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Oct 01, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Indigo Free

Mount Eerie (aka Phil Elverum) is releasing a new album, Night Palace, on November 1 via Elverum’s own P.W. Elverum & Sun label. Now he has shared another song from it, “I Saw Another Bird.” Listen below.

Elverum had this to say about the song in a press release: “Behind the dry smirk of the title (sequelling out from A Crow Looked At Me) there are huge feelings that get opened. We are ridiculous little people toiling on the ground, but the sublime darts around above us always. We can pause, chill, and resume the conversation with the big unknown. This song tells how, in a toe tapping way.”

When the album was announced, Mount Eerie shared two new songs from it, “Broom of the Wind” and “I Walk,” the former via a music video.

The last Mount Eerie album was 2019’s Lost Wisdom pt. 2. It was a collaboration with singer Julie Doiron (in 2008 Elverum and Doiron previously collaborated on the Mount Eerie album Lost Wisdom). In 2020 he also revived his previous musical moniker, The Microphones, releasing the first album under that name in 17 years, Microphones in 2020.

In 2017 Elverum released an acclaimed album, A Crow Looked At Me, which was followed in March 2018 by another equally acclaimed album, Now Only. Both were written after his first wife, Geneviève Elverum (née Gosselin and also known as Geneviève Castrée), passed away in July 2016 after losing her fight with pancreatic cancer. Geneviève was a musician and comic book artist who had recorded as both Woelv and Ô Paon. Geneviève was diagnosed with inoperable, stage four pancreatic cancer just four months after giving birth to their daughter and died a year later, leaving Elverum to raise their infant daughter on his own. But then in July 2018 it was announced that Elverum had married actress Michelle Williams (alas they divorced the following year).

A press release says that Night Palace was written and recorded in the aftermath of these life-changing events, as Elverum attempted to settle into his new life. As the press release puts it: “After a natural disaster, things do grow back. A person catching their breath after a traumatic experience has a kind of reoriented clarity. Art that is made without urgency or expectation has a chance to reach beyond the usual. It was in this patient clarity that Night Palace came to be written and recorded from 2022 to 2024. Elverum’s life settled back down and he reassembled the old analog reel to reel studio at his quiet deep woods home and began experimenting again.”

Read our 2017 interview with Mount Eerie about A Crow Looked At Me.

Read our 2018 interview with Mount Eerie about Now Only.

Mount Eerie Tour Dates:

Tue. Nov. 19 - Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw
Thu. Nov. 21 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Bellwether

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