Mount Eerie - No Flashlight

lots of press/interviews for Now Only that i haven't gotten around to reading yet:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/03/mount-eerie-now-only-interview-phil-elverum/555485/

Totally agree, in that people might refrain from the new one, but 'Now Only' is indeed so much more that ACLAM pt 2. We have a rolling worst P4K thread, wholly justified, but that review you posted KM is absolutely wonderful. So understanding, down to the nitty-gritty, and so compassionate in judging this new album on its merits, instead of just on its narrative. The latter, I can see why, would scare away a lot of people. But 'Now Only' is a beautiful beast, in its own right.

from that atlantic interview, it sounds like there might be more to come in this vein:

Kornhaber: Was there any trepidation about doing two albums in a row in the same mode, on this same topic?

Elverum: Not at all. It wasn’t over. I had more to say still. And I didn’t want to stay in that feeling of A Crow Looked at Me. I knew the only way out of it was to continue writing songs. There wasn’t even really a gap in the production. I just kept writing.

I almost made Now Only a lot longer—there was this one song I’ve been trying to write for a long time, and I’m still chewing on that. That would be part three. Three seems like a good number to wrap up with and then do something else.

Kornhaber: So it might be a trilogy.

Elverum: Maybe, but I’m not holding too tight to that idea. I have been feeling happier lately, and more healed. I don’t think there’s going to be an end to grief. It’s a lifelong process and this loss will be with me forever. But lately I’ve been not dwelling in it so much.

in a reddit AMA recently he mentioned that Benji was an influence on the lyrics of the last two albums, as it helped him to realise that poetry and metaphor could be abandoned for blank honesty

of course, this album is much much better than any of Kozelek's recent material

there's a little bit on that in the atlantic interview, too:

Kornhaber: Death is one of the great topics of art through history. Did anything about how culture has portrayed grief ring false to you once you went through it yourself?

Elverum: It all felt false. In my time of being just destroyed, I went through all my poetry books and nothing spoke to me.

No, that’s not true—there’s this one Gary Snyder poem [“Go Now”] that cracked things open for me in a really useful way. It’s written basically in the same style as A Crow Looked at Me, very graphic about the mechanics of disease and the death of his wife: the cremation, the smell, her teeth jutting out. No poetry involved. Just describing it. That opened up for me the idea of I don’t have to interpret this. I don’t have to make it pretty or find wisdom in it at all. It’s okay to just describe what happened, then leave it at that. There’s no lesson.

Listened to this straight through today, sat in my local university library staring st the snow. It was perfect. I can remember entire sections of the lyrics, impressionistically at least - like it was transfusion as much as listening. Almost tempted to say I'll never listen to it again.

Meet Phil Elverum, Michelle Williams’s husband. The actress married the acclaimed singer-songwriter (who performs as Mount Eerie) this month. https://t.co/qNBmtHFxIr

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) July 26, 2018

uh

WOW

I really don't care about this sort of thing at all normally but this is cuet, good for them imo

yeah good for them! also what

yeah, it's like cool, but also, wait what?

i know this is terrible but i'm imagining the next album being a similarly blunt, stream-of-conscious style take on meeting billy crystal backstage at the people's choice awards or something

huh, shitty to name his daughter when he seemed pretty against it in every interview from the past couple of years, hope they're all happy though.

Relevant section from the main article:

By the time you read this, she and her partner, singer-songwriter Phil Elverum, whom she met through a mutual friend, will have been married in a secret ceremony in the Adirondacks, witnessed by only a handful of friends and their two daughters. Her new husband, an indie musician who records and performs under the name Mount Eerie (and, before that, the Microphones), also lost a partner in tragic circumstances while parenting a small child. His late wife, illustrator and musician Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with inoperable stage-4 pancreatic cancer in 2015, four months after the birth of their daughter, and the two very private artists went public with a GoFundMe page to help defray medical costs. Castrée died 13 months later, in July 2016, leaving Elverum with an 18-month-old daughter. In the past two years, he has released two raw, critically acclaimed albums, A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only, that unflinchingly explore grief, death, and the utility of art in the face of loss. Williams calls her relationship with Elverum “very sacred and very special.” In July, he packed up his home in Anacortes, Washington, and drove across the country to live with her and their daughters in Brooklyn.

“I never gave up on love,” she later tells me, saying that she has spent the 10 years since Ledger’s death looking for the kind of “radical acceptance” she felt from him. “I always say to Matilda, ‘Your dad loved me before anybody thought I was talented, or pretty, or had nice clothes.’ ” I can hear her voice crack. She sometimes can’t believe that she’s found this kind of love, at last. “Obviously I’ve never once in my life talked about a relationship,” she says, “but Phil isn’t anyone else. And that’s worth something. Ultimately the way he loves me is the way I want to live my life on the whole. I work to be free inside of the moment. I parent to let Matilda feel free to be herself, and I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.”

Williams decided to open up about her relationship, as she did about her income, on the chance that other women might find hope or instruction in her story. “I don’t really want to talk about any of it,” she says. “But there’s that tease, that lure, that’s like, What if this helps somebody? What if somebody who has always journeyed in this way, who has struggled as much as I struggled, and looked as much as I looked, finds something that helps them?” In the end, she says, what she’s learned is simple: “Don’t settle. Don’t settle for something that feels like a prison, or is hard, or hurts you,” she says. “If it doesn’t feel like love, it’s not love.”

imagining the next album being a similarly blunt, stream-of-conscious style take on meeting billy crystal backstage at the people's choice awards or something

Sheryl Crow Looked At Me

lol

well, as others have said, good for them! i don't know anything about michelle williams but from that little snippet she seems cool

nice to think about greatest showman money funding 50 more mount eerie records

Damn

This is cool

Also the Adirondacks rule, so good choice.

Amazing news

It's weird feeling so happy about two people I've never met but ya, this is really sweet.

lol @ all these "Who is Phil Elverum?" articles popping up though.

Sheryl Crow Looked At Me

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.), Thursday, July 26, 2018 6:43 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:D

Yeah this is amazing news, good for him.

Yeah really happy for Phil, one of the nicest guys I have ever met in music.

This is cool news, very happy for both of them!

viva michelverum

whoa

I really liked this piece: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/love-is-real-on-phil-elverum-marrying-michelle-williams/

I think Now Only is probably the best thing Phil has ever made

really great timeline in the new Exclaim from his inception to newest record. How is the new one then, i am still suck on microphones as my favourite records, though ocean roar and the companion album blew me away

*stuck

i enjoyed this internet video of 'the microphones' (new lyrics at the start?) and am excited to see phil play in a couple of weeks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFktCAxQj8M

It starts with kd lang's "constant craving". There's a new take on the "took my shirt off" verse at the end though... at least I haven't heard either of these things in this song before. Interesting!

He played a ~20-minute new song at the start of the set that was basically an autobiography of the Microphones '95-'03, played a handful of old songs (incl. "Lanterns," "I Cut My Hands Off"), and then closed with another new songs that was a pretty stark and direct accounting of his past year and break-up and return home...

thanks for that fits!

of course! suffice to say the show was really something special, and the new songs are both great--if a lot more like his recent rambling mode with Mount Eerie than like anything Microphones (a distinction he discusses within the song at one point)--I hope he records them

haha knew big phil wouldn't tough out the east coast. take the man out of PNW but you can't take the PNW out of the man.

Correction to what I said about there being new lyrics in that video... that was a bit of "The Glow Pt. 2 (sequel)"!

ldn show last night, phil opened with the aforementioned microphones song then played about ten new songs - all very lyric heavy like the last couple of records seemingly all about the last year or so. friend spoke to the promoter and apparently he was able to come over for the one off show because he's been working with gaelic singers in ireland, which is v intriguing... anyway show was fantastic, really enjoyed it

shit i had no idea he was playing london last night. or been working in ireland.

was just about to chime in to ask if anybody went to the london show. i love that i can rely on on ilxor as my sole portal for contemporary music news.

wish i could give more detail but i was a little drunk

new album Lost Wisdom pt.2 out 8 November, collaborating with Julie Doiron again like on the original Lost Wisdom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhKoeYiGTWs

i really like the single "Love Without Possession", and i think Now Only is the best thing he's ever done so i'm very much looking forward to this.

can't listen atm but statement reads like these are the songs played live recently, is the single in similar style to the last two records?

oh!!! he played 2 shows with Julie in Montreal on Sunday - they still seemed a bit shaky so I didn't think they had recorded together (as much as i hoped)

beautiful and heartbreaking songs, mostly about the end of his recent relationship. (he seems upset about it still.)

it's more major key and the melodies are more direct and less rambling than anything on the last two, while the lyrics aren't so stream of consciousness narrative in style. it's still a fairly sparse folk song that gets going a little bit in a wonderful moment towards the end, it's not that removed but i prefer it to anything on A Crow Looked At Me to actually listen to already

Not to be confused with the song "Lost Wisdom Pt 2" from 2009 album "Wind's Poem". Or maybe it is. Looking forward to this!

Didn't recent shows have a long song dealing with his recent divorce, sort of in the style of Now Only? His press release text makes it sound like there won't be any of that sort of thing here, but then there's only 8 songs? It doesn't exactly sound like he's going "back" to his previous sort of material either. Phil will just continue to Phil. Really glad to hear of another project

the track times are on itunes - there's one 7-minute track but the rest are pretty short and it's only 31 minutes as a whole