Mount Eerie - No Flashlight

^ jesus, i had no idea. the p4k feature is great, dreading the day i listen to A Crow Looked at Me for the first time

knowing that makes a harrowing interview even more powerful.

To me this was the key moment:

“I sometimes think about the life that my daughter will have with no mom,” he wonders. “What does it mean to have a ghost mom? Not that I can do anything differently about it. But it’s an inferior version of what we had planned, you know? This was not our top choice.” We both crack up; grief is funny sometimes.

Jayson is one of the best writers in the game right now; I am in awe of everything he writes

Jayson was the perfect choice for such an intimate interview. Could not have been penned better by any other writer.

Excellent article, it's rare to see Phil this candid

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/phil-elverum-on-creating-art-from-grief/

That Elverum piece was fabulous - so understated and clear-eyed. And I had no idea about Jayson Greene's daughter. Dear god. One would hope for an ounce of such humility and humanity in the face of such tragedy.

streaming on npr

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520013269/first-listen-mount-eerie-a-crow-looked-at-me

Fuck, this is beautiful

yeah, hard to find words for this as a whole but Soria Moria is just breathtaking

http://www.metacritic.com/music/a-crow-looked-at-me/mount-eerie

So this has a 96 on metacritic. Looks like we've got a year-end list juggernaut on our hands.

This album has such potent observational details and emotional heft. Don't think I'll ever listen to it again, but I'm glad Phil can express this way.

this is all i've listened to this week; something hypnotic about it, different guitar lines and lyrics follow me after each listen. is an astonishing work, wouldn't envy anyone who has to review it though.

joanne kyger, whose poem is on the cover, died like two days before the album came out :-/

I too have been listening to this all week. I've been a fan of his work forever but yeah, this is different. It reminds me a bit of my experience with Bowie's 'Blackstar' in that the music is inseparable from what it's about and I wonder if I would feel the same if the narrative was more open to interpretation.

as different as it is though, no one else could make something so understated yet devastating. think this is a really good, thoughtful review about it's relation to his previous work:

http://www.popmatters.com/review/mount-eerie-a-crow-looked-at-me/

am curious about the experience of people new to elverum, hard for me to untangle this from having followed him for years.

this is amazing - the way it plays, rather than wallows, in grief is key to it, plus the brilliant songwriting and arrangements. imo far more devastating than other 'tragedy response' albums of recent years

This album has such potent observational details and emotional heft. Don't think I'll ever listen to it again, but I'm glad Phil can express this way.

― Carlotta's Portrait (Ross), Friday, 24 March 2017 19:47 (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I listened to the album once over the weekend and this is exactly how I feel about it.

Will certainly listen again. Just as the album seems to be flagging those last three tracks come in and they're amazing

all fails
my knees fail
my brain fails
words fail

got through the first 4 songs on this and felt completely drained. i can't get through it. waves of blank depression and meaningless sadness. the NYT review of this is spot on - this isn't "art" really, because art is concerned with aesthetics. it just is. the scariest thing about it is i understand what he said after his wife death - everything lost meaning, it all became absurd. this makes Blackstar look like a party. that's a man staring death in the face, one last rattle and rage. this is soul-sucking.

"It just is."

Yes, it just is. It is also beyond admirable, amazing, soul crushingly honest and extremely uncomfortable to witness. It shakes me up completely and indeed sucks my soul bone dry. Only to fill it up till it overflows with love for life, love for love.

If that is not art, I honestly do not know what is, and I probably do not even care about discussing it. Because life is literally too short.

i'm interviewing Phil soon and i have no idea how to do it. any insights welcome.

Oof. That sounds like once a dream gig turned into a nightmare. Not literally a nightmare, I think Elverum is awesome. But the grief is so all encompassing it's not even an elephant in the room, it is simply unavoidable. A dinosaur of grief crushing you.

But I think you can still have a very meaningful conversation with him. You could ask him about how he feels, now that he put this album out there, it being reviewed as a piece of art, or work, and how that affects him, how that 'response' makes him reflect on the album. The dynamic of putting such a personal thing out in the world is something that would interest me, to read about.

What medium are you writing this for?

a print paper...will be online, too, of course

thanks for the thoughts, LBI. we'll certainly cover that kind of stuff, i'm sure. i'm interested, too.

what i find most fascinating by the whole thing is his response to this loss in his life - that he feels "ripped open" and exposed, so why not just record these songs and play them and talk about them, etc. "My internal moments felt like public property," he has said. TO BE VERY VERY CLEAR: he should grieve exactly how he feels is right. period. and i think "talking about it" is generally thought of as healthy, but it's not necessarily a *typical* reaction, particularly for someone who is somewhat of a public figure.

anyway, i am a human being with loved ones, i figure we'll just have a conversation and i'll go where it leads.

I agree with pretty much all of that and I think it's fine to have doubts. Christ, I'm sure he had them, too (about going in at all, let alone making all this 'public').

I think, essentially, I find it too uncomfortable to listen to. It's not intrusive, as such, as Elverum has chosen to make his grief work public, but the simple fact of being party to watching someone trying to give voice to, to give language to, something which evades that impulse induces a kind of shame. Or it's like that thing that during one of the first American expeditions to the moon, an astronaut accidentally pointed his camera at the sun, which immediately burned out the camera's cells. It was as if the camera couldn't tolerate the source or purity of what its own raison d’etre is to capture and relay.

I took No Flashlight as a reference to being in the dark but maybe it's more about having stared at the very centre of things and having one's cells burnt out. Or both of those things.

this is amazing - the way it plays, rather than wallows, in grief is key to it

I agree with this. I find it sad and intense but not as bleak as others seem to, just relentlessly real. Some of it is even kinda wry? "Do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?"

Yeah, agree with this ^

it's so sad, but i don't struggle to listen to it ... except maybe the part about the backpack. that's tough.

I think Phil does manage to have a good sense of humour and levity despite the heartbreak, which does make the album easier to listen to.

Personally still I don't feel compelled to listen to it regularly, I just majorly hope it has helped him.

I am not sure whether I agree that "unlike many works about grief, though, there is no glance towards redemptive larger meaning, which makes it all the more bracing". I think that actually in recent years there were a lot of critically acclaimed albums (particularly Carrie & Lowell and Skeleton Tree) that seemed to acknowledge meaninglessness of death and they were also a lot less poetical, artistic and a lot more minimalistic than previous records of those artists. But in my opinion this album in a way none of those albums have before poses the question that seemed to be beside the point - after all is it art or is it not art? Some people here find it unlistenable. Some people find it strangely alluring, I actually have listened to this quite a bit. We can probably all agree it's not meant to be art and it doesn't even try, musically or lyrically, to be art, it doesn't offer any explanation, solace, there's really nothing to be learned from it and most people listening probably won't even be able to emphatise with what Phil has gone trough but in the end isn't communicating reality what art is all about? In My Chasms Phil asks "do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?" and for some reason, yeah, they do. :|

I guess what I am trying to say is it's really hard and maybe even shameful to pinpoint what exactly I am getting out of this album

Nice post piramjida

This is also Phil's most functional album yet, I think. Musically and arrangement-wise it's as spare as some of his live recordings and unadorned - which serves the content of the songs and emotion well. It probably wouldn't make much sense to be as layered or particular as his other work.

I still have put off listening to it, but i found even listening to two of my absolutely favourite Phil songs ("Don't Smoke" and "Get Off The Internet") all of a sudden way more heavy, given their life-is-short sentiments.

The very fact that this album exists blows my mind most of the time. The idea of this just being out there, unprotected. It is real. I have this on vinyl, it is in my hands and it's spinning now. A not so gentle reminder of naked, ugly, barren, terrible death; Phil doesn't even try to portray death in a "romantic" way, and he shouldn't, because it's so stark and heartbreaking and real. This really makes me hate any 'romantic' notion of death. In movies, in music, in culture. Which was always something to cling to (in dire need, seek the 'romantic' in things, in bad things, in death...). Doesn't happen here.

Me loving this album leaves me feeling completely inadequate as a human being dealing with loss. I still have no single clue what to do with this album, how to feel listening to it. It feels like I need to either put up a fight or give it up all together. Like there is no leeway, no middle ground. This schism, perhaps, is precisely the point. Nothing makes sense, and that's ok, and here's why etc.

Death is real.

Amazing album

When I was much younger "Maps" by Microphones helped me deal with break up blues.

I hope Phil is able to process what happened and I'll always support him, expressing through art is a gift in the worse of times. I hope he finds peace

this album is utterly devastating and awfully difficult to get through. it's ACCURATE which is a strange thing to say about art but it feels right to say so.

european tour coming up, I hope for his sake he's playing plenty of things besides this album

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DKHVWR7XcAY9zMI.jpg

i would guess he is not. he probably will one day, but i think for now he feels like these songs are the only songs he has.

i am doing some educated speculating, of course.

Lot of Norway shows

great news, he's not just playing songs from a Crow...

By the time Elverum had left the stage, he had played an equal number of album and non-album songs, all about Geneviève.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/in-a-room-listening-to-phil-elverum-sing-about-his-wifes-death

Quick question, the last song on A Crow Looked... is the first track to actually say 'Geneviève' right?

The non album songs on this tour (ie new songs, about Geneviève) are of much the same texture and content. And beautiful. But definitely not a reprieve from those feelings.

my friend saw him recently and the material he is playing is in line with what sean is saying. I saw Phil years back when he was first debuting Mt. Eerie and at that time he only played one recognizable song, "The Blow Pt. 2" and the rest was new songs/songs off newer live records. Not sure he would ever really go back to Microphones material, for better or worse

I watched a video of the new song he's been opening all his shows with recently, "Distortion." good god, what a song - 11 minutes long, essentially one finger picked guitar figure, devastating words just tumbling out... i haven't listened to A Crow Looked at Me since it came out, I couldn't make it past 4 songs...

yes I've listened to it once all the way through and am not sure when I'll feel like listening again. I saw him play with genevieve/woelv years ago and likewise didn't recognise much at all, it was fantastically low key: he wandered around barefoot meandering in and out of songs; she got everyone to harmonise with her. it seems like it will be such a strange gig

re: my last post, i was thinking songs from his past. non-album songs written since G's death, yes, *that* makes sense.

i still think he may never go back to stuff he wrote before she passed.