‘Grief is giving me this beautiful, deepening understanding’: Phil Elverum on loss, new love and his landmarks of US indie
His wife died, he became a single parent and his next marriage swiftly ended. After these trials, the hugely acclaimed singer-songwriter explains why he’s turning outward to consider the world around him
For almost two decades, Phil Elverum’s life centred around performing and recording music. First as the Microphones and then as Mount Eerie, he had accumulated a catalogue of songs through which he made sense of his world, written with a diaristic honesty that won him a loyal following. But in July 2016, after the death of his wife, the cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, a distraught Elverum began “rejecting my life’s work” and focused on single parenthood with their daughter, Agathe.
From his home in Anacortes, Washington, Elverum reflects on those darkest days. “Geneviève and I had both been artists, obsessed with our creative lives,” he says. “That was our focus, our devotion, our identity. But when she died, I asked myself: why had drawing at a table 16 hours a day or making all these dinky little LPs been so important to us? I questioned the existential value of art and music and poetry. These had been my tools to understand life. But when Geneviève died, they felt useless to me.”
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