Photo ALLYSON FOSTER
Phil Elverum has announced his latest Mount Eerie LP, a brutally honest portrayal of his wife’s passing from pancreatic cancer last year. According to a press release, “these songs are not fun. They are pretty and they are deep, and they find a love that prevails beneath the overwhelming and real sorrow. It is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie catalog in its unvarnished expressions of personal grief, metaphor-free.”
Here’s what Eleverum had to say about A Crow Looked At Me, followed by its lead single and an excerpt from the album’s one admitted influence, Will Oldham…
Why share this much? Why open up like this? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? Our little family bubble was so sacred for so long. We carefully held it behind a curtain of privacy when we’d go out and do our art and music selves, too special to share, especially in our hyper-shared imbalanced times. Then we had a baby and this barrier felt even more important. (I still don’t want to tell you our daughter’s name.) In May 2015 they told us Geneviève had a surprise bad cancer, advanced pancreatic, and the ground opened up. What matters now? we thought. Then on July 9th 2016 she died at home and I belonged to nobody anymore. My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea leftover from a more self-indulgent time before I was a hospital-driver, a caregiver, a child-raiser, a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known.
DEATH IS REAL could be the name of this album. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That’s why.
Mount Eerie
A Crow Looked At Me
(P.W. Elverum & Sun, March 24th)
1. Real Death
2. Seaweed
3. Ravens
4. Forest Fire
5. Swims
6. My Chasm
7. When I Take Out The Garbage At Night
8. Emptiness pt. 2
9. Toothbrush/Trash
10. Soria Moria
11. Crow
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