Keeping up with Phil Keaggy’s fingers

“Pretty much, my recordings tripled by the time I started working in this room.”

Phil Keaggy, the legendary guitarist and CCM pioneer, is referring to the studio in his home where he has made nearly all of his recordings for the last 35 years. But when he says that they’ve tripled, he’s probably underestimating.

As of this writing, his Bandcamp page lists 390 releases. Displayed as his latest are Strings & Sonnets, a 2024 collaboration with the Anglican poet Malcolm Guite, and Up All Night, a 2025 collaboration with the drummer Tyler Coomes and his brother, the Lettuce bassist Erick. So when he agrees to an interview, you assume that those are what he’d like to discuss.

And they are. But first he wants to discuss something even newer: Deep Water, the debut album by the prog-rock supergroup of which he’s a member, Cosmic Cathedral. It’s the brainchild of Neal Morse (keyboards, guitars, vocals) and also includes Byron House (bass) and the Genesis alumnus Chester Thompson (drums).

Released by the Sony-distributed InsideOut, Deep Water is Keaggy’s first appearance on a major-affiliated label since—well, since he started recording mostly at home. “It’s a real musical triumph,” he says. “The way the album wraps up, it really glorifies the Lord.”

He’s referring to the 38½-minute Deep Water Suite, and he’s right. He credits the album’s sessions with helping him to “get [his] facility back” after the left-hand surgery that he underwent last summer to alleviate trigger finger and trigger thumb. “The hand,” he says, “is 80% as strong as it used to be.”

If Keaggy at 80% is better than most other guitarists at full strength (he is), Keaggy at 100% is something else altogether. Which is where Up All Night comes in. Credited to “Coomes Keaggy Coomes,” it compiles sessions that Keaggy recorded with the sons of Love Song’s Tommy Coomes as a kind of therapy after the death of their mother last year. No one sings, everyone jams, and a good time reminiscent of the era in which electric blues began developing a funky bottom line is had by all.

No one sings on Strings & Sonnets either, but Malcolm Guite recites, and his arresting voice plus his poetry’s lyrical nature plus Keaggy’s atmospheric guitars make the album an aural feast. Guite’s ability to combine reflections on Scripture (and, in two poems, the Inklings) with the traditional 14-line format makes it a spiritual feast as well.

Speaking of feasts, Keaggy’s also planning a deluxe edition of his 1976 album Love Broke Thru (“with alternate mixes and isolated tracks so you can hear how Mylon [LeFevre], Annie Herring, and Matthew Ward sounded in the backgrounds—it will really move you”) and a “tastefully edited” vinyl edition of Glass Harp’s Live! At Carnegie Hall.

If keeping up with his releases sounds exhausting, Keaggy understands. “I have,” he jokes, “missed half of them myself.”