Clattermouuuth’s Music of The Week: “A Crow Looked at Me” By Mount Eerie

By Andrew Kohler

Welcome back to Clattermouuuth’s Music of the Week, curating Rockaway’s music taste one week at a time.

Sorry for the long break! It’s been a busy two weeks, but I’m back with one of the most heartbreaking albums I’ve ever heard: “A Crow Looked at Me” by Mount Eerie. Shortly after his wife, Geneviève Castrée, tragically died of pancreatic cancer in 2016, Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie) began writing the album to cope with the loss.

What makes this album work so well is how it is so uncompromisingly honest. The album begins with a haunting contradiction, “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.” This is a captivating line to begin an album with because it contradicts the album as a whole. Is Elverum’s entire album about turning death into art? I don’t think he wants it to be. Rather than trying to create art, he is trying to document and embrace the grief. In doing this, art is accidentally made.

The lyrics are raw. There aren’t really any fancy literary devices in this album. Rather, in the lyrics, Elverum writes about the struggle to find art and meaning in the death of Castrée. In the second track of the album, “Seaweed,” Phil searches for symbols of his wife in nature: “I can’t remember, Were you into Canada geese? Is it significant, These hundreds on the beach? Or were they just hungry for mid-migration seaweed?” Phil wants there to be a deeper meaning in nature. He wants there to be beauty in death, but the truth is that it’s just geese, it’s not anything more than that.

This is what makes “A Crow Looked at Me” such a difficult listen. There isn’t really anything optimistic about it, because it doesn’t have to be optimistic. The lyricism is so brutal in the way it honestly speaks about grief, because grief is so brutal. The first three words of the album summarize the entire album, “death is real.” If there’s a message, it is to embrace and accept grief, because there really is no way around it.

As Elverum sings: “The loss in my life is a chasm I take into town, and I don’t wanna close it. Look at me, death is real.”