Last year, when Phil Elverum released A Crow Looked at Me, his latest album as Mount Eerie, he said that, surprisingly, the songs had "poured out quickly." After the tragic death of his wife, the musician and artist Geneviève Castrée, he'd hunkered down in her room, recording with her instruments and emerged with set of moving, spare, plainspoken songs that grappled with the moments leading up to and following her passing. The record was meant to "multiply [his] voice saying that I love her," and it arrived like a sprung leak or an untamable river, a font that couldn't easily be stopped up, even if writing songs wasn't what he most wanted to be doing in the midst of that period.Improbably, maybe even uncomfortably, he managed to bring those songs on tour for much of last year, singing the details of her final days night after night—occasionally skipping the grimmest bits. In the midst of those dates, the faucet turned back on, and by the time A Crow Looked at Me came out, he was already playing more new songs that grappled with similar feelings. But these new compositions were a bit more cosmically focused, both in their compositional meanderings, and in the way they zoomed out a bit, dealing not just with the intimate feelings but the odd circumstances that surrounded them, like having to play these at a festival in Arizona, then leaning on Skrillex's tour bus and staring up at the sky.
January 19 – Auckland, NZ – Academy Cinemas
January 21 – Perth, AU – Mojos
January 23 – Sydney, AU – City Recital Hall
January 24 – Melbourne, AU – Melbourne Recital Centre
January 25 – Castlemaine, AU – Theatre Royal
February 22 – San Francisco, CA – Swedish American Hall (Two Performances)
March 22 – Maspeth, NY – Knockdown Center
March 24 – Los Angeles, CA – The Cathedral Sanctuary at Immanuel Presbyterian
March 29 – Portland, OR – Revolution Hall
March 30 – Vancouver, BC – The Vogue Theatre
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Today, Elverum has announced that he's collected some of those songs onto another new album called Now Only, and released the first of them, an 11-minute heartbreaker called "Distortion." That messily fingerpicked track was one of the uncomfortable highlights of the show I saw him play at a former synagogue in South Brooklyn. It begins with a tribute to Castrée's memory, then pulls back, looking across his whole life, and beyond, for a meditation on death, memory, and what lasts when we're gone. There's a pregnancy scare and a desire to "echo beyond my actual end" and the hazy recollection of a Jack Kerouac documentary he once saw on an airplane.Elverum has long wrested with existential questions and on Crow he even proposed a rejection of his previous conceptual grappling, suggesting it bore no weight before he "knew his way around these hospitals. But "Distortion," at its epic length, and epoch-spanning scale, feels like his grandest attempt at pinning down the questions of mortality that—he says in the song—have plagued him since he was a child. As he attempts to untangle these impossible questions, he fingerpicks dutifully, treading onward, in spite of all of the rubble that surrounds him.Now Only is due on Elverum's own P.W. Elverum & Sun on March 16, and shortly after its release he'll head out on another tour. Those dates are below.Mount Eerie tour dates:
January 19 – Auckland, NZ – Academy Cinemas
January 21 – Perth, AU – Mojos
January 23 – Sydney, AU – City Recital Hall
January 24 – Melbourne, AU – Melbourne Recital Centre
January 25 – Castlemaine, AU – Theatre Royal
February 22 – San Francisco, CA – Swedish American Hall (Two Performances)
March 22 – Maspeth, NY – Knockdown Center
March 24 – Los Angeles, CA – The Cathedral Sanctuary at Immanuel Presbyterian
March 29 – Portland, OR – Revolution Hall
March 30 – Vancouver, BC – The Vogue Theatre