For more than a decade pianist Ben Cosgrove has quietly combined his lifelong passion for nature and music. He traipses around beautiful wilderness and then composes music about how it moved him. While Cosgrove has also built a career as a touring pianist and sideman with New England bands like Ghost of Paul Revere, his wordless solo compositions, a blend of folk and orchestral music, has been his most personal way of communicating the beauty of vast valleys, the richness of forests and the power of oceans.

That’s what makes the self-described landscape-inspired musician’s fifth album so much different than his previous work. Rather than look at those beautiful places as the standard definition of nature, he looked at the nature outside his front door. While the pandemic certainly helped him along in his effort in a time when he was not allowed to travel, the idea had actually been percolating before lockdowns.

“I felt like people were maybe taking the wrong message from my shows,” he said in a recent video call from the side of the freeway (Cosgrove was on his way from Maine to New Hampshire to play a supporting role at a friend’s concert). “I worried that I was maybe reinforcing an idea about what nature is and where we might find it. I think that it’s actually sort of unhelpful and destructive to think of people being in one place and nature being somewhere else that you go to visit.”

The 12 songs on the album are ruminations on the natural forces in everyday life, such as a vine-covered freeway overpass, the magic dichotomy of wind turbines (human-made yet powered by nature) and overgrown gardens. Recalling the music of George Winston and Nils Frahm, they’re Cosgrove’s way of focusing attention toward under-appreciated parts of peoples’ lives.

“That’s what I’ve always thought, and yet I would get on stage every night and tell stories about the middle of the ocean or a national park. I didn’t really have any stories about nature as it actually appears in people’s normal lives,” he said. “To correct for that, I decided I’ll write a whole album about this stuff. Then a pandemic happened, and I like couldn’t leave my neighborhood. It was kind of like the universe forced me to walk the walk. It called my bluff.”

I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a musician who has described himself as “landscape-inspired.” You’re describing yourself like an architect. Where did you find this direction for your solo music?

Ben Cosgrove: I’ve sort of always written music about nonmusical things. I’ve just always found it a useful tool for processing my experience with these other parts of the world, or as I go through my life. It was around the time I was in college that I discovered that I was very interested in things like geography and place, environmental history and landscapes and all these fields I really didn’t know existed. It felt very natural to turn my music towards trying to engage with those subjects. My interest in them ran so deep that I haven’t gotten bored with it yet. It feels like a continually fruitful thing to try to work through and figure out.

Many touring musicians feel more comfortable in dingy bear-stained halls than hiking a national park; where does this passion come from?

I feel very lucky. I feel as though I do get to inhabit both of those worlds. I get to play in a dive bar and then hike in the woods for seven days, and then write music about both things. The fun thing about writing about place is that you get to think about each of those in the same category.

You’ve partnered with parks; how do those partnerships work?

I’ve done a lot of artist residencies with different parks and in national forests. I’ve worked with Acadia National Park and White Mountain National Forest, Isle Royale National Park. … The park or whatever the institution is gets publicity because there’s this artist running around making work about it, and for me it’s this great creative cattle prod. You’re thrust into a new and foreign environment, and you have to figure out what about it is most compelling or confusing or worth making music about. A couple of the best ones I’ve done have been places that I didn’t really know well.

I did a year-long residency with the New England National Scenic Trail, which is this hiking trail that goes from the Long Island Sound to the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border. It’s in the same category as the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail, but it’s 200 miles long and it’s in Massachusetts, so no one really knows it’s there. They were very interested in having somebody who could run around and play shows in all of these little towns this trail runs through, in libraries and backyards and breweries. … And tell people that, “Oh, by the way, this thing is in your backyard and you can walk to New Hampshire if you want.”

And I’ll do one or two public programs while I’m there. I’m doing one this summer at Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas. And then afterward I’ll write some music about it that, as I run around the country playing shows, at some point in the night I would wind up playing the song and talking about this location. It’s good exposure for these sites; for people to know they’re out there. Once I realized that I was writing music about landscape all the time, this sort of emerged as a way that I could do that and also feel useful to the world and part of a community. It’s always a nice break from touring, too.

It’s an untapped market for musicians, I think!

Turns out! There are a few of us out there. It’s funny, though. There are other musicians who write about landscape and it’s always a thrill when I bump into another one, because all of us have a different strategy for doing it. Some people … will evoke the sound of a bird or conjure this river that goes through. I’ve always found it more useful to try to focus on the subjective experience of a place and then write about what that is like.

The inspirations on The Trouble With Wilderness were close to where you lived. How did you let them affect you? Would you go out to an overpass and stare at it until a song came? Did you take a keyboard with you and doodle around until you had a melody?

I just moved into this new sublet and was getting to know the town. I would go on these long walks every day, just kind of rambling around and looking at stuff. Because I had decided to look for these places where wildness and manmade things overlapped, I started to notice them more than I would have otherwise. Ordinarily, I’d be driving eight hours to play a show somewhere.

There’s an interstate highway that runs right through the town I was living in western Mass, and it was totally overgrown by weeds … in a beautiful, overwhelming way that I never would have noticed otherwise. I’ve always liked roads, too. I think it’s so interesting to have a physical, stationary thing that is nonetheless defined by movement. There’s people moving across this thing all the time that don’t know about the ferns and ivy that are crawling up the sides of it. So that song [“Overpass”] is supposed to feel kind of kinetic and in motion, but also there are these things creeping around its edges that you don’t really notice until a song has been going on for a while.

There’s a song on there about piles of debris that are on the side of town. There’s a song about wind turbines [“Oklahoma Wind Speed Measurement Club”]. There’s something about plants growing through the cracks in the sidewalk.

What I tried to do with a lot of the album—once I decided what the subject matter would be— was to figure out a way to make songs that could somehow sound mechanical and organic and kind of ethereal all the same time.

I find wind farms very evocative and beautiful because there are these very obviously manmade, almost eerie, things. These identical things stretch for miles and miles. But the way in which they move is completely dependent on the wind. I was looking, throughout the album, to places where it was hard to say what was wild and what was not.

“This Rush Of Beauty and This Sense Of Order” was inspired by a poem by E.B. White (“Charlotte’s Web”). Is poetry something that often inspires you?

I often am. … I read that poem and really taken with it. I copied it down in my journal and was trying to figure out why I thought it was neat. When I began this album, I thought it perfect for this. It’s about order and chaos within a garden. I’ve written other songs about poems. It all winds up about place and landscape in the natural world, in some way, but most of the stuff I read and listen to also about those same subjects.

“Templates For Limitless Fields Of Grass” is written of different takes on a repetitive theme. That seems representative of the point you were getting across on the entire album. It’s not meant to transport people somewhere else but to pause and look around where you are now.

It’s about finding and appreciating the ways in which surreal and magical experience can come from something you might initially think is ordinary and not worthy of attention. The song is built from repeating one or two arpeggios over and over and over again. It’s inspired by this art project. I just love the idea that you could mechanically reproduce this thing over and over and over again, and it would wind up in a situation where you do feel kind of like removed from ordinary reality. You’re in this new transcendent space that you don’t know how to can move around inside of it, you don’t really understand how it works. … It’s like if you say the same word over and over and over and over again for 20 minutes, you will eventually notice all these sounds that are part of it. What the album hopes to do is show people how there is opportunity for wonderment and disorientation and transcendence in stuff like sidewalks and weeds.

Each song features you playing an acoustic piano, often in unconventional ways. In what ways do you use the piano other than playing the piano?

On some songs you hear all the hammers flying around, you hear my limbs moving, you hear me huffing and puffing. In many cases we packed the piano full of fabric and cloth to mute the strings. In other places, we put little tea lights across the inside of the strings so that when I would play, it would rattle uncontrollably. A lot of the album, I tried to take as much control away from myself as I could, which is a very hard exercise. Since the album is about how everything is wilder than you think it is, it felt appropriate. In other places I’m playing the inside of the piano with a pair of chopsticks or strumming the strings by hand. It’s made to seem both very up close and visceral, but also kind of unreal and confusing.

What effect do you hope this music has on people? Is there a way you want them to be moved?

I want to remind people that the everyday world you move through is every bit as wondrous and worthy of attention and awe. It is as full of beauty as a national park or a wilderness area might be. There’s these peculiar natural/unnatural situations happening all around us all the time, and for so many years, I was not giving them the time of day with regard to what I was writing music about. I just tended not to look down.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.