Revered Canadian musician Michael Feuerstack is returning this year with a new album titled Eternity Mongers, and along with that announcement he delivers “Your Mind’s Made Up.”
Michael Feuerstack on “Your Mind’s Made Up”: “When I was in my 20s and 30s, everyone around me starting having children. Now that some time has passed, it’s time for many of those children to leave home in the same away that we all once did,” explains Feuerstack. “That same feeling can be applied to different kinds of departures, and so I kept it a little bit vague to cover more ground. There is something vexingly inverted here in this particular portrayal of selflessness: it’s a kind of selflessness that most people have to accept at some point in their lives. You don’t rise to it, you fall into it.”
Eternity Mongers, the latest album from Michael Feuerstack, is filled with some of the questions we ask ourselves as we navigate this beautiful and complicated world. What is the thing you live for? What is your strongest fear? What is it that makes you wonder? These twelve songs, like so many of the best songs, are born out of curiosity—a curiosity for and about all things: the world around us, the way we interact, the way we live, and the ways in which we try to live. As weighted as the subject matter of these songs at first appears, there is also a playfulness at work throughout, a sense of levity to set the balance right. Do you ever get tired of having fun? Eternity Mongers asks us to consider these questions about the world and about ourselves, and to accept and embrace that we are all always changing, even when changing means making mistakes. They used to call it growing up, but now we know there’s no such thing.
Eternity Mongers is an album of wonder, and wondering, an album that places the listener right there in the middle of it, asking us to consider who we were and who we are and who we want to be. It also asks us to consider—slyly, subtly—how we want to be. And that is its strength: Feuerstack is giving us these questions, but not the answers. The songs here gently suggest that we simply think about these things, and they remind us that the questions we ask are as important as the answers we uncover—sometimes even more so.
What do you think of “Your Mind’s Made Up”? Looking forward to Eternity Mongers?
