A Crow Looked At Me

No subject has been more badly exploited by art than death. How often have you found yourself in the middle of a good book or movie, warming up to its world, making the magical passage through which its characters’ lives become temporarily real only to be sped into artificial reverence by someone dying? Gosh, you think: Death: That’s big. This must be a pretty meaningful experience. Death is reduced to a sympathy-extraction device, what the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani once described as “literary ambulance-chasing,” designed to crowbar into the hearts of an audience just as they were thinking about changing the channel. Real death, meanwhile, moves ominously through the world of the living like a tide, gathering in waves that break without warning or reason, paroxysms of grief followed by yet more shapeless life. Fake death pops. Real death remains a slog.

Onto this tightrope walks Phil Elverum, a hermetically introspective songwriter who records under the name Mount Eerie. In spring of 2015, Elverum’s wife Geneviève was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 80% of patients within a year. According to the American Cancer Society, nearly all people with pancreatic cancer are over 45; two-thirds are over 65. Geneviève died three months after her 35th birthday. A year and a half earlier, she had given birth to her and Elverum’s first child, a girl.

A Crow Looked at Me, Elverum’s ninth album as Mount Eerie—and 13th overall, counting his earlier music as the Microphones—mentions Geneviève in nearly every song, sometimes by name, sometimes through cold, negative space. It’s almost as though Elverum has nothing better to talk about. Which, of course, he probably doesn’t.

Elverum’s recent albums—2015’s Sauna, 2012’s double feature of Clear Moon and Ocean Roar—were heavy on ambiance and fuzz, sonic embodiments of things through which we can’t see. Crow is spare and clean, mostly voice and some guitar, the sound of coffee in winter. You can almost hear the floorboards creaking. In a recent interview, Elverum called it “barely music.” Given the floss-thin line between his art and experience, you could take it as the album’s intended genre: Barely music.

Over the past few years, there have been a handful of albums similar to Crow, or at least with a similarly autobiographical premise: Sun Kil Moon’s Benji, Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, stark, diaristic albums haunted by literal death, grief on record. Indie culture tends to prize this kind of undecorated directness as a stand-in for truth, as though nobody has ever spoken clearly and lied.

But listening to Crow, the songwriter I kept thinking of was Chan Marshall, whose early music as Cat Power felt confessional but surreal, painfully direct but impossible to pin down. Like Marshall, Elverum’s sleight of hand is that standing naked doesn’t make him any easier to see. If anything, Crow’s cold spaces and plainspoken delivery lull the listener into an illusion of solid ground even when it’s not there, laying everything on the same emotional bandwidth, from meditations on geese and forest fires to descriptions of his wife’s jaundiced skin. He never tells you how to feel, or more surprisingly, when.

Elverum’s early albums as the Microphones captured the solipsism of one’s 20s, where even small feelings are uncontainable, not the internal flicker of neurons but plate tectonics, the saga of raging rivers and moons and stars. Here, one’s inner world was always swallowing the outer one, not just a life among many but an allegory of heaven and earth. That the music was so obsessively layered, so obviously the product of a single mind only cemented the underlying metaphor: Elverum wasn’t just the center of his universe, he was its creator.

Real life—its unpunctuated hum, its customer-service lines—has a way of knocking that out of you. Over the past several years, Elverum’s point of view has become earthbound to the point of mundanity. Sauna, from 2015, featured an entire song about walking to the bookstore and seeing a pumpkin. Refreshingly, the pumpkin was not presented as a metaphor for anything; it was a pumpkin. Or, if it was a metaphor, it was only for the accumulation of stuff with no particular meaning or attachment to narrative, for that rare, seamless mindset where things are what they are. Crow’s sharpest line is in its third act: “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about, back before I knew my way around these hospitals.”

Most of the time, though, Elverum’s ground isn’t so solid. Crow isn’t so much about sickness or death but the hallucinatory stupor of grief, a state where everything—toothbrushes, flies, crows, and sunsets—flickers with suggestion and memory, as though Geneviève’s spirit had been scattered back into the universe like seeds. One understands Elverum’s temptation intuitively: After all, he can still hold her toothbrush.

So simple, so tactile, so deceptively real are these songs. Their cumulative effect is that they become wobbly with metaphor, forcing the listener into the kind of magical thinking that transforms everything in the living world into a sign of the dead, only to snap back into a reality that for better and worse means nothing. Halfway through the album, Elverum’s daughter asks if mama swims, to which Elverum replies that yes, she swims all the time now, because they scattered her ashes over water.

The album’s most breathtaking line is its last. “Sweet kid, I heard you murmur in your sleep. ‘Crow,’ you said. ‘Crow.’ And I asked, ‘Are you dreaming about a crow?’ And there she was.” In a single moment, the mechanics of these songs—the way dreams refract life, the way grief resurrects the dead without logic or warning—becomes blindingly clear. Then, either because Elverum is polite, or because he’s tired, or because there is nothing more to say, he ends with the image of his wife lingering like something glimpsed through a rainy window, blurry, then gone.

It would be easy to hear this album as sad. Certainly the facts of Elverum's story are. But facts aren’t art and art isn’t real, at least not the way cancer is. For an album so firmly anchored by death, Crow is suffused with life: The geese, the forest fires, the crows, the grocery-store lines where Elverum stumbles through awkward conversation with people from town. Tragedy hasn't stopped him from noticing the world; if anything, it seems to have pried his eyes open for good. As for the question of sadness, I defer to a quote attributed to Anton Chekhov that art should “prepare us for tenderness.” I have two very young children of my own; one of them is sleeping on my chest while I write. Listening to Crow, I find myself imagining what life would be like if I had to raise them without their mother. Think along these lines for any longer than a few seconds and you, like I, may find yourself rebounding from sorrow to a state of almost infinite gratitude. Take a good look, Elverum says: Most of this is beautiful and none of it is guaranteed.