04: A Song That Makes You Sad.
Great Ghosts, Mount Eerie (11 Old Songs of Mount Eerie, PW Elverum & Sun; 2005)
Phil Elverum is a myth-maker. Moreso than most other musicians I listen to. Whether working under The Microphones, or Mount Eerie: it’s Phil Elverum and his myths.
This song comes at the point at which The Microphones was retired, and Elverum attempted to be reborn as Mount Eerie. It is one of the many songs that document his self-imposed exile to a bare hut for the winter of 2002-03, in North-west, Norway.[1] This one is the one that sticks with me more than any other.
A simple Casiotone drum-beat and minor chords provide the accompaniment for Elverum’s solitary campfire tale, sung and spoken. It’s a point at which he recognises that you can’t live up to your own myths.
“I am teeming with ghosts, and I’m still whining for wives, I’m knitting my brow. Now I’ve surrendered. If you listen, you can hear us all howling.”
It doesn’t matter that it is set in bleak mid-winter, rolling in the snow. It could be anywhere, trying to lose yourself. Overcome who you are, shed your skins, and be the things you think you could, or should, be. With a full beard, a child, a wife, maybe.
There’s positivity in that, of trying to get your sadness in order. What is upsetting is that we can’t. We can’t escape who we are, our memories, who we’ve been. Who we will always be. We are all haunted in ways by our ghosts. That’s a good thing, but it is something we have to overcome. Somehow. We have to learn to live with them, forget what we thought we would be, and be what we actually are.
That’s sad, to me. I can’t face fatalism or predeterminism. I know we’re always the same, with different iterations of it throughout our lives. I still wallow, but I’ve learnt the correct times to howl, and the best times to address my ghosts.
LISTEN: 11 Old Songs of Mount Eerie version [Soundcloud link] / Dawn version [Soundcloud link]
[1] He kept a journal which has since been published as Dawn by Buenaventura Press, with a CD of other songs written during this time. You could listen to a PC read the whole book here.
