Night Palace book launch

and "I Saw Another Bird" (email send #2)

Hi. Happy October 1st!

(Sorry if you’re getting this twice. Substack seems to have had an email outage for a sec and most of the first send didn’t really get sent.)

Last newsletter I announced a new Mount Eerie album, “Night Palace”, which comes out November 1st as a double LP wrapped in a tarp-sized poster, and also as digital files to download or stream.

I also announced 2 extra special release shows for the album in New York and Los Angeles, for which tickets are now selling briskly. Click those cities and go.

I also said “hey watch this video for Broom of Wind and listen to I Walk”

I also said other stuff

and also I said there’s a letterpressed BOOK VERSION of Night Palace coming out before the record, like… imminently. Check these out:

Order that book!

As part of their role in the printing and binding of this special book, the excellent people at C.C. Stern Type Foundry/Stumptown Printers/Craft Printing House have invited me to inhabit their world as part of a working printers’ residency in early October. I’m bringing my kid. We’ll cast hot lead, we’ll set type, we’ll print words, we’ll fold and bind and talk. And then we’ll have a book launch for the hot off the press silent version of Night Palace!

Sun. Oct. 6th, 2024 - Clatskanie, Ore., Birkenfeld Theatre, Clatskanie Cultural Center 75 South Nehalem Street Clatskanie, OR - 4:30 to 6pm - This event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP is appreciated, but not required.

It’s a book event with talking about books and printing, but also I’ll sing some of the songs, and books will be available, plus other souvenirs.

More information about this event here.

One further note about the book that I mentioned in the last newsletter: we’re also making an extremely limited casebound edition (26 copies, one for each letter of the alphabet, hand illustrated and lettered by me) that will be made available first to paying subscribers to this newsletter. That link will probably come in the next post. Upgrade to paid now if you want to get in on that.

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and also, furthermore, today we release a new Mount Eerie song called

I Saw Another Bird

The third single from Night Palace is out now. It’s called “I Saw Another Bird”. Here’s a video to go along with it:

and here are some words I had to say about the idea behind the song:

Out in front of the house I crunch around in the gravel moving pieces of wood from pile to pile between trunks of giant trees. I clank tools, I rummage in a cardboard box of nails, I slam a car door. I check my texts, I refold a tarp, I go inside for lunch. The human world, with me as its representative, slams around ungracefully in this forest clearing where a house has been made, my house. The cycles that went on here before me continue, and I sometimes notice.

Sometimes I feel like a participant swimming in the eternal, and other times I feel like an intruder with a breathing tube and imported food. The old chatter of animals and outdoor air here is uncesasing and I swing in and out of inclusion. My house has walls. The door closes, the windows have glass. I go in and out. My thoughts crowd in and dissolve back out. Is someone other than my own projection really walking through these dreams or is everything just meat and dust?

Birds cross the line. They leap between worlds, from ground to sky, like laughing emissaries from gods. Or they are gods. They halo our own grinding wondering-time alive here in the dirt. They taunt with their easy access to the big perspective. It’s been this way since forever, since we’ve had eyes to look up. The 17,000 year old cave art at Lascaux shows a dead hunter whose body has taken on a partial bird form, a beaked head, with a carved bird baton thing lying nearby, as if in death the person transformed into a being more suited to crossing over.

And it’s ravens and crows in particular that have always spoken to us, with their rascal languages and bird cultures of clever manipulation. From indigenous North American ravens who created the world in all their different mischievous ways, to Odin with his two whispering spy ravens, to Shakespeare, to Poe, and on to now, and still going. These birds do walk through our dreams and waking lives, regarding us, commenting, voluble. They write our myths in the air.

When Geneviève died and I scraped the bottom of my ability to keep believing in the significance of the intangible, when I was in that who cares hole, I noticed the blunt presence of a crow. It looked at me. I said fuck you and wrote about throwing her toothbrush away instead. But the truth is that when a crow looked at me, I was also looking at it. The mutual gaze went two ways and it never ends, two mirrors propped facing each other. The interspecies regard is meaningful, even when the dispiriting crush of life and death eclipses our more tender corners of awareness. I was freaked. My bullshit detector was haywire, too high strung. I posed dismissively toward the bird and wondered away for new springs of meaning drawn from something less ephemeral seeming.

Now my breath has slowed. I scratch around in the driveway doing my mellowed life work without a big stance to prove. Always, and I mean always, there are ravens watching me go about my tasks. Here in this forest, their home, I must seem interesting. They perch and talk at me. I respond in my English, usually with just “hello” and then they lift off. Their wings flap in loud whooshing huffs through the trunks, moving on to the next checkpoint. I love their breathing flapping. I think of them as neighbors. They probably think of me as a pet.

This frequent exchange we have is not ephemeral or poetic or mystical. It is boring. It’s the rocks on the ground. It’s a daily greeting. I stand there blanking out beneath these messengers from the other world and know that a quieter interrelation is being made clear, just like when I stand on the edge of the water and maybe hear whales, maybe hear the infinite mysterious. Or when I debate impermanence with a fish. We are fools on our phones beneath the sky, all of us, bumping against revelations while looking the other way. Nonetheless, sparks continue to leap between worlds while we glimpse flashing reflections.

The gods come and talk at me every day. It’s no big deal. For me “the gods” is the breath and the food, the light falling and the seasons’ churn. After “hello” and a bow, I reply wordlessly about the good fortune of finding ourselves in this laughing and broad interdependence mesh. I am grateful to be visited. While we chatter and gawk at each other, the world beyond and this one merge some.

Why not take this opportunity to pre-order the record if you haven’t already? It’s going to be a doozy.

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Those are the announcements for today. Book launch and new song. Weirdo at the end of a dead end road logging on to his computer to hustle his art souvenirs to strangers, that’s me. I have more stuff in the works that I’ll tell you about later.

Thank you all for your attention and support.

bye, Phil

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current reading:
Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD by Martin Aston
and learning Finnish on duolingo