“Real Death,” the first song off Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me, deals with the death of his wife, the illustrator and musician Geneviève Castrée, and his life after.
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
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb
When I walk into the room where you were
And look into the emptiness instead
All fails
My knees fail
My brain fails
Words fail
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
A backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now
You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known deep down would not include you, though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down, being swallowed into a silence that's bottomless and real
It's dumb, and I don't want to learn anything from this
I love you
Real Death was written by Phil Elverum.
Real Death was produced by Phil Elverum.
Mount Eerie released Real Death on Wed Jan 25 2017.
Phil has talked in an interview about some motifs of this song:
For me, looking at the songs that I used to make, before this, I was more deeply a symbol-user. The older songs are a lot about looking at the world around me and finding meaning in these things that are just things. Light is hitting t...