Reckoning with sardonic love and mushy sorrow, Chicago indie folks singer/songwriter Elijah Berlow leans into vulnerability and contradiction on “impatient by the continental divide,” a young meditation on relationships, unrest, and emotional publicity.
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“impatient by the continental divide” – Elijah Berlow
The coronary heart doesn’t at all times know what it desires – and even when it does, the figuring out might be messy.
Elijah Berlow’s new music is a mirrored image of that very chaos: A love not fairly proper, not fairly incorrect, and but nonetheless deeply, disarmingly actual. He wraps his coronary heart in fingerpicked guitar and leans into contradiction on “impatient by the continental divide,” a soothing but stirring indie folks reverie that aches with unstated truths and unresolved tensions. As tender as it’s turbulent, the music is a cathartic exploration of vulnerability, resistance, and the quiet unraveling of what as soon as felt sacred.
learn how to say this dare I say this?
Leaping from tree to tree
The blending of Brandywine
ingesting of closing minds
For meant to be an alcoholic sea
To be drowning in
Atwood Journal is proud to be premiering “impatient by the continental divide,” the superbly introspective B-side to Chicago singer/songwriter Elijah Berlow’s two-song single. Launched in tandem with its music video and following this previous Could’s A-side launch “sacred,” “impatient” finds Berlow diving deeper into the fragile interaction of affection, longing, and disillusionment. The observe was written 5 years in the past as a stream-of-consciousness poem and later recorded on a porch in Wisconsin, the place Berlow deliberately leaned into the rawness of his environment: “I wished the scratch of a beetle, the hum of the summer season bugs, the hit of my pores and skin on the guitar,” he recollects. “I wanted to discover [these songs] in a extra uncooked space of sound and really feel.”
The result’s one thing as unfiltered as it’s deeply felt. “This music speaks to a story derived from a type of sardonic love,” Berlow explains. “An affection that’s so riddled with contradiction, but that opposition is precisely what serves as the premise for the attraction and nurturing companionship. The figuring out and naming of truly being fairly not okay and having the ability and weak sufficient to seek out belief past these actually fairly bare emotions.”
When and the place did this line of questioning?
Grow to be so slim and burdening
The inexperienced bronze Mississippi
Fertilizer nitrogen
Pale grey Moon, the contemporary engine
Damaged down smoking once more
Every little thing’s not all proper
We’ll get to Denver later tonight
Every little thing’s not all proper
Berlow’s efficiency is as delicate because the phrases he sings. His voice glows with quiet conviction as he muses on pressure, distance, and intimacy: “Every little thing’s not alright… we’ll get to Denver later tonight.” There’s a cinematic stillness to his supply – a uncooked honesty that lingers between every pause. The instrumentation matches this temper, with mushy, fingerpicked patterns ebbing and flowing like ideas tumbling round an unsettled thoughts. On this area of emotional friction, Berlow manages to domesticate connection.
When did we ever agree
on something of price or low-cost?
Silk clean, like forgetting goals
Anguish head, rush,
switching gears, and crossing streams
The music’s accompanying video, directed and edited by DC Poropat, appears like a reminiscence frozen in time. Shot on what appears like an previous household camcorder, the home-video-style visible finds Berlow meandering by lush inexperienced fields, enjoying with sticks, skipping stones, and driving alongside infinite stretches of rural and suburban roads. It’s nostalgic and intimate – a quiet meditation on motion and solitude that mirrors the music’s internal ache.
As a companion to “sacred,” the one’s A-side, “impatient by the continental divide” brings Berlow’s storytelling full circle – buying and selling the ecstatic embrace of earth and time for one thing extra conflicted and unresolved. Each tracks, he says, got here from the identical area of introspection and transformation: “I wrote each of them 5 years beforehand as stream-of-consciousness poems in the identical area the place I ended up monitoring them… Aaron Smith actually bolstered that very same feeling and gave my tough concepts a smoother form. Nick Broste combined it, who took the songs and actually shaped them into the area they inhabit presently. Nick took the music’s facets of softness, porousness, and its dwell feeling after which breathed them into actuality.”
Why has uncertainty
turn into our flesh and enamel?
We breathe exhaust like oxygen
and simply turn into machines
that simply open up awake
to simply shifting shut
shot impatient
by the continental divide
There’s one thing shifting on this quiet unrest – a magnificence in the way in which Berlow permits uncertainty to exist with out dashing towards decision. “impatient by the continental divide” doesn’t attempt to repair the ache at its core; it merely sits with it, honoring the burden of unstated phrases and the guts’s sophisticated truths. Let this music maintain you in its stillness, and perhaps, for a second, it’ll really feel such as you’re not so alone.
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“impatient by the continental divide” – Elijah Berlow
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