Kyle Kellams: We haven't checked in with Emmy-nominated composer and musician Amos Cochran for a bit. He's been busy recording soundtracks for two productions for Mattel, releasing an ongoing monthly series titled “Piano Sketches” the first Friday of each month, and preparing for a Feb. 7 concert at Skokos Performing Arts Center in Alma titled “Immersive Sonic Dreamscapes”. This is one of his compositions, Diving Bell.
The Feb. 7 concert is his first this year, and it's presented in partnership with the Arkansas Arts Council touring active roster. The last time Amos Cochran was in our studio was in 2024, when he was preparing for a new score for a production of “Our Town” that also took place at the Skokos Performing Arts Center.
Amos Cochran: When we did “Our Town”, the crowd was invited to be on stage and I was off to the side, mainly because it was just piano and it was about the performers. But Chuck King, who's the head of the Skokos right now, he and I were talking about what if we did a show in the same fashion where we had the audience on stage with us?
The piano will be there in the middle, kind of right, raised a little bit with some neat lights and fog. And one thing we realized about inviting people on stage is actually they have to walk through an empty auditorium to get onto the stage. And there was something about, we didn't expect to experience this, but as that play got closer, we were all making this walk every day onto the stage and it was just a different headspace. It was a totally unexpected way to enter a show.
And I think one of the things I've been striving for for the longest time is always a slightly different experience of something. When I started playing live, I guess it was 2018. I was really unhappy with the spaces to play. It was either play in a bar with a TV going or play in a concert hall, was a bit stuffy, so I kind of, I feel like I've been for a long time been crafting this sort of found middle space.
And I've done that for years and years and years and it's been great. It is a bit exhausting because you do run out, you know, you eventually go, well, gosh, how many more middle spaces can we find? So this one felt like a really cool way to start the year. I want to play live a bit more this year. And yeah, the show at Skokos is going to kind of hark back to “Our Town” in the sense of the setup, but I'll be doing one of my full solo piano show nights.
Kellams: “Immersive Sonic Dreamscapes”. Immersive, we're already getting, because you've got everybody up there on stage with you. So sonic dreamscapes?
Cochran: I believe, is actually something Katy Henriksen like coined for me a long time ago. And I think people use this. I mean, I'm not the first person to use sonic dreamscapes, but it stuck. I guess we did an interview here and she used that in the title and it was like, ah, for the first time, it's like that resonated pretty heavily. So I tend to pull back to that.
Because I think if you look at it as just a solo piano show, I don't think it does credit to the concepts. And so anytime you can put something neat like that in the title, it immediately makes people question it. And I think with art, with everything we're doing, we really we're just asking people to ask questions to themselves. So I always like when a title can be short and concise, but ask a good bit of questions.
It's really for you to answer, and not so much me to tell you what it should be.
Kellams: To a degree, it erases the line, to a degree, because you'll still be the performer. There's no way around that. But it does sort of erase part of the line between performer and audience.
Cochran: Always. Yeah, I think that's been something, not intentionally, that I've always been doing, but I have come to understand in the last few years, I think that barrier is really, I don't like it. I don't like this real idea of hierarchy so much in performance, because I always come back to, and this took me a long time to understand this, and I'm still trying to understand it. But, you know, the performance isn't about me at all. It's not even about the music. It's about you, and it's about your experience with what you're hearing and where your mind goes.
My job is just to get through these things. I'm not trying to tell people how they should think, how they should feel, where their mind should go, what they should look at, what they should not look at. It's my job to sort of craft that space for an hour and a half and let anybody who's going to take the time to listen, let them go wherever they want to go.
Kellams: What do you think the value is… How many people will be on stage? Let's say it sells out.
Cochran: You know, I should know this and I don't. I think it's probably around 150, 100, 150, which would be a lot actually, if there were that many people there, I would that would be quite amazing. So. But I've never counted. I've never loved that. I think I've always said I'd rather play to 10 people that really want to listen, than 300 people that don't care.
Kellams: The reason I ask is, what do you think the value is? Because you could do this at home for your family. But presumably there will be some strangers, some people who know you. What's the value of those of us experiencing this concert together?
Cochran: Right. I think that's something I've worked on for a long time because I don't play live a lot. Hoping to change that a bit more this year, like I mentioned. But I think we can hit a point where by ourselves in our room when we play, we can sort of land on this level of perfection. It's like, oh, I did it. I got it right.
The minute you put another set of eyes on you that totally changes. It's like then all of a sudden it matters a little bit more. It's like it really counts. And I also think there's the importance of writing the music, learning the music is great. It's sort of like 50% of it, but until you hand it over for at least one other person or as many people as you can to hear it and experience it, then it actually becomes something.
And so that's what live performance really has always been as well. It's like the music can't truly have a moment unless it is really experienced live. And it's very different than recorded music.
Kellams: Are you at all self-conscious
Cochran: When I'm playing? Oh, I mean, I'm always a bit terrified, you know? I mean, I'm always a little bit terrified, but I think that's important. But when I start playing, it just depends. That's one of the reasons I'm crafting the set a certain way, actually.
I found this is something I've been thinking about a whole lot. This again, getting back to this concept of practicing in our room and then performing. My daughter does theater. Same concept. She can work on a song in my little studio with me in there all day long. The minute another person walks in, it's like, oh my gosh, it feels so different.
My son runs track and we've been talking a lot about how much he and I go up and run at the track, just us and how we time things and do stuff. But the minute he's really lined up and, you know, the start goes off with other people, it's so different and you can't really practice that. And my youngest daughter, she's the same with dance. As far as how well they'll do in practice versus a routine.
So this is a concept I've become quite interested in. And I think only in live settings can we really, truly experience it. I've found I've been doing more Instagram lives when I do these Piano Sketch albums, but I've found even doing the Instagram Lives, just having a just knowing that maybe another person is watching it and you get a little nervous and it changes it. So I've also been crafting the set with an opening song. It's a new song and it really lets me sink in. It's not that my music is strangely precise, actually. It's very simple. So when you put a lot of space in music, there's a lot of room to mess up.
Kellams: Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
Cochran: You know, like, if you're gonna go bum bum that second note, if it's wrong and there's space after it, it's like, oh God, it's wrong, and nobody knows, really. So, but I'm, I have an opening song, and I did this. I did this one other time last year, and it really let me settle into the show because it's a little more, it's not improvised at all, but it's a little more loose, and it allows me to kind of settle in.
So I'm really curious to see. I mean, this is my first one of the year, so we'll see how it goes. I played a show I guess last September and October, and I haven't played live since then, so it's always a little scary.
Kellams: You mentioned you didn't play live a lot in 2025, but you were working. You had scores.
Cochran: Oh I had oh yeah, I had a lot of scores. Some really cool score stuff. I was able to, in the spring especially, and in early summer, scored a feature film out of Memphis called “Hoop Street”. That was really great. And some documentary work. And then I had a really cool opportunity to do some scoring work for Mattel. I scored a Hot Wheels series and an American Girl doll series for them, which was pretty wild, which was pretty wild time, very different caliber of everything.
Kellams: You still do that in Alma, though? At home?
Cochran: Yeah. I mean, I do it at home in the studio. Yeah. I mean, all the main work happens at home, and then I'll take a lot of the final mixes. Went to the studio, Soul Studios in Fort Smith, where my main crew still is when we have the opportunity to work together. But that was kind of neat to see what that caliber of really corporation is like.
Kellams: What does Mattel tell you about what they want to hear? Do they tell you anything?
Cochran: Well, for American Girl, they were super specific actually. And we went back and forth a whole lot. And there was, there was a lot of figuring that out. They actually already had a main theme song that was going to be one of their new songs. And so I pulled elements from that and then crafted a score around it.
And then with Hot Wheels, Hot Wheels was great. They were just like, do whatever you want. And we just like, I got the guitars out and I got my bass out and I got to just really kind of go crazy. So that stuff was a lot of fun.
Kellams: Amos Cochran came to the Carver Center for Public Radio last month. He'll perform “Immersive Sonic Dreamscapes” at the Skokos Performing Arts Center in Alma on Feb. 7. Doors at 7, music that evening about 7:30 p.m. The concert, presented in partnership with the Arkansas Arts Council touring active roster. You can learn more about his music on his Instagram page, his handle @amoscochran. And by the way, his series called “Piano Sketches” can be found on all music streaming platforms.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
