Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum has just announced his summer 2017 tour dates, which will span from August to September across the United States and Canada. The tour is in conjunction with his most recent album, A Crow Looked At Me, which was released this year at the end of March. See the full list of tour dates below.
A Crow Looked at Me is a concept album that Elverum wrote about the recent death of his wife, French-Canadian cartoonist and musician Genevieve Castree. Just after giving birth to their first child, Castree was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2015 and died a year later in 2016. When she passed, she was 35 years old. As it would seem, the album is not fun, but rather a brutally realistic account of experiencing the death of a loved one. Elverum wrote all of the songs in the room where Castree died, and used the instruments she owned, including her bass, pick, amp and accordion. According to a press release, he even used her paper to write the song lyrics, which follow Elverum’s journey “…from the hospitalizations to the grieving, the specific domestic banalities that become existential in the context of such huge and abrupt loss. These songs are not fun. They are pretty and they are deep, andthey find a love that prevails beneath the overwhelming and real sorrow. It is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie catalog in its unvarnished expressions of personal grief, metaphor-free.”
The album was already received critical acclaim, with many publications taking note of the strength required to write it as well as the raw nature of Elverum writing down all of his experiences and feelings toward his wife’s death.
Via the New York Times, “So intense are these songs that it feels almost impolite to refer to them as art, which typically connotes an interest in aesthetics. There is sad music, which is to say music that deploys lyrical or musical motifs meant to connote misery. And then there is this album, which mostly exists in a space beyond those concerns. It is an album because a musician made it and it is broken up into songs, but it is also a diary, a balled-up tissue, found art.”
Read our review of A Crow Looked at Me, and also check out the recently released Nobody’s Perfect EP, which Elverum put up on Bandcamp, and it includes five songs recorded at a performance in 2005 that were never released or recorded previously.
Mount Eerie Summer Tour
8/18 – Vancouver, BC – Christ Church Cathedral
9/5 – Chicago, IL – Thalia Hall
9/7– Raleigh, NC – Fletcher Theatre
9/8 – Washington, DC – St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church
9/9 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
9/11 – Brooklyn, NY – Union Temple of Brooklyn
9/13 – Boston, MA – Arts at the Armory
9/15 – Providence, RI – Columbus Theatre
9/16 – Burlington, VT – Winooski United Methodist Church
9/17– Montreal, QC – Ukrainian Federation Hall
9/20 – Toronto, ON – Great Hall
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