Mount Eerie Releases Devastating “Ravens” Video, Announces West Coast Tour Dates

Mount Eerie’s latest music video for “Ravens” speaks for itself, and it has a lot to say. The song is the second single from Phil Elverum’s forthcoming album A Crow Looked At Me, an attempt to process the death of his wife, Genevieve. In the months following her death, Elverum recorded the album in the room in which Genevieve died, using the instruments she owned with the words written on her own paper.

The song “Ravens” is packed with the raw authenticity that one could expect from this process. The song avoids figurative language, opting instead to tell the story of his marriage with painful honesty. The video features old camcorder recordings, presenting scenes from Elverum’s marriage and even some footage of Genevieve herself.

The song, at heart, ponders the weighty “what now” question by which Elverum is acutely confronted. Elverum questions whether it’s reasonable to anticipate a reunion, remarking:

And I’m left living like this
Crying on the logging roads with your ashes in a jar
Thinking about the things I’ll tell you
When you get back from wherever it is that you’ve gone
But then I remember death is real

Still, the song doesn’t give in to despair, but rather uses the grieving process as a way for Elverum to remake himself. Elverum introduces a glimmer of hope to the song’s end, saying:

The ground absorbs and remakes whatever falls
Nothing dies here
But here is where I came to grieve
To dive into it with you
With your absence
But I keep picking you berries

A Crow Looked At Me will be released on March 24 by Elverum’s own P.W. Elverum and Sun. Watch the “Ravens” video above, check out the tracklist below, and below that, find Mount Eerie’s upcoming West Coast tour dates. You can also listen to A Crow Looked At Me lead single “Real Death” here, and Paste Cloud audio from Mount Eerie’s 2010 Daytrotter session below.

A Crow Looked At Me Tracklist
01. Real Death
02. Seaweed
03. Ravens
04. Forest Fire
05. Swims
06. My Chasm
07. When I Take Out The Garbage At Night
08. Emptiness pt. 2
09. Toothbrush/Trash
10. Soria Moria
11. Crow

Mount Eerie Tour Dates:

April
04 – Eugene, Ore. @ WOW Hall
06 – Big Sur, Calif. @ Henry Miller Library
09 – Santa Ana, Calif. @ Observatory (When We Were Young Fest)
10 – San Diego, Calif. @ Irenic
11 – Los Angeles, Calif. @ The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever
14 – Oakland, Calif. @ Starline Social Club
17 – Portland, Ore. @ Mississippi Studios
18 – Olympia, Wash. @ Obsidian

May
12-14 – Arcosanti, Ariz. @ FORM