There's No Music Like the Unspeakable Grief of Mount Eerie's 'Now Only'

Standing alone onstage at a South Brooklyn synagogue last September, Phil Elverum offered an apology. Midway through a set of songs from A Crow Looked at Me—an album that focused unblinkingly on the death of his wife, the artist and musician Geneviève Castrée—he announced that he’d be skipping a few songs. Ultimately he’d leave out a block of three of the record’s more emotionally raw tracks—a strange thing to say, I realize, about a record where every song is clouded with sickness and death—including one where he explains the way Geneviève’s final moments replay in his memory over and over again. No one spoke and he continued into his next song.

A weird thing happened as Elverum continued to play songs up there, alone under a spotlight in a sanctified space. The gathered crowd started to treat it more or less like any other show. Elverum would sing in his mild whisper, of seeing Geneviève’s face turn into to something “jaundiced and fucked.” And then at the end of the song people would clap and whistle, breaking the contemplative silences. No one yelled requests or spilled beers or anything like that, but somehow even this rote fulfillment of the concert-going social-contract felt uncomfortable, an extreme version of the feeling when a packed movie theater laughs at the wrong part of a movie. I wanted to yell at everyone to stop, to pay attention, that these songs were too important, too gracious, too personal to punctuate with something so mundane as slapping flesh. But then Elverum would resume singing again about his wife’s “bloody end of life tissues,” just like he had the night before and would again the night after.

Elverum, whose predilections toward self-interrogation date back long before the deliberately prosaic monologues of Crow, addresses some of this weirdness on Now Only—a companion record of sorts, released earlier this month on his label P.W. Elverum & Sun. The record’s title track—composed in the sort of tongue-twisting emotional spillage that’s become Elverum’s signature in these last few years (he’s called it “barely music”)—bounces from the unsettled grieving of a hospital waiting room to the barren future in the Arizona desert where he played a festival set.

There isn’t much music that’s like Now Only—Elverum has essentially created a genre unto himself. His stated influences are the rambling psychodrama of Sun Kil Moon’s recent material, the unembarrassed confessionalism of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s writing, and the acoustic starkness some of Will Oldham’s Palace Music records. But even taking parts of those doesn’t quite get you to the open-hearted and plainspoken style he’s settled on—especially as its changed form slightly on Now Only. The previous record was recorded quietly, in Geneviève’s room and with her instruments, but this one starts to embrace the world beyond. The earthy distortion of previous Mount Eerie records creeps back in, he borrows a guitar line from a song he wrote nearly 15 years ago. These songs are back to being part of the story of Mount Eerie, a foot forward—however shaky—for one our best songwriters, making beautiful music out of outright tragedy.

The lyrics too look outward. On the title track, he offers an exhaustive account of leaning on Skrillex’s tour bus and staring at the stars, considering the “feral eruptions of sobbing” that arrive less frequently as the days pass. But there is a heightened reality in his prosodic depiction of a weekend at a festival, some itchiness as he describes hanging out with Weyes Blood and Father John Misty, characterizing their conversations as “like lost children / exploding across the earth in a self-indulgent all-consuming wreck of ideas.” He considers his distance from his audience, describing the weirdness of his booking “to play death songs to a bunch of young people on drugs.” He ends a verse with an understandably anxious button, “To be still alive felt so absurd.”

On Crow, he described this disconnect as a “chasm” that opened up between him and everyone else in his life when Geneviève died. He describes it more fully on “Earth,” a song on the new album, singing that “everybody that used to know us seems concerned.” The sheer density of detail on these two albums, the suffusion of meaning into wisps of air and closing doors, gives a fullness to these feelings that so few pieces of art about mourning have. Everyone knows or will know loss, but no one can know it quite like this. No one will feel the empty echoes of first meeting their person, eating fruit outside an idling bus in quite the way Elverum describes.

That chasm one of sentiments that’s hardest to hear in Elverum’s music. Listening I want to empathize, but the more he explores the depths of his confusion and sadness, the less I believe that empathy in the way we most commonly understand it is even possible: that you can never feel exactly what another person is feeling. The suggestion, in these labyrinthine pathways of thought that unspool on these records, is that in grief and in happiness we are ultimately alone. It’s a thought that’s easy to get stuck in, he has a song called “Emptiness Pt. 2”—ostensibly a sequel to another song whose refrain went “‘More emptiness,’ I said. ‘And more, and more’”—where he suggests that this whole line of thinking is ultimately self-serving. Even in embracing abjection, distance, and loneliness, there is no respite, there is only the uncompromising fact, as he sings repeatedly on Crow, “Death is real.”

Now Only, though, is not so uncompromising; there are attempts at papering over the chasm. He sings with a little more distance, taking a wider view of his life, fixating on existential questions that have nagged him since he was a child. He dedicates a long verse to a pregnancy scare and a one-night stand when he was 23 years old. He sings of a future, moving beyond the eternal present that grief’s fog bogs a person down in. It’s not hope, not exactly, just a suggestion that life continues, but even that feels hopeful in comparison. On “Crow Pt. 2” the records closer, he sings this pretty much explicitly:

Living, for Elverum, at least for now means continuing to get onstage and sing these songs for strangers who don’t understand exactly. There’s no way they could. But he still does. Last week, he took another New York stage to play for a bigger crowd than saw him play in that synagogue. He was accompanied this time by a small, dry fir tree, ostensibly so the crowd would have something to look at aside from just him and a spotlight. As time goes on you figure out ways to make the uncomfortable parts work a little better for you. People clapped again for the songs from Crow, but this time it didn’t feel so wrong. Now Only offers the context of a life that continues, however painfully.

Even in the hard parts now, it feels like that’s what we’re clapping for, not for the grief but for continuing in spite of it, for going on because that’s now the only option. It’s not because we know exactly what he’s gone through—the vacant sing-along chorus of “Now Only” only underscores that (“People get cancer and die / People get hit by trucks and die”)—but because the sound of skin is empirical proof of our own unwitting perseverance. In these songs, you hear an echo of life lived, and in applause you can offer an echo back—a call and response for those surviving, somehow.