Interview with Megafaun's Phil Cook

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Durham, N.C., experimental folk band Megafaun seems always to be in motion. After two successful LPs (2008’s Bury The Square and 2009’s Gather, Form and Fly), this summer the trio—multi-instrumentalists Phil Cook, Brad Cook and Joe Westerlund—will put out an EP enigmatically called Heretofore. As if that wasn’t enough, May 11 they’ll see the release of Relayted, an album by Gayngs, a supergroup made up of wide-reaching musicians led by fellow Wisconsonite Ryan Olson. They’ll play The Earl Saturday, May 1, when they pass through on their first national headlining tour. We pinned down Phil Cook to ask about the EP, recording with Gayngs and etching out a place for themselves on the live circuit as a band that's constantly evolving.

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Julia Reidy: Would you tell me about writing and recording Heretofore?

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Phil Cook: Honestly, it just happened really fast. We were just home between tours and wanted to do some recording, but the mini-album thing ended up being in retrospect. We didn’t have any songs written, so we wrote it, recorded it, and basically did it all within a matter of six weeks. It’s a new pace for us. The recordings are very straightforward in a way. It took us a few weeks after it was done to really process some of the things that we wrote, to actually sit and go, “Whoa. We totally just did this.” We did the whole thing in a studio, well actually not the whole thing, but like Gather, Form and Fly, our last record, was done totally at home, but mixed in the studio. This new one was recorded and mixed in the studio, and we added a few things at home here and there, but the sound of the record is different, in a way.