In this episode, we announce this academic year's Doig Center theme— “The West as Palimpsest"—and the programs this fall that this theme will entail.

This episode features Ben Cosgrove, the composer of Wrinkles in the Map's theme music. Ben is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist whose work explores the intersection of sound and place. He's drawn to landscapes that aren’t traditionally grandiose and majestic but rather opaque and mysterious–the shadows lurking around a corner, the uneasy way the light falls on a hillside while a storm blows the grass sideways, the ever-changing sand spits of a coastline. It’s here, in these places that resist easy definition, where we are sometimes most attuned and present to the world around us–and to the interior landscapes of our experience of it. In this conversation, we talk about the power of music to say things that words perhaps cannot, the power of witnessing new places as integral to the creative process, and why his songs don’t have lyrics.

https://www.bencosgrove.com/

Songs heard in this episode:

15:09 Break

24:46 Aubade

33:06 Salt

39:07 Brinckerhoff

43:45 Glass

Back in March, we were thrilled to co-host in Bozeman the Twelfth Annual Eccles Family Rural West Conference in partnership with Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. The conference was a kind of microcosm for one of the big takeaways from the day, which was the importance of creating organic opportunities for connection across different identities, cultures, ways of knowing, and belief systems. The day was so packed with insights and conversations that there were all kinds of insights that I wanted to process further so they could be distilled and offer a chance for further reflection from our Wrinkles in the Map audience. So I invited my counterpart Dr. Zephyr Frank, Faculty Director of the Bill Lane Center, on the show today to talk through some of those insights and takeaways.

Rural West 2026 Article by Kylie Gordon

Zephyr Frank Migration Maps