+ Deluxe LP edition features 140g virgin vinyl; heavy-duty matte board jacket; insert with lyrics and credits; and high-res Bandcamp download code.
+ N.B.: Vinyl LP release date is Aug. 27, 2021 (CD/digital release is July 23, 2021).
Includes digital pre-order of Life, and Another.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
digital album releases July 23, 2021
item ships out on or around July 22, 2021
Purchasable with gift card
$20USDor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
+ CD edition features gatefold jacket with LP replica art and insert with lyrics and credits.
Includes digital pre-order of Life, and Another.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
digital album releases July 23, 2021
item ships out on or around July 22, 2021
Purchasable with gift card
$13USDor more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
+ Get both physical audio formats in one low price bundle.
+ Deluxe LP edition features 140g virgin vinyl; heavy-duty matte board jacket; insert with lyrics and credits; and high-res Bandcamp download code.
+ CD edition features gatefold jacket with LP replica art and insert with lyrics and credits.
+ N.B.: Vinyl LP release date is Aug. 27, 2021 (CD/digital release is July 23, 2021).
Includes digital pre-order of Life, and Another.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
digital album releases July 23, 2021
item ships out on or around July 22, 2021
Purchasable with gift card
$28USDor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
+ Get both the CB and limited-edition book in one low price bundle.
+ CD edition features gatefold jacket with LP replica art and insert with lyrics and credits.
+ A limited-edition Life, and Another photo and song book (perfect bound, foil-stamped cover, 64 full-color pages, 300 copies only) featuring images, songwriting and studio notes, collages and texts by Erin Birgy, and drawings by Zach Burba, designed by Joel Gregory, is available, while supplies last, exclusively via Paradise of Bachelors.
Includes digital pre-order of Life, and Another.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
digital album releases July 23, 2021
item ships out on or around July 22, 2021
Purchasable with gift card
$23USDor more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
+ Get both the LP and limited-edition book in one low price bundle.
+ Deluxe LP edition features 140g virgin vinyl; heavy-duty matte board jacket; insert with lyrics
and credits; and high-res Bandcamp download code.
+ A limited-edition Life, and Another photo and song book (perfect bound, foil-stamped cover, 64 full-color pages, 300 copies only) featuring images, songwriting and studio notes, collages and texts by Erin Birgy, and drawings by Zach Burba, designed by Joel Gregory, is available, while supplies last, exclusively via Paradise of Bachelors.
+ N.B.: Vinyl LP release date is Aug. 27, 2021 (CD/digital release is July 23, 2021).
Includes digital pre-order of Life, and Another.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
digital album releases July 23, 2021
item ships out on or around July 22, 2021
Purchasable with gift card
$30USDor more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
+ Get all three physical formats in one low price bundle.
+ Deluxe LP edition features 140g virgin vinyl; heavy-duty matte board jacket; insert with lyrics
and credits; and high-res Bandcamp download code.
+ CD edition features gatefold jacket with LP replica art and insert with lyrics and credits.
+ A limited-edition Life, and Another photo and song book (perfect bound, foil-stamped cover, 64 full-color pages, 300 copies only) featuring images, songwriting and studio notes, collages and texts by Erin Birgy, and drawings by Zach Burba, designed by Joel Gregory, is available, while supplies last, exclusively via Paradise of Bachelors.
+ N.B.: Vinyl LP release date is Aug. 27, 2021 (CD/digital release is July 23, 2021).
Includes digital pre-order of Life, and Another.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
digital album releases July 23, 2021
item ships out on or around July 22, 2021
Purchasable with gift card
$38USD
+ A limited-edition Life, and Another photo and song book (perfect bound, foil-stamped cover, 64 full-color pages, 300 copies only) featuring images, songwriting and studio notes, collages and texts by Erin Birgy, and drawings by Zach Burba, designed by Joel Gregory, is available, while supplies last, exclusively via Paradise of Bachelors.
ships out within 5 days
Purchasable with gift card
$12USDor more
Streaming + Download
Pre-order of Life, and Another. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
All purchases also include full LP and CD album artwork and insert, including lyrics and credits.
Someday
I hope
To forget
What I was for
Let it dissolve
Like an artichoke
Being gutted
Around its spine
I make a plan
To see you
The week
An offer known
I couldn’t keep
But it’s sweet
To see me
Circle the garden
With a rake
Once again
We lose it
Moni, take me
Moni, take me
To the wood
To sit in something
Wicked
Stirred
Again
Moni, take me
Moni, take me
To the wood
To find
What’s wicked
And pure
Again
Little movements
Rock me
Have I been awake
Before?
Station to Station
222 times
And the person
I thought I was singing for
Is the person
To leave behind
That’s it
That’s just it
All I’m left with are my lines
Once again
We lose it
Moni, take me
Moni, take me
To the wood
To sit in something
Wicked
Stirred
Again
Moni, take me
Moni, take me
To the wood
To find
What’s wicked
And pure
Again
Most of it’s gone
My feet in the lawn
Looking back
To the glow of a note
And once you have me
Will you let yourself feel it
Or will you be writhing
Impenetrable probe
When I am the grass licker
I’ve got a bad coat
Makes me miss you
’Cause I’ll never know heat
The way that you wrap me
You said it was easy
But I couldn’t breath
Back at the Loch Ness
Harpies flew in screaming
Wanted to meet me
For I’ve yellow poppies
Growing in my shadow
Those are the things
That seem to scare you
The Weight of the Earth
On paper
Hand it out
Close to thick
The velvet water beneath us
Is sneering
Called us idiots
Because in the middle
There’s two feet of silence
Of something that’s love-like
And wants to live
I tamp it down
Pretend a child
Let my tongue lap up
Whatever’s more wild
By fearful definition
I think I’ve renamed it
The picture of your hand
The center of my mantle
The Weight of the Earth
On paper
Hand it out
Where are my girls?
The magical Mega Bog returns with another fantastical off-world transmission, the most sophisticated, exploratory, and accessible statement yet from surrealist songwriter and avant-pop prospector Erin Birgy. Featuring James Krivchenia (Big Thief), who co-produced, and Zach Burba (iji) among its cast of vibrant players, Life, and Another bristles with painterly technicolor surface textures while plumbing fathomless depths of feeling.
ALBUM NARRATIVE
On Life, and Another, Mega Bog (the world-inhabiting moniker of song-animator Erin Birgy) tends a succulent garden full of plants that the unwitting passerby might mistakenly perceive as extraterrestrial, but which are in fact very much of this Earth. Departing from the humid Holodeck spider plant nursery of previous record Dolphine (2019), Mega Bog’s new album brings us back to our home planet, into the rarefied air pressure of a dried-up desert valley where its fourteen songs were written and scattered like stones in the landscape. But true to Birgy’s alchemical writing practice, these bright stones simply refuse to blend into their arid environment, each one a precious gem chiseled by the anti-capitalist geologist’s hammer to reveal the impossible, dazzling life that inheres under the dusty exteriors of both the northern Nevada of her youth and the rural New Mexico of the album’s birth.
Cohabiting with Life, and Another’s co-producer, engineer, and percussionist James Krivchenia (Big Thief) in a small cabin near the Rio Grande off of NM State Route 68, Birgy found herself often alone, suspended between their separate touring schedules. In these silent time passages, Birgy experienced a complete loss of self amid the expanse. Frequently thinking about death in the middle of nowhere opened a familiar black hole of troubling projections, and any desire to find freedom or remain positive continued to fold back into self-destructive thought and fear. Strange long days were spent pacing the property with a rake, befriending ants and spiders and struggling with the instinct to poison them if they ventured into the home. Comfort was occasionally found in internet reruns of Frasier and Star Trek Deep Space 9, texts on the ethics of terraforming and space colonization, and Ken Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Over time, a budding interest in mindfulness, attachment theory, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and rage gave way to new productive brain processes. These creative juices followed Birgy on the road and into subsequent lonely bedrooms as the songs continued to flow. New, northern landscapes, like the woods and rivers outside of Seattle, Washington, provided further inspiration during odd sublets in the area. Dark as everything may actually be, Birgy always manages to stay with trouble and conjure the extraordinary resulting music.
Life, and Another stages a semi-fictionalized drama in the community theater of the interior self, with scenes of collective longing at the bowling alley, disputes over a distended memory outside the bar, and the solitary circling on the patio, looking out over the yard in stubborn awe. These memories, from both past and future, bubble up throughout the album and present their characters as new entries into the Mega Bog Book of Symbols. In “Station to Station,” an artichoke, the decadent indulgence young Erin learned to steam for herself, is gutted around the spine. In “Weight of the Earth, on Paper,” named after the collection of memoir tapes by the artist-warrior David Wojnarowicz, poppies sprout in Birgy’s shadow and scare her companion, while harpies circle above Loch Ness. Fantastical visions beget inherited family traumas that taunt withering romantic relationships. A deep faultline connects the record with the work of Wojnarowicz, who, in the years before his death in 1992 (twenty-nine years and one day before the release of Life, and Another), recorded in his tape journals a series of moments of rapturous solitude in the deserts of the American Southwest, carried from dream to dream by real and imagined friendships with human lovers, horses, scorpions, clouds, and the occasion cruiser.
Recorded over several sessions in various studios—the Unknown in Anacortes, Washington, Way Out in Woodinville, Washington, and Tropico Beauty in Glendale, California—Life bleeds with instrumental contributions from longtime and new collaborators, including Aaron Otheim, Zach Burba of iji, Will Segerstrom, Matt Bachmann, Andrew Dorset of Lake, James Krivchenia of Big Thief, Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, Jade Tcimpidis, Alex Liebman, and co-engineers Geoff Treager and Phil Hartunian. The group’s temporary re-imagining of exoplanetary life together carries this collective imagination through its architecture, which, if you try to grasp it too tightly, will only appear to you all at once, afterward, instead of moment to moment, station to station, through the house into which Birgy and her friends have invited us. Listeners know by now they can trust Mega Bog to continuously lead them into deeper and wilder, spiritual pop territories. Skittering piano glissandos, haunting psychic background voices, and tequila-inspired improvisations creep and crawl over the dark-night-of-the-soul rock and roll dreamscape, before vanishing to make way for invocations of quiet clarity and living-breathing instrumental passages.
This is how the record takes on its picaresque, non-anthropomorphic epic story bag shape. Imagine that Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Wim Wenders’s film Until the End of the World, and Bucky Fuller and June Jordan’s speculative architectural redesign of New York City were episodes in some larger, yet-to-be-written Canterbury Tales of imaginative, necessary life on the planet. Mega Bog etches its chapter here, transforming the brutal heaviness of the world into the collective struggle of living.
KEY POINTS
+ Deluxe LP edition features 140g virgin vinyl; heavy-duty matte board jacket; insert with lyrics and credits; and high-res Bandcamp download code.
+ CD edition features gatefold jacket with LP replica art and insert with lyrics and credits.
+ A limited-edition Life, and Another photo and song book (perfect bound, foil-stamped cover, 64 full-color pages, 300 copies only) featuring images, songwriting and studio notes, collages and texts by Erin Birgy, and drawings by Zach Burba, designed by Joel Gregory, is available, while supplies last, exclusively via Paradise of Bachelors.
+ Featuring James Krivchenia (Big Thief), who also co-produced and engineered the record, as well as Zach Burba (iji) and Meg Duffy (Hand Habits).
+ RIYL Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, Slapp Happy, Kevin Ayers, Bridget St John, David Bowie, Cate Le Bon, Aldous Harding, Big Thief, Hand Habits, Yoko Ono, Nico, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu, David Wojnarowicz, Wim Wenders
+ Album page/details/acknowledgments: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-056/
+ Artist page/tour dates/links/back catalog: paradiseofbachelors.com/mega-bog
supported by 8 fans who also own “Life, and Another”
bright jangly guitar and incredibly thick bass grooves combine with wry spoken word vocals and immaculate timekeeping to form something truly special. andrew
