Reckoning with sardonic love and soft sorrow, Chicago indie folk singer/songwriter Elijah Berlow leans into vulnerability and contradiction on “impatient by the continental divide,” a tender meditation on relationships, unrest, and emotional exposure.
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“impatient by the continental divide” – Elijah Berlow
The heart doesn’t always know what it wants – and even when it does, the knowing can be messy.
Elijah Berlow’s new song is a reflection of that very chaos: A love not quite right, not quite wrong, and yet still deeply, disarmingly real. He wraps his heart in fingerpicked guitar and leans into contradiction on “impatient by the continental divide,” a soothing yet stirring indie folk reverie that aches with unspoken truths and unresolved tensions. As tender as it is turbulent, the song is a cathartic exploration of vulnerability, resistance, and the quiet unraveling of what once felt sacred.
how to say this dare I say this?
Leaping from tree to tree
The mixing of Brandywine
drinking of closing minds
For meant to be an alcoholic sea
To be drowning in
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “impatient by the continental divide,” the beautifully introspective B-side to Chicago singer/songwriter Elijah Berlow’s two-song single. Released in tandem with its music video and following this past May’s A-side release “sacred,” “impatient” finds Berlow diving deeper into the delicate interplay of love, longing, and disillusionment. The track was written five years ago as a stream-of-consciousness poem and later recorded on a porch in Wisconsin, where Berlow intentionally leaned into the rawness of his surroundings: “I wanted the scratch of a beetle, the hum of the summer insects, the hit of my skin on the guitar,” he recalls. “I needed to explore [these songs] in a more raw area of sound and feel.”
The result is something as unfiltered as it is deeply felt. “This song speaks to a narrative derived from a sort of sardonic love,” Berlow explains. “An affection that is so riddled with contradiction, yet that opposition is exactly what serves as the basis for the attraction and nurturing companionship. The knowing and naming of actually being quite not ok and being able and vulnerable enough to find trust beyond those really quite naked feelings.”
When and where did this line of questioning?
Become so narrow and burdening
The green bronze Mississippi
Fertilizer nitrogen
Pale gray Moon, the fresh engine
Broken down smoking again
Everything’s not all right
We’ll get to Denver later tonight
Everything’s not all right
Berlow’s performance is as delicate as the words he sings. His voice glows with quiet conviction as he muses on tension, distance, and intimacy: “Everything’s not alright… we’ll get to Denver later tonight.” There’s a cinematic stillness to his delivery – a raw honesty that lingers between each pause. The instrumentation matches this mood, with soft, fingerpicked patterns ebbing and flowing like thoughts tumbling around an unsettled mind. In this space of emotional friction, Berlow manages to cultivate connection.
When did we ever agree
on anything of worth or cheap?
Silk smooth, like forgetting dreams
Anguish head, rush,
switching gears, and crossing streams
The song’s accompanying video, directed and edited by DC Poropat, feels like a memory frozen in time. Shot on what looks like an old family camcorder, the home-video-style visual finds Berlow meandering through lush green fields, playing with sticks, skipping stones, and driving along endless stretches of rural and suburban roads. It’s nostalgic and intimate – a quiet meditation on movement and solitude that mirrors the song’s inner ache.
As a companion to “sacred,” the single’s A-side, “impatient by the continental divide” brings Berlow’s storytelling full circle – trading the ecstatic embrace of earth and time for something more conflicted and unresolved. Both tracks, he says, came from the same space of introspection and transformation: “I wrote both of them five years previously as stream-of-consciousness poems in the same space where I ended up tracking them… Aaron Smith really bolstered that same feeling and gave my rough ideas a smoother shape. Nick Broste mixed it, who took the songs and really formed them into the space they inhabit currently. Nick took the song’s aspects of softness, porousness, and its live feeling and then breathed them into reality.”
Why has uncertainty
become our flesh and teeth?
We breathe exhaust like oxygen
and easily become machines
that just open up awake
to just moving close
shot impatient
by the continental divide
There’s something moving in this quiet unrest – a beauty in the way Berlow allows uncertainty to exist without rushing toward resolution. “impatient by the continental divide” doesn’t try to fix the ache at its core; it simply sits with it, honoring the weight of unspoken words and the heart’s complicated truths. Let this song hold you in its stillness, and maybe, for a moment, it’ll feel like you’re not so alone.
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“impatient by the continental divide” – Elijah Berlow
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© Matt Lohan art © Noel Nissen
© Matt Lohan
art © Noel Nissen
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