Love and death have a tendency to change peoples opinions on little things like music, sampling, and life itself. For example, when Phil Elverum — better known as Mount Eerie — first saw Lil Peeps videos, “White Wine,” and “Beamerboy,” in which the late rapper sampled his songs “(Something)” and “Headless Horseman” from the 2001 album the Glow pt.2,” he was disgusted. Speaking with Stereogum in an interview, Elverum said:
“[W]hen I first saw his videos I was like, ‘Argh! No! Yuck!’ I just really didn’t get it, and I think it’s just because I’m old, honestly… It’s one of the first times I felt truly alienated from, you know, kids these days. But I mostly just felt bad. I didn’t want to be associated with it.”
A fair point of view for a rock guy who is almost 40 trying to decipher the post-emo hip-hop styling of a 21-year-old kid from Sweden. But then love and death interjected. Elverum’s wife died of Pancreatic cancer and he would go on to release his 2017 album, A Crow Looked At Me — which was the first project written in the shadow of his wife’s death. When news hit of Lil Peeps overdose and death, Elverum tweeted “Lil Peep is on my mind.” A simple, solemn statement that he would later expand on:
“Death was on my mind. More people dying, young people dying, people dying before their time, Geneviève dying, and people grieving in this sloppy, chaotic, public way, which I was also doing. It just poked at all these issues in a fresh way, surprisingly.
We’re only a few days away from the release of Mount Eerie’s new album, Now Only. It’s an album written by a clearly changed man with a distinct perspective on life:
“I didn’t want to be a hard ass. I’m mostly fine with anyone using my music for whatever. Everything’s just compost that gets reused.”
Elverum’s new album Now Only is available Friday. You can listen to the first two singles on his Soundcloud.
