#365songs (103 / 365)

I had a conversation with my brother about grief today and couldn't stop myself bringing up A Crow Looked At Me, the rawest expression of grief in musical form I've ever heard. Its songwriter Phil Elverum has called it "barely music," but it is certainly music, and some of Elverum's most straightforwardly pretty music at that. It's unrefined and unpolished, in keeping with the opening lyric: "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." One senses Elverum, who's been writing songs his whole life, resisting reflexively making the real death he's singing about — that of his wife, in her mid-thirties, from pancreatic cancer — into art.

"Forest Fire" is maybe the first song on A Crow Looked At Me, whose songs are in chronological order, that sounds kind of put together rather than, like, scraped up. The first few songs, in the unbearable miasma of the aftermath, have an unstructured feeling to them, like Elverum just kind of starts on an idea or a memory and goes until he runs out of things to recollect, but "Forest Fire" has a verse at the beginning whose melody repeats after the more stream-of-consciousness-y stuff in the middle. It's the middle stuff that has one of the lines that I think of most when I think of this album though: of the titular forest fire, Elverum sings "They say a natural cleansing devastation, burning the understory, erasing trails. There is no end," and then proceeds immediately to "But when I’m kneeling in the heat throwing out your underwear the devastation is not natural or good. You do belong here. I reject nature. I disagree."

This line hits me hard enough in isolation, but coming from a guy whose whole deal, musically, has been oriented around invoking nature as metaphor for his internal world or as a subject of study and fascination in its own right, it really brings home just how appalled he is at what has happened.

In trying to articulate to my brother why this album has been such a weird kind of comfort to me, I landed on this: over and over on A Crow Looks At Me, Phil Elverum does not shy away from or try to rise above the irrational, hurt, angry feelings that he's swimming in. As time and the album moves forward, he does get some distance from those feelings, but reluctantly, like as awful as those feelings are it's still the intensity of them that is tethering him most closely to the memory of his wife. It's inartful in the best, most authentic way, messy in an un-fussed-over way, but Phil Elverum is good enough at writing songs that it is really, not "barely," music. No album I've heard since the emotional turmoil of adolescence has affected me like this one.