A Crow Looked at Me: A Companion to Death and Life After Death
Phil Elverum quietly records an album in his home in 2016. This is something that Elverum had done multiple times in the past, creating masterpieces such as Dawn and Lost Wisdom. His wife, Geneviève Castrée had done the same under the name Ô Paon. But this time, Elverum was recording something different. Something existential, simple, and memorable. Elverum was recording an ode to his wife, who had recently passed away due to pancreatic cancer.
Death is a popular topic when it comes to creating art, especially when creating music. Sufjan Stevens does so perfectly on Carrie and Lowell, an album created to capture the love and confusion Stevens had towards his mother and stepfather. But Phil Elverum has created something so much more personal and moving. Recording under the name Mount Erie, Elverum released the album titled A Crow Looked at Me on March 24, 2017, a near eight months following Castrée’s death.
A Crow Looked at Me provides an immediate entrance into Elverum’s mind, as he tries to cope with and understand the death of his wife. Making his emotions available for all, this is a deeply personal and lucid look at the aftermath of losing a loved one. Loneliness, confusion, depression, and heartbreak, all feelings that Elverum explicitly portrays.
The first track on the album, titled “Real Death,” throws the listener right into Elverum’s mind from the opening line. “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.” Despite this song being about the death of his wife, Elverum states that we do not realize the enormity of death and the feeling that it lays on one’s soul. One can contrast this line with one of Elverum’s earlier songs, “I Can’t Believe You Actually Died,” a song Elverum published under the band name “The Microphones” in 2002. This song takes a more lighthearted look, compared to A Crow Looked at Me, at death and the reaction to one’s death.
“Real Death” is full of soul-crushing imagery, as Elverum belts out the lines “Crusted with tears, catatonic and raw / I go downstairs and outside and you still get mail / A week after you died a package with your name on it came / And inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret /And collapsed there on the front steps I wailed.” The universe does not care that you died, it carries on with or without you, providing a real look into the unimportance of human existence. “Real Death” ends abruptly with the line “And I don’t want to learn anything from this / I love you.” The song ends abrupt, just as one’s life can end in a heartbeat. This is a theme that Elverum carries throughout the album.
For listeners looking for relief following “Real Death,” the sophomore track does not offer any refuge for the wary. “Our daughter is one and a half / You have been dead eleven days” permeates the airwaves as Elverum describes taking a boat ride to the place where he and his wife had planned to build a home. “Seaweed” tells how despite the closeness to his wife’s passing, Elverum begins to describe how he deals with losing certain memories of his wife. “I can’t remember / Were you into Canada geese? / Is it significant.” Elverum begins to search for meaning and significance in ordinary details and events, trying to piece together a lasting memory of his lost wife.
For the third song on the album, Elverum produces one of the most lyrically dense eulogies on the disc. “Ravens” tells the story of two ravens spotted by Elverum in the yard, ravens that fly towards the island that Elverum and Castrée had planned on settling down on and living together. This song has an extra layer of expression to it, as Elverum has stated in interviews that he recorded the song in his wife’s bedroom, with her guitar, her pick, her amp, he wrote the words on her paper, and he looked out of her window as he created this masterpiece of sadness. Simplistic, Castrée’s guitar is almost an afterthought on this song, as Elverum’s words echo through the listener’s conscious.
As Elverum moves through the album, the mood remains the same. “Death is real” reverbs through the listeners body, moving down the body through the nerves like a shock of electricity as the song “My Chasm” comes to a speeding halt.
Elverum has created a masterpiece that exudes thoughts and feelings that are so real that the listener begins to feel the same feelings, so much so that a personal connection begins to form between the listener and Elverum. As dense lyrics lambast you, over and over, you ride each wave of shock as the lyrics keep pounding into you. Taking over your entire thought process, the second half of A Crow Looked at Me provides no relief for the listener either, as Elverum continues to ride the wave of sadness as he discusses the loss of memories of his wife on the song “Toothbrush / Trash.” This song is the first glimpse into moving on that Elverum allows us to see. As he sings about throwing away her “bloody, end of life tissues” as well as her toothbrush.
You can hear the atmosphere on this record, the instruments that Elverum treats with delicate carefulness as he tenderly strums away at Castrée’s guitar. As he transitions out of sadness, we finally get another glimpse at Elverum’s ability to move on past the death of his wife, with the song “Soria Moria.” A Norwegian fairytale, the Soria Moria castle is seen as a place of happiness that one may reach after it passes a large chasm.
Elverum sings of his personal Soria Moria castle, a personal happiness that Elverum must reach. He would do so by escaping from the fog, Castrée’s death. Elevrum must leave the home in which she passed away in and make his way to his own Soria Moria.
As A Crow Looked at Me comes to an end with the song “Crow,” Elverum sings to his daughter, who was recently born before Castrée passed away. He and his daughter were on a hike in the woods that have been mentioned previously on the album, but this time, there is a third character along for the hike, a crow. The importance of the crow is not left to the imagination, as Elverum has stated in interviews that he felt the crow following along was a special moment and one that he could not afford to forget.
One could tie in Geneviève and the crow, but to do so would require a certain level of mental gymnastics that I personally do not wish to take part in. One can determine that Elverum has been as blunt as possible on the album and interviews, so much so, that if he meant for there to be a relationship between the crow and his wife, that he would have mentioned so in the song.
This was not an album that I enjoyed. It is beautiful, poetic, and a masterpiece, but it is not an enjoyable album. You see the emotional pain that Elverum was experiencing, as well as the emotional growth that he goes through as he transitions from Geneviève’s husband to the father of his daughter.
I can not imagine the feeling that Elverum’s daughter will have in the future when she takes a listen to A Crow Looked at Me, as she will have one of the most surreal and lucid examples of enduring love between two parents. This is an album that Geneviève would have been proud of, an enduring monument to Phil Elverum’s love for Geneviève Castrée.
