Before pursuing songwriting, Elijah Berlow spent most of his adult life as a butcher and a farmer— trades that require intense intimacy and immediacy with both muscle and mortality — yet the books he immerses himself in move in mythic scale — Greek Myth, Shakespeare, Midieval poetry, epic fantasy.

Today, on a fifteen-acre farm in Vermont shared with horses, sheep, and open sky, he channels physical toil and classical literature into songs that move from the earth to the ether and then back to the earth. In “Night Sky Song,” he sings of human devotion and endurance: (“When winter winds hunger, your frostbite will also be mine”) and in “Circe Song,” he sings from the voice of the greek goddess herself (“I built the sky so you could grow tall / I built the fields so when you fall/ you have a soft place to rest your head upon.” ) Across his debut record, Songs of: Watching The Birds Watch Us, Berlow navigates love, devotion, grief, and the relationship to the living world and its creatures, from the immediate to the mythic.

Following in the footsteps of storyteller heavyhitters like Townes Van Zandt and Jake Xerxes Fussell, Berlow creates music so elemental it could’ve been pulled directly from the earth.