Content warning: serious themes of death

Music has made me shed tears on the first listen, but it is not often the first listen has made me bawl. Phil Elverum, more commonly known by his musical projects The Microphones and Mount Eerie, now partakes the solemn honor of breaking my heart. Elverum has been creating ambitious indie folk and rock music under these projects for decades, most notably The Glow, Pt. 2 released in 2001 under The Microphones, an innovative and captivating album with strums of stereo guitars and thumps of immense drums that blow through you like a wind storm, conveying themes of nature, humanity, loneliness, and – in particular – death.

Death is a recurring motif in many of Elverum’s projects, yet none have reached the emotional magnitude as A Crow Looked At Me, his eighth studio album released under Mount Eerie on March 24th, 2017. This album surrounds the death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, who tragically passed at the age of 35 from pancreatic cancer, leaving behind Phil Elverum and their one-year-old daughter.

I stumbled upon A Crow Looked At Me through its opening track, “Real Death,” during one of my predictable hunts for sad music on a melancholic winter night in my hometown bedroom. I tapped play and laid back, awaiting to be bombarded by powerful metaphors or symbolisms to describe the hardships of death as many songs about death similarly do. Ironically, I was most abrupt by the lack thereof: “Death is real / Someone’s there and then they’re not / And it’s not for singing about / It’s not for making into art / When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb.”

Elverum’s plainspoken lyricism is as sour as it is poetic. While a lot of music expresses death in a romantic or aesthetic way, Elverum demonstrates that the most powerful mechanism for communicating grief is relaying its sobering truths. Someone you care for is once present and fulfilling, then that same person is suddenly absent, leaving you desolate. Whenever Elverum does utilize symbolisms, he constructs them simply and beautifully; this is best seen on the track “Seaweed,” which illustrates him scattering his wife’s ashes on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago in western Canada where he and his wife originally planned on moving and building a house together:

“I bought a chair from home, I’m leaving it on the hill / Facing west and north, and I poured out your ashes on it / I guess so you can watch the sunset / But the truth is I don’t think of that dust as you / You are the sunset.”

You are the sunset.

A Crow Looked At Me was written, produced and released entirely by Elverum under his personal music label, P.W. Elverum & Sun, in less than a year after Geneviève’s passing. Instrumentally, this record is slow and skeletal, with Elverum’s tender vocals often complemented by little more than light brushes of his acoustic guitar. Elverum openly invites listeners to a chronological insight into his grieving process, including several timestamps in his lyrics such as “You have been dead eleven days” and “Three months and one day after you died.” This timeline builds to the final track, “Crow,” where he and his daughter are depicted hiking in the woods:

“It was all silent, except the sound of one crow / Following us as we wove through the cedar grove / ‘Crow,’ you said / ‘Crow,’ and I asked / ‘Are you dreaming of a crow?’ / And there she was.” Elverum leaves us with an ambiguous ending. Who is “she”? Is it a crow looking at him, or is it Geneviève, reminding him of her presence or keeping her surviving family safe in the woods?

A Crow Looked At Me deserves an attentive and introspective listen, especially those who struggle with grief. Though this album overflows with waves of emotional pain and turmoil, the tides are soothed by Elverum’s tender songwriting and his gentle vocal and instrumental deliveries. In an industry where anguish and vulnerability can be aestheticized and diminished, A Crow Looked At Me stands tall as a work of honesty and compassion. It is not an album you will revisit often. Not just because of the agonizing heartbreak it inflicts, but because one listen will forever humble you with a deep and boundless gratitude for your loved ones, your wellbeing, and mere existence. As Elverum sings on the track “Swims,” “We are always so close to not existing at all.”

–Henry Sheridan