He sits at the piano, his back bent into a shape that resembles the round crook of a shepherd’s cane; he calls to mind the cartoon George Gershwin in Disney’s Fantasia, if not in his music then certainly in the mood he’s created, or maybe it’s just this room. The lights send out red floods that catch the frizzy halos around people’s heads and glow off their faces, blue ones that tint their cheeks and trace the edges of their chests.
What do people hope for when they enter a room like this? Cook tells us he’s connecting—us and himself—with the child he once was, discovering the upright piano in his parents’ living room and making out of it a friend, the same way he did, he says, with the instrument he’s playing now.
His tracks are short, self-contained. Plaintive but not melancholy. They end, often, unexpectedly—not abruptly but playfully, like a wink after a good joke or a smile after a sad story. I hear in his songs the DNA of things I listened to ten, fifteen years ago, all that sad music with a funky heart from Justin Vernon and his friends, of which Cook is one. I think of the Bon Iver show at the Pilot Light in Knoxville after which Vernon walked around the dingy room and shook everyone’s hand, all of the five people there. (That memory does not belong to me but to a friend’s ex-boyfriend.)
A hush has fallen over the crowd. This always happens; shows like this feature a lot of feigned solemnity, which is similar to sleep in that at some point during the faking it becomes real. The fact that there’s no singing, just piano, helps. I can hear the bartender stirring ice in a shaker, then dumping it out. Someone behind me rustles something inside of a bag. Cook plays a song with a lilting rhythm that sounds like it should soundtrack a tracking shot of a woman on her way to fall in love. Someone behind me is sniffling, but I am too aware of their physical proximity and perhaps too respectful of their privacy to turn around to see if they are crying or suffering from allergies.
People like Cook make you forget how hard the piano is to play, how easy it is for it to sound clunky and discordant, or just corny. Briefly I send up a prayer that the woman behind me stops cooing every time he wraps up a track and that the people in front of me put away the phones they’re using to record thirty-second clips of Cook at the piano. I remember the time I saw Wilco and Jeff Tweedy kept interrupting the show to ask people to please put their phones away—this was before smartphones, when the most anyone would get out of a camera phone was tiny, grainy footage no longer than a few seconds—and finally bent down into the crowd, snatched a woman’s phone from her hand, and kept it in his pants pocket for the remainder of the show. You’re never going to look at that video and you’re never going to be in this room again, I think he said. That was the sentiment anyway.
Notes reverberate through the air; liquids vibrate in their glasses. I wish there weren’t food around; I’m not enjoying the smells, the squishy shapes. Light silhouettes the curved edge of what looks like a bánh mì; I’ve never liked a sandwich less. Cook winds toward an ending; he’s been taking us somewhere all night, songs conjuring images, space unfurling between notes. We’re together down here, but he’s alone up there. Whenever I’m in a room like this one, I feel acutely the inescapability of my own perspective. Look at all these people I’m not.