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Apr 28, 2020 By Lily Guthrie Photography by Libby Rodenbough Bowerbirds

Hailing from Durham, NC, indie folk band Bowerbirds return with a double single release, the first holler we’ve heard from them after an eight-year hiatus. “Endless Chase,” accompanied by a self-directed music video, and “Hazel Eyes” are spawned from the mind of multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Phil Moore, who is now the sole member since Beth Tacular left the band. Listen to the songs below.

Since the release of Bowerbirds’ 2012 LP, The Clearing, Moore and Tacular had a child and broke off their relationship, but Moore marches on, making music with Bowerbirds (while Tacular focuses on her visual art). The two latest songs were inspired by Moore’s childhood memories of birdwatching in Florida, and he analyzes the mechanics of a moment, giving shape to his search for identity.

Moore had this to say about the songs in a press release: “I went through kind of a major break up. I made a lot of memories in those 12 years and became part of myself in those 12 years, but then a lot of these songs were just inadvertently a way to mine the past and remember I was a human being before that. ‘Endless Chase’ is pretty simple… it’s all about remembering the confidence of youth. I strung that into the video. It’d honestly been a while since I’d ridden a bike at all. ‘Hazel Eyes’ has maybe more specific visual memories—a cabin in Northern Minnesota that I used to go to as a kid. That’s at least where I chose to start writing that from visually. Again, the same thing—my juxtaposing the feelings of when I was a child to now, when you could just space out and feel like there were places in the world that were free, like being on that lake and feeling like, ‘Oh, I’m out in the wilderness’—and juxtaposing that to now, where, no matter what, we’re kind of all in a capitalist rat race. And the further you kind of get into independence as a youth, you start realizing more and more things you need a permit for that, you can’t just be free.”

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