“Cochran creates his own brand of ambient Americana. His varying choice of instrumentation and mood goes a long way towards conjuring up vivid images in the listener’s head.” — Uncut
“Another carefully spun canvas of subtle emotive pulls, TV and filmic-like soundtrack scores, ruminations and mirages.” — Monolith Cocktail
Kentucky-via-Devon, UK multi-instrumentalist/producer Myles Cochran releases his sprawling opus You Are Here, available today in double-LP, CD and digital formats.
The album was just praised by Uncut magazine for its “varying choice of instrumentation and mood [that] goes a long way towards conjuring up vivid images in the listener’s head,” with Cochran hailed for “creating his own brand of ambient Americana.” The track “Making Something out of Nothing” was also featured on the Best New Music bonus CD that accompanies the latest (September/Springsteen) issue of the magazine.
Over many years spent refining his recording chops, Cochran crafted a singular, dreamlike blend of instrumental twang, jazz, folk, and chamber music with faint touches of electronic programming and dub. You Are Here feels at once rootless while also anchored in a very defined sense of place.
“You have to understand,” says Cochran, “that when I was growing up in Kentucky, country music was everywhere, but it was a world apart. It was the sixties — if you were cool, (or trying to be) you didn’t listen to country — even, possibly especially, in Kentucky. I grew up in a musical household, but my parents listened to the Modern Jazz Quartet, Leadbelly and Bach; I was busy with the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. The first inkling of what we were missing was, ironically, the film The Last Picture Show, with its Hank Williams soundtrack — it took an outsider to show us the value of what we took for granted. I didn’t start playing guitar until just before I moved away, and it became clear as soon as I started writing songs that country music was a part of my musical DNA — it was just there. So that’s kind of how my sound became such a blurry amalgam of twang, jazz, folk, and chamber elements.”
https://mylescochran.bandcamp.com/album/you-are-here
Indeed, on You Are Here, lilting steel guitar melds in a dreamlike swirl alongside dusty standup bass, soaring cellos, and Cochran’s myriad acoustic and electric guitar flourishes, with a splash of electronic production thrown-in for good measure. The album revisits the singer-songwriter’s instrumental side heard on his 2021 release, Unsung. Save for one song with vocals, You Are Here sprawls out across the course of its nearly hour-long runtime, covering a vast expanse of distances and moods; Cochran applies his time-honed songwriting acumen to what he refers to as “songs that just happen to not have words.”
“No doubt,” he continues, “it’s the atmosphere of the music that people will notice right off the bat, since I’m not spelling things out so much. And it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to describe this music as ‘ambient Americana,’ whatever that’s supposed to connote. But in terms of structure, buildup and dramatic payoff, I was very much trying to write actual quote-unquote songs. I also found myself being drawn away from monochromatic emotions. This album was made during a time when so many people were losing people around them, when it felt like we were all kind of traversing this giant chasm together. But, to my ear, it doesn’t come across like an elegy.”
“Sure,” he adds, “the mood is speckled with mournfulness. I mean, I was certainly in that kind of space at times while making this music. But when I listen back, mourning is just one color in a larger mosaic of sensations that I get from these tunes. And honestly, I couldn’t even quie tell you what the mood is on most of them. And I’m the one who made them! It wasn’t planned that way; that’s just how it fell into place. A lot of the album actually feels very spirited and alive to me — almost defiantly so, even though it’s very gentle music.”
Cochran, who now splits his time between the rural English county of Devon and gritty East London, half-jokingly refers to himself as a “displaced Kentuckian,” but it would be too convenient to say that You Are Here reflects only his separation from home, or any sense of rootlessness from a life that’s turned into something of a long migration — first from Kentucky to New York City, then to London, then France and, eventually, back to England. There’s something almost ancient and primordial, in fact, in the wellspring of American stylings he’s able to tap into.
“If you’d told me prior to moving overseas that I would someday live in Europe,” he explains, “I would have laughed. I’d have had no idea how to even envision what such a life would look like. But I’ve been away from the States for decades at this point. One of the most important things I got from Kentucky was this intense sense of place. On the other hand, there are times when it feels like ‘home’ is an abstract concept that slips through my fingers. And yet, here I am after a crazy adventure of a life, close enough to see my granddaughter regularly. Things don’t necessarily come back around, but they kind of settle of their own accord. You get to where you don’t fight it. This album reflects all of that on a number of levels. Kentucky will always be a part of who I am, but in some ways I was ‘displaced’ before I ever even left.”
“It’s the same,” he muses, “with the styles that come through in my writing. I look at all the stuff I grew up listening to as ‘American music.’ The lines between them don’t exist for me anymore — and I like it that way.”
