Day 89: Mount Eerie — A Crow Looked at Me
“Death is real. Someone’s there and then they’re not. And it’s not for singing about. It’s not for making art.”
For reasons that become immediately obvious, A Crow Looked at Me is not an album that vocalist/multi-instrumentalist/producer Phil Elverum (better known as Mount Eerie) set out to make on purpose. Released just nine months after losing his 35-year-old wife to cancer, it is an encapsulation of raw grief in motion. It doesn’t attempt to find universal meaning in death, or approach it on abstract terms. It’s made with no sense of greater expectation or purpose. It’s just the work of a near-lifelong musician attempting to cope through the only method that makes sense to him.
That A Crow Looked at Me succeeds is entirely a credit to how intimately and unpretentiously it recounts the messiness of grief over sparse, stripped-back, mostly acoustic arrangements. Mostly addressing his wife in the days, weeks, and months after her death via second-person narrative, Elverum shows us what she’s missing, painting a vivid portrait of an incomplete man grappling with a profound absence in real time. Getting rid of his wife’s old clothes and cleaning out the bathroom’s trash aren’t loaded with significance due to any melodramatics, but by the frankness with which Elverum chronicles the banal horror of outliving a partner.
Elverum resists the temptation to carve meaning out of something that is by its nature inherently meaningless. Perhaps no other album I’ve heard so perfectly encapsulates the temptation to look for profound answers hidden within the mundane after a world-rupturing event. “Were you into Canada geese?”, Elverum asks on “Seaweed”, “ Is it significant, these hundreds on the beach?” We don’t get an answer, because there isn’t one to find.
While Elverum eschews metaphor or allegory when it comes to internalizing his loss, that’s not to say that there’s no place for metaphor in his lyrics. Certain moments are so poignant that you’re almost carried away from a world so marked by death. “You clawed at the cliff you were sliding down, being swallowed into a silence that is bottomless and real”, sets the tone on “Death is Real.” And though the chasm between Elverum’s grief and poetic language is deep and fraught with peril, there’s no mistaking that he’s able to summon the will to span it on occasion. “What was now you is borne across the waves, evaporating,” he says to conclude “Swims” in one of many moments fit for a eulogy, rejecting the cleansing destruction of “Forest Fire” in favor of a more benign image of death as it’s reflected in nature.
The album isn’t without hope, though. Using a painting based on a Norwegian fairytale as a narrative device, “Soria Moria” zooms out to place Elverum’s struggle before and after Geneviève’s in the broader context of a search for happiness, alluding to the eventual possibility of its return. Closer “Crows” subtly shifts the second-person subject from his dead wife to young daughter, signaling the return of “future possibilities” that were put on hold, even if the world is “smoldering and fascist.”
I feel like my attempts to capture the essence of an album so immediate, so potent, and so revelatory are inherently pathetic here. I want to say so much, but I can’t say anything nearly as poetic as Elverum himself does. Just know there’s no way to approach A Crow Looked at Me without experiencing a tangled mess of emotions. You’ll walk away shaken, reshaped by the experience (however insignificantly) in ways that feel so pervasive as to evade neat categorization. Listening to it is not something that should be undertaken lightly, but with time, you’ll emerge all the better for it.
This is Day 89 in my 100 albums in 100 days series, where I review a new album or EP I haven’t heard in full before every day through December 31st. Check out yesterday’s post or see the full archives for more.
