Michael Brook on Revisiting Cobalt Blue, the Infinity Guitar, Film Scoring, and Leaving Work at Work

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Today's installment: 4AD just reissued musician and composer Michael Brook's fascinating 1992 album Cobalt Blue as well as its sorta-companion live document Live at the Aquarium, and if you listen to the records it's easy to hear why: Brook's free-flowing, almost liquid-like guitar textures sound impossibly current in terms of what's going on in certain corners of both overground and underground music, and they also fit in astoundingly well when it comes to the types of sounds some might associate with classic-era 4AD. (His music also sounds like Dire Straits to me, but maybe that's just because I've been thinking a lot about Dire Straits lately.) I hopped on a call with Michael last month to talk about his own revelations from revisiting these records, as well as his estimable career working with luminaries like Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois; he was forthcoming and warm, making for the perfect interview that I think you're going to love reading. Check it out:

How are you doing today, Michael?
A little tired. I did a concert last night, but it went well, so there's that.

What's the concert you played last night?
A solo concert at a really great art space in L.A. called 2220. It was my second solo concert in 20 years, and it went incredibly well—and it might not have.

When you say it might not have, what are some those concerns?
Beyond the usual random elements of good or bad luck, I've been doing quite a lot of film scoring for a long time, and you just don't get time to play guitar that much. I was out of shape, and I'm old, so it was about getting back in shape, walking this tightrope of practicing too much and injuring my hand or not practicing enough. That was touch-and-go, but it all worked out great.

I also haven't had to remember any music in a long time because, for film, you just record it and you're done. When you're playing live, you gotta remember shit, and that's a volatile skill that can go away. Also, the technology is different now. Some of the technology I'm using was from Live at the Aquarium, but there's so many new options that are, in most ways, completely better. Because I do a lot of the technical stuff—like looping myself—live, I have to rehearse a lot so that it becomes muscle memory. That's where the "riding the bicycle" part comes in, and then I can have a conversation to put some emotion into the musical performance. But that requires that I don't have to think about riding the bicycle.

You said it was the second solo concert you've played in 20 years. When was the first?
It was last month, at the Bang on a Can: Long Play Festival in Brooklyn. That went extremely well. Much more luck was involved with that. With this one, I had more time to get ready. Basically, I didn't have enough time to prepare for either of them—but for the one last night, I had more time, and that made a difference.

Talk to me about your memories of putting together Cobalt Blue. Given a lot of what's currently going on in various corners of music, it definitely sounds like a newly relevant record.
I'd done my first solo album when I lived in Toronto, and part of the reason I moved to England was to become a full-time musician. I got some recording equipment and started working on a new album in a fairly undirected way—just exploring and improvising. It was a very long process, partly because I was very much a novice at composing. I'd just mostly played guitar and made up little bits. I didn't think about the compositional process very much. It wasn't on my radar. Also, I completely relied on Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who had much more experience at that. I was experiencing the magic of getting other musicians to come in and play on things, and how that can turn something around or bring some life to it. In the back of my mind was the idea that, now that you have a multi-track, you can just play all the parts. Unless you're Prince or Stevie Wonder, that's not going to be as good, right?

You worked with Daniel and Bob Lanois in their studio very early in your career as well.
Yes.My day job in Toronto was running a video editing facility for artists, and through some friends, I met Brian Eno. He was working on video at the time, living in New York and flying to Toronto to work at my place. He asked me to help him work on his videos as I was starting my first album, and told me to check out this studio in Hamilton that I didn't know about and he'd done some work at. I was playing in Jon Hassell's band, and Brian convinced Jon to come to Hamilton to work with Dan and Brian on one of Jon's albums. I was a peripheral part of that, and that's how I met Dan. Brian was helping me with Hybrid, but he had other commitments, so Dan helped me work on it as well.

Cobalt Blue wasn't the first record you put out on 4AD, but it does fit in very well with a specific sound that some may associate with the label around that time. Talk to me about getting in the mix with 4AD and your relationship with the label around that time.
I was a fan of the label. Russell Mills—the painter and graphic artist who did a lot of album cover design at the time—was a friend, and he organized a series of concerts at his local church in Vauxhall. I played there often, as well as Roger Eno, Dead Can Dance, and Robin Guthrie, and that's how I met Ivo Watts-Russell. We became, not real buddies, but we were on a friendly basis. He asked me to produce Peter Newton's record, and then my involvement became a little more than that of a producer, so both Peter and 4AD graciously said, "We think you should be the co-artist on it."

Cobalt Blue was finished, and it was going to come out on Brian Eno's label Opal. Their distribution deal fell through, and it was looking like that side of things just wasn't going to work out. I was floundering, and quite honestly, it was kind of depressing. You can release anything now because you can just do it yourself, but back then you had to get a somewhat proper label to get anything out. At one point, Ivo and I were having dinner, and he said, "What's happening with the record?" I said, "Oh, you know, it's gone pear-shaped," and he said, "Well, we might be interested in putting it out"—which, I didn't think of what I was doing as totally on the 4AD spectrum. But, of course, that's the thing about 4AD—there isn't one.

One thing Ivo said, because he had this huge hit with some kind of dance thing [M|A|R|R|S' "Pump Up the Volume"]. I said, "How do you decide what to put out, or what you think is going to work?" He was like, "I just put out stuff I like. I have no idea how it's going to do at all." Obviously, he had this genius A&R enthusiasm. So then they agreed to put Cobalt Blue out, and that was fantastic. And you're right—you can see it being in the 4AD spectrum slightly, but also, it's such a wide spectrum with these little dots on it.

It's interesting to hear you mention having this moment where you're trying to find a home for this label and feeling a little depressed about its overall prospects. Following Cobalt Blue's release, were there other moments in your career where you felt things were in flux?
I'd say that's overwhelmingly what happens. People say, "Oh, you've had this long, illustrious career, all these things quite a few people know about." Taylor Swift doesn't deal with this issue, but for so many artists, it's not exactly hand-to-mouth, but there are definitely moments where there's a loss of momentum, and you're just waiting. When I did Into the Wild, which was probably my first score for a feature that got wide attention. I thought, "Okay, now I'm not exactly in the big leagues, but I'm big league-adjacent. I'm going to get all these kind of cool projects with decent budgets." I didn't work for nine months after Into the Wild came out. Nothing happened. I moved to L.A. after Night Song came out on, Real World, and people were excited about that—and then there were long periods where stuff didn't happen. It's just part of the territory, but it does take its toll. I mean, I was just reading your interview with Beth Orton. Who drops Beth Orton? For the vast majority of artists at almost every level, there's long periods of uncertainty and setbacks.

I do think a lot of people who don't have intimate familiarity with how the music industry works are always quite surprised to find out that work that's beloved and has left a legacy—or even has some level of commercial visibility—does not necessarily translate into long-term success. It can be a tough pill for listeners to swallow.
Yeah, there's a little bit of survivalship bias there, if an artist has done some really good projects that have been appreciated, they think, "Well, that's their whole life"—and, mostly, it's not. I'm not complaining, just that's the way it is, but it's a bit counterintuitive.

How did you feel the initial reception to Cobalt Blue?
Of course, in those days, there wasn't any internet, so you just relied on the music press. I could be misremembering this, but it seemed like there were a couple of minor reviews—a two-inch square paragraph in NME or whatever. Essentially, it felt like nothing happened. It felt like I hadn't put it out. I wasn't getting any feedback. I don't think I got any for a couple of years.

It wasn't ahead of its time, but I think the context nowadays is much more open to music like that—and the infrastructure for music that's of a minority taste is more viable these days. I'm so excited it's being reissued, because it feels like the context is now perhaps significantly more receptive to things like it.

The press materials for the reissue mention how, while you were working on this record, you initially couldn't tell whether Brian's contributions were going to work—but after playing it back at the end, you felt his impact on the music after all.
A bit of it was that I had no musical training. I just played in bar bands and high school bands. I didn't have much compositional awareness, and maybe I still don't, in some ways. So I'd been working on this material and assembling pieces that were different ideas combined, and Brian really helped in that. He has an incredible sense of composition and structure, and he'd say, "Why don't you do this, this, and this?" I didn't quite understand, and I went along with it, but it wasn't part of my mindset at the time. Retrospectively, he really helped a lot, and I'm deeply appreciative of that.

You mentioned Live at the Aquarium earlier, which is also being reissued. Let's talk about what the stakes were for that particular performance. In the press materials, you noted that, at the time, you didn't really know how to translate something like Cobalt Blue to a live setting—but it very much has its own sonic life aside its studio counterpart.
What I don't remember was if I was doing any meaningful live performance before Live at the Aquarium. I think I was. I did a series of concerts called Opal Evenings with Roger Eno, Laraaji, and Harold Budd. For Live at the Aquarium, someone had a brilliant idea to do the [album release] party at the London Zoo. In terms of translating Cobalt Blue, that took a lot of work and time incorporating what at the time was—I won't say "cutting edge," but rare technology, like synchronized live-looping. And you're right, it became its own thing. Some of the connections between the pieces are maybe looser than others.

I hadn't listened to either of them in a long time, and when we started talking about the reissues, I listened to both of them. My perspective had changed in that I felt there was a little more emotion and intensity in Live at the Aquarium, while Cobalt Blue feels a little more architectural—which, that's how it was made. But I hadn't really thought of that aspect at the time.

I'm curious to hear you talk about the incorporation of the infinite guitar on these recordings, which is something you'd already conceived of and had worked with beforehand.
I'd always been found Indian music quite seductive. I liked those timbres, and the concept that you can focus on the journey between two notes rather than what the two notes are. With a piano, it's whatever note follows another note—that's it, and it's kind of discreet. In Indian music, there's a lot of ornamentation, and the expression goes into the journey between notes. I always resonated with that. When I started playing with Jon Hassell, who'd studied Indian music and incorporated many of those techniques, I found that inspiring and wanted to be able to bring some of that to guitar.

The challenge with guitar is, to a degree, it's a sort of percussive instrument. You pluck the note, and you can make it last a little bit longer, but you don't have a lot of ability to focus on the journey between two notes. I saw Bill Nelson using an EBow, which would make the note sustain as long as you want, and I found that really inspiring. I thought, "This is going to be great," and I ordered one. But of course, back in the day, you mail a check from Toronto to California and hope for the best—so I never got one. I'd booked time in Dan Lanois' studio to work on Hybrid, and I thought, "Maybe I can make something that'll do that." I'd fooled around with electronics a little bit and at one point considered that as a vocation, so I did some experimenting and got something that worked eventually. Hybrid was the first time I used it, And then it became a big part of what I like to do musically. On Cobalt Blue and Night Song, there's a lot of infinite on there.

People often feel there's a mutually exclusive aspect to being interested in technology and [being interested in] the emotional part of music. I don't find that at all. Fooling around with technology is exactly the same as working on music, in my experience, and I don't feel there's any contradiction between them. Technology is what helps me add emotion to music.

Let's talk about how you've observed musical technology change over the years.
Relating back to the compositional challenges, when I used to work with tape, I'd have to make graph paper and draw these colored lines with bar numbers of where parts happened, so I could have a blueprint for a composition. When DAWs came out, that was exactly how I thought about music, so it was a real breakthrough for me.

For the concerts—and hopefully a tour—my original plan was to take much of the hardware I used for Live at the Aquarium on the road. I used to travel with three flight cases of pedal boards—and I still had, or reacquired, some of the equipment, which worked. This stuff is all 40 years old, it's really heavy and fragile, and it's maybe not a good idea to take it on the road. So I started replacing some of it with software. That's worked out great. Some people say, "Oh, it's not as good as the hardware"—and I think some of it is not as inspiring as the hardware. Sonically, it's fine. But there are more options now. I used to travel with a one-track looper, and now I have eight tracks in an iPad that loop.

It's incredible, and it's in some ways a little bit like the music industry, where there are so many options and resources now. It's great, but it's also overwhelming. I mean, who's buying all this equipment? I just saw a thing from JHS, who make guitar pedals—and they make great stuff—and they said, "We're making a run of this pedal, and the first 6,000 will come to people, and then you'll have to wait." There are 6,000 people who want to buy another distortion pedal? I'm not putting JHS down—their perspective is, "We're going to sell out of 6,000 really quickly," and they probably will. I'm a little befuddled by that side of things, and the same is true with the music industry. There's so much music coming out, so many people doing so many things. It's very hard to imagine how that works. Do those people earn a living? I don't get it anymore, really.

I worked with a musician on his album campaign recently, and he was telling me about how he'd bought all of this vintage gear just to make one record and then sold it all immediately. There is that sensation—I don't know if you can even call it gear fetishism at this point—of stuff that's just being bought up and used before people forget about it or sell it. It's a little dispiriting.
Yeah, I think there's a slight cargo cult aspect, and a bit of fetishism. I guess a significant number of people have more disposable money. There's certainly my generation of baby boomers, where there were a lot of aspirations to be in a rock band, it didn't work out, they got older, their kids are gone, they've got a bit of money, and they think, "I'm going to buy some gear." There's also those YouTube channels, where everyone's got 15 really good guitars on their wall in the background.

I went through a phase where, 10 or 15 years ago, I started to have a little bit of extra money and I thought, "I'm going to buy guitars I really like." So I got the models that the Beatles used, things like that. It wasn't a wise choice. I think 35, 40 guitars—and it's kind of embarrassing—and I play five guitars. Mostly, I play two. It was done in good faith, but I'm not doing justice to those instruments. They don't get played for five years.

You had a bit of a breakthrough moment when Michael Mann selected "Ultramarine" to be part of the Heat soundtrack. It seems like that was also your intro to the world of film scores.
I had a very vague ambition when I lived in London that the ideal world for me would be to do an album once a year, a tour around once a year, and a film around once a year. But it's very hard to get a toehold in the film world. They're very risk- averse, and by the time filmmakers start thinking about music, they're towards the end of the project. They're in post, and often they're stressed out, scared, and tired, so you don't get them at their best. There's a lot of pressure on them financially and logistically to go with a safe bet for a film composer—somebody who's got a good track record—and that's part of why it's so hard to get into.

I had the luck of Chris Douridas at KCRW playing my music quite a bit. Michael Mann would listen to his show as he was driving into the studio every day and call him and say, "What was that? Can you send me this?" That piece got into that film, and I'd instantly jumped the queue a little bit, because I was in a proper, well-respected feature film. It gave me a bit of a badge of credibility with the film industry. It's still hard, but it was a bit of a turbo boost.

I talk to a lot of people about scoring these days, and it's become very prevalent now amongst indie musicians. A lot of people tell me it's one of the only ways to make money at this point, but a lot of people also get into it and find that it's a little harder than they expected. Given that, I'm curious to hear you talk about your relationship to scoring films over the years, and if your approach has changed with the passing of time.
It's a significantly different process in general. For me, making music was just following your muse. There's an exploratory aspect of it. Film is probably like when composers used to have a patron say, "Hey, I need a mass for my granddaughter next Sunday. Can you do that?" You're part of a larger process, and the music is just part of something else.

Another huge challenge is that many filmmakers don't know what they want, and they don't know how to say what they want—so a lot of it is guessing what somebody wants who can't really tell you. That's challenging. One thing I did learn—which can mitigate that to a degree, but not totally conquer it—is asking the filmmakers questions like, "What's your emotional goal here?" Let's not talk about music or instruments—what do you want to happen emotionally in the film? Then there's nuts and bolts things like, "Are there any instruments you really hate?" If you hate clarinet, no problem—but tell me.

Because film is such a collaborative, structured process, sometimes there are people who are part of the decision-making process where you want them involved right away—because there's no point in doing a whole bunch of work, everyone's happy with it, and then somebody who you didn't even know existed says, "No, I don't think that's the right way to go." You can get better results and waste less time if everybody's involved at the beginning. But often, people don't know what they want.

Do you like watching a lot of movies in general?
Not that much. I mean, I love movies, but when people say, "What are you listening to these days?" and I'm like, "I'm not listening to anything. I just spent 12 hours working on music. I'm totally sated." That happens with film, too. I've been working on pictures all day, and if I do watch things, I want a dumb movie like Airplane—something I don't have to think about. I've often been working on something often very emotionally involving, and that muscle is tired at the end of the day.

When it comes to the end of the day itself, what are some of your go-to leisure activities?
Well, I'm kind of on a sabbatical right now. I went to Pakistan in November '24 to record some tabla for a new album, and it reminded me how much I loved being in the music-as-music world. I thought, "I'd like to do this for a while and take a break from films." That's what I've been doing since the beginning of the year, so the end of the day has changed a little bit. Maybe I will watch a movie, or have some wine—but there isn't much of me left at the end of the day, quite honestly, and a little bit of that is getting older. I kind of want to veg out, to a degree—but I'm hoping that I'll have a little more energy, because now that I'm on sabbatical, I don't have to work 12 hours on something and I'll save a little bit of energy for some other things.