On a whim last week I decided to go to a concert of an artist I didn’t know much about, playing just up the road from my house. He’s an American singer who in the publicity photos was climbing a mountain in a fisherman’s sweater carrying a baby bundled to his chest. It looked cold where he was.
The artist was Mount Eerie, aka Phil Elverum, a singer-songwriter from a remote corner of the Pacific north-west; the baby was his daughter. The album he was touring and played in its entirety was written about his wife Geneviève. A performer and artist, she died of pancreatic cancer not long after she gave birth to their daughter.
A Crow Looked at Me, released by Mount Eerie last year, was written in the room where she died and each song deals with her death and his grief so explicitly and directly, that to find a comparison, one may need to go back to the poets: Auden, St Vincent Millay and Dylan Thomas.
On one track he sings of the days after his wife’s death:
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
Had I listened to the album before I bought tickets, maybe I wouldn’t have gone. It is one thing to listen to the songs alone, at home, to be drawn into his pain, that manages both to be exquisite and brutal, in a place where you can absorb it privately. But to see the pain performed … would it be like seeing a man on an operating table, opened up without anesthetic? All of us in the audience witnessing a man unprotected and hurting, yet unable to offer consolation except our mute witness?
It was a hot night and we sat in plastic chairs in the old, lovely Theatre Royal in Castlemaine as Mount Eerie performed on an unadorned stage and people around me wept.
He broke the mood occasionally. He talked about a music festival in the desert where he hung out with Father John Misty all night in some hotel room, and the next day accidently reversed into the Skrillex tour bus.
But then it was back to the daily labour of hard grief: “And I’m left living like this /Crying on the logging roads with your ashes in a jar.”
Later, out on the street, the night still hot and big moths drawn to marquee lights, people stood in desolate groups, some hugging each other. A woman who had been quietly crying inside was crying outside.
I went home. That was a week ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
As long as he’s singing about her she has a sort of existence
True proper lamentations – words set to a dirge that specifically and often painfully mourn an individual, are few and far between in popular culture. And why wouldn’t they be? They are not just an anathema to the hook, melody and charm of the three-minute pop song – but to our general cultural reluctance to sit too long with uncontained grief. After all, in life, after a decent interval has passed, there often come the uncharitable thoughts of “Shouldn’t you just get over it mate?”
We don’t like too much sadness. It can feel weirdly like impoliteness.
In popular music here have been songs about death – great, sad songs. Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven and Billy Bragg’s Tank Park Salute come to mind.
And there has been a million songs about breakups, and some really brilliant entire albums about breakups – Adele’s 21, Beck’s Sea Change and Morning Phase and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours are just a few examples.
Some music presumed to be lamentations – Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, Mahler’s song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) – were created before each lost a child.
A whole album like Mount Eerie’s about a particular death stripped of metaphor and melody is more in line with a traditional lament – not just a song in form but something that also exercises a very specific cultural and spiritual function.
Laments are drifting towards extinction, not just in performative arts but at funerals.
You may find them still performed at Eastern Orthodox churches during a funeral mass. But at most modern funerals you see the nascent positivity industry in action. A life is celebrated, achievements and relationships are highlighted. At some, people are encouraged to wear bright colours and be upbeat. Like at a Viking funeral the coffin is covered in stuff – as if the person was merely going away for a long weekend: football jerseys and fishing tackle, a favourite book, their iPhone.
The old-fashioned lament at the modern funeral is a mood wrecker. It’s a howl of protest, like the cry of a child that cannot be comforted. It’s calling across the Styx, “Bring him back!” It’s saying: fuck nature.
It’s not just the positivity industry which is killing the lament, but our modern default setting of irony. Irony keeps us detached and aloof. It’s a defence mechanism. But who is more defenceless than someone in deep grief? They are unmasked and unprotected. Maybe that is why we cannot look too long or too closely.
Once the lament was part of burial rites, at least if you were Celtic.
The Irish practice of keening – a lament sung at funerals by women that involved physical movement like rocking – died out in the middle of the 20th century.
Archival recordings from the Gaelic-speaking Aran Islands in the 1950s exist. It’s a harsh, low, uncontained sound, a ritualised cousin of a primal scream – but at slight remove. The keeners were women who were paid (sometimes in money, sometimes in food or whiskey) – and their coarse howling was an appropriate proxy for and representation of pain.
Keening was phased out in Ireland by the Catholic church – the female, pagan complexion of the ritual spooked the uniform, centralising church.
A recent BBC radio documentary on keening interviewed people who remember seeing it as children. They recall the sight and sounds now as being “weird”. And I guess it is, because that is what the animal, primal side of death has become. We don’t want to look at someone’s grief too closely – particularly if that grief cannot be contained.
It is socially awkward. What to say? How to act?
As Mount Eerie sang last week: “I now wield the power to transform the grocery store aisle into a canyon of pity and confusion and mutual aching to leave.”
As the concert continued, it was clear he was singing to her. He seemed disconnected from us – as if the presence of an audience was neither here nor there.
It’s not hard to imagine that performing the songs on tour each night would be unbelievably painful, yet also a way of holding her close. As long as he’s singing about her she has a sort of existence. (“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.”)
The concert finished abruptly and so did the tour. He was flying home the next day.
Mount Eerie stepped off the stage and towards the merch stand, where he was selling T-shirts.
Death is real. But life goes on.
