Real Death: a perfect song.
Overanalyzing Music #2
The album that starts with this song (Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me) is likely to be one of the top 5 this year across the board for publications. Here I’m only talking about the opening song, Real Death.
Before that I want to look back to an album that came out last year: Skeleton Tree by Nick Cave. This album is one that was born out of grief, Nick Cave’s son had died having fallen off a cliff right before or right at the beginning of the recording process.
The way Nick Cave described it in the documentary One More Time With Feeling was that he was creatively stunted after it happened, and the album wouldn’t exist unless the lyrics had already been written. Thus the actual content of the album doesn’t address the grief Nick Cave felt directly, in that case it’s the intensity and emotion of the record that breaks your heart. When Girl in Amber starts, desolation and unresponsiveness ekes from every crevice. The album came out raw and heavy, or as I said in the year end list of 2016: “this album is the hardest listen on this list”. It was also my #4 on the list.
Back to Mount Eerie. The one similarity between these two projects is the major influencer, the death of a loved one, in this case the artist’s wife who died of cancer. And this album was written and recorded:
August 31st to Dec. 6th, 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments, her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper, looking out the same window.
In the song Real Death Phil Elverum touches upon some topics that Nick Cave did too that death is “not for singing about, not for making into art”. The song itself is much lighter than the Nick Cave counterparts before you listen to the lyrics and the details of his voice. And those are completely unavoidable. On this song the voice is center-stage, the story can’t be shut out. The melody is soft, the voice is mostly devoid of emotion. The song is simple and raw, so the details take control of it. The song starts with a statement of fact and recommendation, the voice doesn’t waver. One can detect a little quiver when he starts bringing it into the personal “house”, and he has to slow down drastically for the next two lines, almost in an attempt to keep calm (though “look” and “emptiness instead” betray something). With the next lines he’s characterizing this song directly, the desolation (knees failing), the inability to create art (brain failing), the inability to write complexly (words failing).
And this is where he speeds up the lyrics in the song and stumbles sometimes. This next verse includes two sections where he hardly breathes in, rushing to get the words out. It has a description of what he did (go to the mail), a description of what happened (finding a package for her and wailing (where his voice breaks) on the front steps). Then it takes a look first into what Geneviève might have been thinking about the future of her daughter, goes back to the past where she thought it, and finally brings the one metaphor in this song to describe what she went through, acting as a euphemism for death, while describing the battle emotionally. Finally he lets exhales two prominent feelings:
It’s dumb
And I don’t want to learn anything from this
I love you
Listening to Nick Cave’s album gave me similar feelings to this one, but the palate of colors and flavors is completely different, the words he uses and how they are wielded to express his guts are very different. In both cases the end result is an intimate dissection of a human’s guts though, even if it’s a different section and view.
Real death is a perfect song to me, I’ve felt that nearly since the first time I heard it, and I must have heard it 50–60 times since that. It’s a 2:30 minute song that holds a world of raw emotion. It’s intense and demands attention. But more than anything, it’s a song that seeks out expression, connection, and representation, and on all three counts it succeeds. He’s clear in every single moment of this song. The stripped back instrumental and vocals grab and wrench, since every inflection stands out. And this song clearly represents the raw, unfiltered emotion that came out of him.
It’s not the perfect song, since there’s none of those, but in all it is melodically, thematically and lyrically it feels to me like Phil takes his shoes off, puts them on my feet and walks beside me for a mile, holding my hand as he shows me, in detail, what it is to live without the love of his life. There’s no way to look away and it’s devastating.
