“Death is real/someone’s there and then they’re not/it’s not for singing about/ it’s not for making into art.” These lines, the first ones you hear in (After), set up its main tension. What happened to Phil Elverum, the death of his young wife by cancer about a year and a half after the birth of their daughter, is not something that fits into conventional song structure. It’s too big, too sad, too crushingly real, even for the kind of precisely observed, personally felt poetry that Elverum has always set to music. And yet here he is, a couple of years after the event, presenting his tragedy to the public. How does he do it? And just as importantly, how do we (and the people in the audience) we receive it?
(After) commemorates a 2017 tour in which Elverum took his lacerating A Crow Looked at Me, as well as songs from the then-unreleased Now Only, on the road, sharing intimate details about his wife’s death and its aftermath in a variety of acoustic settings. The songwriter normally discourages live recordings, but last November, someone surreptitiously tracked a particularly lovely performance at the Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht. It was recorded in the 13th century Jacobikerk which here adds a wonderfully hushed room sound, not quite silence but breathing, anticipatory receptiveness.
And so, when Elverum sings in “Seaweed” of scattering his wife’s ashes in a place where she could see the sunset, and then confides, “But the truth is I don’t think of that dust as you...You are the sunset,” there is an audible pause before the applause begins, a space where listeners think their own loved ones turned to dust.
Elverum writes like a naturalist painter, effortlessly finding the details that bring plants, animals, rooms and people to life. He is especially affecting in describing the child, half asleep, dreaming of crows who may or may not represent her mother or raptly absorbing the sound of her mother’s voice via a CD played in the kitchen. He captures that stage of grief where the loved one is nowhere but also everywhere (see “When I Take Out the Garbage”).
The concert takes a bit of a turn when Elverum shifts to newer songs, which delineate the beginnings of a slow process of getting on with life. “Now Only,” the title cut, describes a giddy scene at a desert music festival, where Elverum (and Weyes Blood and Father John Misty) stay up all night talking “about songwriting in the backstage bungalows/Eating fruit and jumping on the bed like lost children/Exploding across the earth in a self-indulgent all-consuming/Wreck of ideas that blot out the stars” but ends, “To be still alive felt so absurd.” Domestic scenes of a father and daughter are warm and ordinary—breakfast, getting ready for school, going for a hike— yet always centered around an empty space. You don’t recover. You just keep going.
Like Nick Cave, Elverum wrestles with thoughts and memories and images that don’t usually enter into musical entertainment. The work is too much for casual listening, and it refuses to be background music. And so, perhaps live performance is the most appropriate setting.
This double disc captures both the awkwardness of performing such inward-looking material and the communion this sort of sharing carves out. Elverum’s lyrics are searing in their specificity. They are about one person’s death and family and experience and nothing else. And yet in the audible breathing organic response, you can intuit the way that audience members are internalizing these details, lining them up next to their own losses and finding a common ground.
