I not living amidst nature? It’s where I feel happiest. But yeah, my whole family’s here, so I’ve just been here my whole life.

Phil: Oh, wow. So you’re born and raised in Illinois.

Gia: Yeah. And then most of my life, I’ve lived in Chicago, in the city. 

Phil: Yeah. I love Chicago.

Gia: Do you? 

Phil: I do. That was the cool city when I was growing up in the Eau Claire area. It was maybe a five-and-a-half hour drive. 

Gia: Yeah, it’s not far.

Phil: Minneapolis was 90 minutes away, so that was the most often visited, but Chicago’s always had a special place in my heart. What do you love about Chicago?

Gia: I feel like I appreciate it so much more now that I’ve been to other places. And especially when I was touring more, just coming home here always feels so great. I feel like it has a very specific energy, but it’s also a pretty mellow city in comparison to New York or LA. I feel like people work really hard here; there’s really nice Midwestern energy. And then I just have so much history here. I genuinely, as I get older, feel more connected to it because of all the movements of my life. I think I had a very love-hate relationship with it when I was younger, like we all do — when you grow up someplace, you’re like, “I’m gonna leave and live this other life somewhere else!” But whenever I leave, I truly miss it. I think being outside of Chicago has been a nice change, but I still have access to it. I think if I were to move, I would have to live in a place that had both city and nature.

Phil: That’s where I live. I love that you mentioned that you’ve take these daily pilgrimages trips down to the lake to be near the water, because I resonate with that a lot. It’s part of my kind of daily rhythm. I just have to get out in the morning and start my day with a different — you know, life is so hectic sometimes and it feels like being in a different vibration that helps me to just slow down. I need to slow down.

Gia: I think that’s something you definitely realize more as you get older. It’s so much more of a priority for me now, even as opposed to, like, five years ago. I can’t function if I don’t have that in my life. I think it’s good for an artist to have pause too.

Phil: Mhm. All the way.

Gia: Slow the thoughts down. You seem like a person who’s actually — truthfully, I don’t know a lot about your other albums. I just love All These Years, and that’s how I was introduced to you. But it seems like you’ve been making music in different kinds of projects for a long time, so I’m sure your mind is very active. I’m just making this assessment about you. [Laughs.] 

Phil: Oh, I’m, like, full ADHD. 

Gia: Me too.

Phil: I’ve had squirrel brain forever and I tunnel in all kinds of different little caverns in there. But thank you for saying so about All These Years I mean, that really represented to me a real honest return to center in my life in a big way. When I was a little kid, I started taking [piano] lessons, but already played anyway — there’s pictures of me when I was a little kid just sitting at the piano and playing. At some point, piano became like the wallpaper — just like our hometowns do, and we’re like, “I gotta get out of here!” You know? So I had to leave piano. I had this instinct like, I know it so well and I just feel so trapped by it. I have all this education under my belt with it now, and sometimes the rules don’t feel like freedom. So I’ve taken a lot of sidesteps into these other instruments to try and understand music and get back to my gut instincts, wherever that is. And once I find them, I kind this continual hunger to keep learning new things, but it’s the same language. It’s what I would sing, but with these different kind of characters and voices. And that’s all been really lovely for me and I’ve learned so much in that. 

I know you play guitar too, right?

Gia: Yeah.

Phil: I find there’s a relationship, once you have another instrument, you start to connect some neurons in your brain about how your fingers move and approach and touch and all of these things. And they do help each other. Even if it’s subconscious. You know, I’m never surprised when piano players learn guitar and they’re playing fingerstyle.. 

Gia: You have the coordination. And I’m sure all of the other different projects that you have dabbled in, that all informed what your piano record would sound like.

Phil: Yeah, absolutely.

Gia: I think it’s a really unique record and I think you have a really — I’m going to use this word again — unique way of composing. And I could tell that you are also a guitar player too.

Phil: You can hear the guitar in there?

Gia: Yeah. I can’t say it as eloquently as you, but there is a relationship, I think, between those two instruments for me too.

Phil: Yeah. You need to spend time with both of them now, not just one. What is that for you?

Gia: I think I had a similar path, where I started with the piano, and then I felt very jaded about the training that I had. And I had this constant feeling, in that world and with that instrument, I was never going to be good enough. Also, I have ADD and I had a hard time focusing — I was never good at reading music, and then when I got to college, I was the person mispronouncing the names of classical artists. I loved classical music and I loved the instrument, but I just was a little less refined than the other people in my program, and I just felt not good enough.

But I truly just loved the instrument. So it’s kind of sad that I stopped playing for so many years, because I think when I dropped out of music school, I was like, OK, I tried that. I’m not good at that. So I’m going to try to become a songwriter. I love music, so I’m going to try to do things in my way. It was just ingrained in my mind that I could not do that on the piano, so I just put it aside for a while. I mean, I think the way that I play guitar, even from the start, was kind of unusual because I refuse to take lessons. I was just like, I’m not doing the training thing anymore. I’m just going to play it my own way. I play in weird tunings and I never know what I’m playing. I never know what key I’m in, even to this day. Now that I’m older, I think I’d like to take some guitar lessons and learn some more advanced fingerstyle and learn different voicings and learn about the actual instrument that I’ve spent 15 years with at this point. 

Phil: Yeah, I think the shedding and walking away — the piano being like a skin that felt too constrictive, or like it was showing us ourselves in ways that brought up unworthiness — I think that’s a really common journey for so many people that I know, and I’ve struggled with it my whole life too. I was in the music department, going to college for music and, I graduated, but I was the only one who played in a rock band. I had all these other loves, and I always felt on the outside, I always just felt like I was just kind of an anomaly there and no one really quite understood me. My love of music never really died, but it was a jazz program, which is based on virtuosity and really sophisticated languages. It was like if I walked into a conversation with a bunch of professors and I just started to use the same words that they did, but didn’t really know quite what they meant or whatever. As opposed to just being like, “Look, dude—” that’s really me. 

That was the reason why banjo was the first thing I picked up off of piano. I did that because it wasn’t guitar and it had five strings and one of them was short, and I didn’t understand what I was playing on at all, and I loved that so much. I just loved the fact that I was only going off of gut and what I heard and what I felt, and that felt like a return to me of how I started piano, why I loved it in the first place. And guitar has a vocabulary with it that’s more known — I mean, it’s almost like the guitar is a metaphor for the United States, you know, where the piano is a metaphor for Europe and colonialism or whatever. But I stopped practicing it. I walked away from my relationship with it that I had for a long time and just kind of went to something else and developed relationships with that. 

And really, what we’re talking about is our relationship with ourself when we’re discovering these new instruments — what is it that we hear, and what is my language on this? I have a longing to express myself, apparently — after all these years, apparently it’s still there. If I don’t play something, I get agitated, I get moody, I get confused. It’s always been like a release valve for my brain, my thoughts. It’s a way to hyper focus down into a moment and just be one with something. I feel like so much of life has this divided, and I feel that all the time. 

What I do like too is that it seems like we both had to return to piano and wake up to the fact that, “Oh, yeah, you’ve been there the whole time.” And in a way, it’s like it never left. It’s always been there. But that return was a big part of unlocking the next chapter for our life.

Gia: Yeah. I think that reconnection was really critical for me. At the time I was feeling very disconnected. It was pandemic, it was just feeling drawn to the instrument again, and yeah, like you said, it was always there. And I think when you start on it, you always have a deep connection to it. Anytime I’d sit at a piano I would feel something. People kept asking me to play on their music — I would accompany people and just add little piano bits to music — and anytime I did it, it brought me so much joy, just arranging. 

And also now that I’ve done it, I’m ready to take some more space from it. I’m returning to guitar and I’m feeling more reconnected to that because I had some space from it. I really relate to what you said about music being something that helps you feel less divided. I remember the first time I wrote a song, I just started crying because it was the first time in my life I could focus on anything. When I play music, sometimes I feel like time stops and I can just live in this elevated space, and my thoughts can just kind of shut down for a minute. And I think when you’re highly sensitive and you have trouble focusing, it’s important to live in a space like that, as a relief from how chaotic things feel for most of your day. 

Phil: It’s therapy in that sense, right? Because what our brains really would love and what our soul and our hearts would really love, is that kind of unity. I also, by the way, cannot read music and every teacher I ever had was frustrated as shit with me. Every teacher I ever had was like, “Phil, you move and sway way too much. You have to stop. You have to sit up straight.” And I couldn’t. I can’t. I bend over into the keys and I just need to be close to it. 

Gia: Why would that be discouraged? Because music is healing.

Phil: I think it’s just that the most known pedagogy of an instrument is piano. There’s so much repertoire, and the only thing that exists for hundreds of years was sheet music — which we’re still playing that music from those hundreds of years. And I think most people, that was just they learned, and they never really learned how to play with music so music just kind of exists kind of outside of them on a sheet. Music is this massive sphere that everyone kind of is included in, and every approach is included in; I think to really have a lifelong relationship with it, even if you take breaks with it, requires that it’s a relationship. It takes two. We need to speak within ourselves in order to have a relationship and build that relationship, and once we do, that’s what gives back. 

I think that’s why most people quit, because they only learn how to read music and then when there’s no music in front of them, there’s no music. I think it says something — if you play for your whole life, the only way you do that is if you learn how to really just play with it. Which is awesome. I love picturing you doing that as a little kid and having a real vindicated moment emotionally with being with yourself in a really authentic way for the first time and realizing music was the vehicle in which you could really be you — in a way that you could actually understand that wasn’t other-focused, that was just for you. No one else had to be there. You were the witness and the recipient.

Gia: And how does that happen? Where does that come from? It’s so crazy to me. My mom was very encouraging of me learning how to play the piano, but then it became, “You have to practice for an hour a day.” And she would even pick some of the music that my teacher would teach me, because I think she just wanted to hear it in the house. But over time, I would practice a little bit and then I would just start making up my own stuff. Then she’d ask me what I was playing, and I’d be like, “Oh, it’s a new piece of music that [my teacher] gave me…” But I would just be making up my own stuff. That started early. I was maybe seven or eight.

Phil: Damn, same

Gia: I remember just making up little things on the piano. It was pretty cool to realize that I could do that, you know?

Phil: Yeah, totally. And also that you were coloring outside the lines and a part of you was kind of getting away with it. Also — you know in lessons, if you haven’t practiced enough, your teacher knows. It’s really clear. I would be Captain Excuse every single time, because the truth is, I would sit down and start there, but I would always venture off into Phil Land. I remember in fifth grade, I had this teacher — the most rigid and least useful teacher for me, who didn’t really see me, I was just slot 3:30, slot 4:30, whatever it was — and she assigned me this piece. It was in C, and I just remember at the time Doogie Howser, M.D. was on television, and I was a huge fan of figuring out TV theme songs — the ending had this little walkdown, and I just added that ending onto my little song for my teacher that week. And she was just like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “I like it!” I don’t know why I did it — I knew probably she was not the person to be vulnerable in front of in that way. It was discouraged. But luckily, my dad can read and he plays by ear, he loves to play, so I always had that reinforcement at home. We’d sit at the piano on Sundays and he would just make shit up all the time, like boogie woogie stuff. So I saw that firsthand, that love, so it didn’t discourage me from still doing it. It just discouraged me from continuing with that teacher. 

Gia: How could she not be delighted at that? I would love that — you’re hearing the same thing all the time, and then your student comes in and plays their piece and they add that at the end. That’s genius. That’s so cute.

Phil: Yeah, well, this is what would separate you and I clearly as teachers now, if we were to be in that position. We would choose a completely different path, because we know the truth within us that she just didn’t contain within her. She didn’t have that mind frame to allow outside of the lines. 

I really love that we have had congruent journeys. But, I think the pandemic has brought me back to the piano because I was stuck at home and like, OK, I’ve played in rock bands, I’ve done all this stuff for a long time… And I always feel like when it comes down to playing key parts in the studio, I hadn’t practiced, like, for ten years. I played in gigs, I did all this stuff, but I hadn’t worked on my craft and worked on my voice and had a relationship with it. So when I came home in 2020 — I already had planned to take that year off, weirdly, so I didn’t have any gigs that I missed — I ended up buying a keyboard with headphones. Because it’s a small house and I have two kids, so because I had to be their teacher at Zoom all day, my only time to really play was from 6 AM until whenever they woke up. 

Gia: Did you notice that that is actually a wonderful time to be creative? Because I feel very creative at 6 in the morning, which feels bonkers. You wake up and you’re like, I have all these ideas, what should I do? It’s quiet and there’s a stillness and your mind is still kind of slow enough that your thoughts don’t get in the way. 

Phil: All these songs were written at dawn. I realized the piano is a process for me. I’ve tried meditation, I’ve tried exercise, I’ve done all these things in my life, but nothing has brought me the serenity, that stillness, other than that instrument — even any other instrument. I just felt like, I want to play in more keys. I’m not going to read music. So I invented my own exercises. 

Gia: Wow. I want to learn your exercises, because I feel like my technique is off.

Phil: I would say I just based solely off of trusting my intuition and my voice — the relationship with the instrument will tell me what the next step is. So if I feel off on one thing, I’ll just kind of invent a little exercise that works that one thing for a couple of days in a row or whatever it is. It moves with me as I move with my relationship. So that has been a really cool way for me to develop and really reconnect. I’m my own teacher right now. 

But I wanted to say something — because we haven’t talked about your music — you use field recordings and other sorts of things in your music, and I really love “Cicadas” so much. I love that D-minor chord that you hit at the end of the first verse. That’s my sauce, dude. 

Gia: Thank you! I’m blushing. 

Phil: Having this outer landscape with the inner landscape balanced is totally what I’m into right now. I’m doing the same thing. We’re really kind of on a similar page. 

Gia: Yeah, I felt like my reconnection to piano and my reconnection to nature was very closely connected, because they were two sources of stillness that I had. I would walk around listening to the piano stuff that I was working on, and then I would be hearing all this nature stuff, and I kind of got used to the way those two things were working together. So I thought, What if I just add this in? I toyed with like taking it out and putting it back in and I couldn’t figure out. I wasn’t trying to be on trend or fit into any… I don’t know, I was worried that it was a little too, like, kitschy. Too cutesy. 

Phil: I understand. But what you said first was the truth, that “these are the two stillnesses in my life.” And so when you put the stillnesses on top of each other, it doesn’t create more waves, it actually just is stillness on stillness. I love it that you do that.

Gia: Thank you.

Phil: Whatever is bringing you stillness should be the things that you place in the space together and see if they live. All of the outside guessing once it’s released are all of our imposter syndromes coming back to haunt us. It’s so hard to get the gumption to trust yourself in that final hour. “Should I, shouldn’t I?” That’s like running from third base to home. Just go!

Gia: Yeah, at the end I was like, This belongs for very specific reasons and I’m going to be grateful later that I just let it live like this.

Phil: I’m so grateful for that.