I don't really know how to title this. Whether it's a review, reaction, or just a confession.
Mount Eerie released an album called "A Crow Looked at Me" last year, and it deserves your attention. I struggle to call it music. Believe me, I have listened to a lot of music in my time, but rarely has an album made me choke up every time I played it.
Last hear, I heard this album (and this song) a total of three times. In my head, I had rated the best album of 2017. But I was scared to revisit it again.
Part of that had to do with the perverse feeling that I am actively listening, and using as inspiration this man's raw sadness. Though I guess that's what this very sad song is to me; inspiring.
When asked if being a sort of tortured soul helped him become a great artist, Leonard Cohen once famously said that good art is a result of triumphing over adversity, not the adversity itself.
The reason I started listening to this song again was because I reconciled with this in my head. The fact that Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie was able to make an album of this magnitude is a testament to his spirit. Whether it be the love for his wife, or a sort of exorcising of his demons that drove him on, I don't know. But it is beautiful, and it is a perfect demonstration of how music, even when it is influenced by pain, can have so much value in peoples' lives, not only in terms of entertainment, but by helping them cope.
Not everyone's wife has died of cancer. Not everyone has even experienced a death of a loved one. But with a track like "Seaweeds", one is able to feel, through Phil, a transcendent pain that encompasses all human uxerpience.
I love this song. It is everything right about music. The tone set, by Phil's guitar, is somber and sobering. Phil's voice, though not doing anything flashy, is distinctively real and earnest. His voice is the guide for his lyrics, which to me, is what elevates the song.
He sings,
"I brought a chair from home
I'm leaving it on the hill
Facing west and north
And I poured out your ashes on it
I guess so you can watch the sunset
But the truth is I don't think of that dust as you
You are the sunset"
Maybe once you hear something a lot, your mind starts playing tricks on you. But when Phil sings "you are the sunset", it is as if there an array of hope that permeates through my mind, the sentiment being that when you lose a loved one, whenever there is something beautiful, it feels as if they are communicating with you.
Perhaps I don't keep returning to this song because it is sad, but because it feels like you are witnessing someone winning a very hard battle, a battle we all must face, and we are rooting for him the whole way.
This isn't a song for the weak-hearted. It's not even a song that most people should hear more than once.
But they should hear it.
