Ali Cook has lived multiple musical lives, and all of them converge in Ali and The Wild Geese, a project that feels both inevitable and unexpected. She comes from a high-level freelance orchestral career as a double bassist (National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony) and with the soul of a genre-melting songwriter, Cook doesn’t so much cross boundaries as quietly dissolve them.
Ali and the Wild Geese is a modern string band that weaves together the raw storytelling of Americana with the precision of chamber music and the energy of indie-folk rock. At its heart is Ali’s crystalline, soulful voice anchored by virtuosic interplay between bass, guitar, violin, mandolin, accordion. Like Crooked Still’s boundary-pushing roots or Punch Brothers’ bluegrass-meets-Bartók inventiveness, the band’s sound is both timeless and unexpected.
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June 16th, 2025
Next is available for purchase on Bandcamp, here.
Why Buy Direct on Bandcamp?
Because music shouldn’t be a commodity—and artists shouldn’t work for pennies.
Streaming platforms like Spotify have rigged the system. They pay artists $0.003–$0.005 per stream—meaning you’d need 250,000 streams just to earn $1,000 (before labels, taxes, or splits). Meanwhile, CEOs pocket billions. It’s a broken model that devalues art and forces musicians into unsustainable hustle.
Jan. 10th, 2025
Debut album, Next, was released on all major platforms.
YouTube | Apple Music | Spotify | Amazon | Deezer
Jan. 6th, 2025
Austin’s KUTX 89.9 featured the song Bad Detective and is part of debut album, Next, which was released on January 10th. Taylor Wallace-Riegel wrote, “with Cook’s arrangement, each member shines through. The story’s whir of a journey through the fruitless effort of trying to answer the question, ‘where did it all go wrong?’ is embellished by the song’s own whir of time signature changes and quick solo exchanges.”
