04-03-19 | Songs for Listening | Brad Cook
Bassist and producer Brad Cook picked tunes at Songs for Listening for Wednesday, April 3. Brad, along with his brother Phil and boyhood friend Joe Westerlund, made up the core of the band Megafaun. (A group they formed after their previous project, DeYarmond Edison, a band including the trio + Justin Vernon, split.) Megafaun was a wonderfully disorienting unit, made of roughly equal doses Americana (the old, weird kind), American minimalism, American funk (50/50 Professor Longhair and P-Funk), and odd American music (the stuff of Beefheart and Zappa). Megafaun put out three LPs and made their final release, an EP with Arnold Dreyblatt, in 2013; this week Songs for Listening features tunes picked by members and contributors to that fine band, Brad is up for Wednesday.
Since Megafaun split, Brad has continued to play bass live and on record, but increasingly he's becoming one of the most in-demand producers in indie rock, working on records for Bruce Hornsby, Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Kevin Morby, William Tyler, Hand Habits, and Whitney, to name a few. By knowing him a little, you can imagine the qualities that draw bands to want to work with Brad: he's voracious, generous, loquacious, and bigger than life. A brief anecdote that will help describe Brad's particularity, for some: in describing his enthusiasm for his work, he once told me that basketball coach Luke Walton was his spirit-animal (note: this is Walton post-Golden State & pre-Lebron).
'Tezeta (Nostalgia)' by Mulatu Astatke from 'Ethiopiques, Vol. 4'
'The Barrel' by Aldous Harding from 'The Barrel'
'Haemin' by Kim Jung Mi from 'Now'
'Riot' by Hugh Masakela from 'Masakela'
'She Turns My Radio On' by Jim Ford from 'Rare Singles & Previously Unreleased Masters, Vol. 1'
