Boston-based Ghost of Paul Revere keyboardist and instrumental folk composer Ben Cosgrove has released “This Rush Of Beauty and This Sense Of Order,” the newest single from his forthcoming LP The Trouble With Wilderness, produced by indie-folk maestro Dan Cardinal (Josh Ritter, Darlingside, Lula Wiles, Session Americana, The Ballroom Thieves) and set for release on April 23rd. “This Rush Of Beauty and This Sense Of Order,” was inspired by a poem by author E.B. White of Charlotte’s Web fame about gardening and gardeners: "Not sun, not soil alone can bring to border / This rush of beauty and this sense of order.” The poem speaks to the ways in which people have attempted—with varying degrees of success—to apply some degree of spatiotemporal organization to the natural world.
“Gardens present interesting situations where all these organisms that want to explode, multiply, and take over are all ratcheted into straight and reasonable rows and columns and painstakingly maintained at certain sizes and shapes,” explains Cosgrove. “In this song, to reflect that tension between order and disorder, I tried to build a sense of joy, chaos, and expression out of a bunch of rigid, blocky chords and stilted gestures. It's tied pretty closely to the idea the whole album is about, which is basically that there’s wildness to be found everywhere: even in the most constructed and artificial environments, there is always something beautiful, chaotic, and anarchic at work, doing its part to rattle the edges, to crack the sides, to burst forth and bloom. “This Rush Of Beauty and This Sense Of Order” follows the release of album tracks “Overpass,” “Templates For Limitless Fields Of Grass” and “The Machine In The Garden.”
The Trouble With Wilderness is a lush, textured, and expansive set of 12 new songs that consider the role of nature and wildness in the built environment. Cosgrove has spent a lot of his career in collaborations and artist residencies with national parks, performing solo across the lower 48, and all of his solo compositions have been centered around those kinds of areas - until now. With the new LP, he encourages us to recognize beauty in the smallest blades of grass breaking through pavement, and in structures that have been overtaken by the wildness of nature. You can hear this when you listen to the album's tracks, as he distills his observations and brings them to acoustic, percussive life on his keyboard.
The Trouble With Wilderness is an uncommonly beautiful set of songs and a massive step forward in Cosgrove’s idiosyncratic and increasingly mature body of work. Like the vernacular landscapes he looked to in composing it, the music on The Trouble With Wilderness sits on the narrow balancing point between order and wildness and manages to lean simultaneously into both.
