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.”
