David Byrne.(AP)
What’s more primal than singing to the dead? “I sing to you, Geneviève / I sing to you / You don’t exist / I sing to you, though”: So begins Now Only, the ninth album that Phil Elverum, the 39-year-old multi-instrumentalist, has recorded under the name Mount Eerie. Geneviève did exist, once, as Geneviève Gosselin, and then as Geneviève Castrée, an accomplished artist and musician, and finally as Geneviève Elverum, before her death in 2016, at age 35, from pancreatic cancer; she was diagnosed just four months after the couple’s only daughter was born. Death changes things for the living left behind, and though that’s an easy observation to make, it’s much harder to live with, there in the aftermath when everything’s changed.
Now Only is remarkable for many reasons, not least because it’s a sequel to 2017’s A Crow Looked at Me, a spare, beautiful album that Elverum wrote in the days immediately after Geneviève’s death. “Death is real / Someone’s there and then they’re not / And it’s not for singing about / It’s not for making into art,” went the opening lines of “Real Death,” the album’s first track. Like Now Only, the rest of the album was similarly devastated and lean, filled with the kind of observations that can’t be understood until you’ve experienced a death in the family. Put next to each other, what’s astonishing about both albums is how Elverum is able to make his raw grief legible.
David Byrne’s American Utopia—the legendary musician’s first solo album in 14 years—offers an expansive and ambitious contrast to Elverum’s intensely focused minimalism. “In another dimension / Like the clothes that you wear / A mighty mighty battle / Sprouting illegal hair,” he sings in the first lines of “I Dance Like This.” “A fitness consultant / In the negative zone / Wandering the city / Looking for a home.” The words are set to fat, plunky chords that lift up Byrne’s signature warble, until about 50 seconds in, when it’s clear something has gone wrong. As he reaches the chorus—”I dance like this / Because it feels so damn good / If I could dance better / Well, you know that I would”—the song shifts into a techno-futurist breakdown, something that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the 1980s. While the lyrics are ambiguous enough to project any meaning onto, it’s the music that’s the real trial here. Nearly all of American Utopia is like this: Byrne has something to say, but it’s not clear that he knows what that might be.
On “Every Day Is a Miracle,” a grooving island-fusion mélange that feels as though it’s been beamed in from a rural state fair in the ’90s, Byrne theorizes about desire:
Cockroach might eat Mona Lisa The pope don’t mean shit to a dog And elephants don’t read newspapers And the kiss of a chicken is hot The brain of a chicken And the dick of a donkey A pig in a blanket And that’s why you want me
While I’m not sure what a donkey’s dick has to do with why a person might want another person, the song does bop. The deeper issue here, one that cuts across every song on American Utopia, is that Byrne’s cryptic songwriting fails to meaningfully address his chosen subject: America as utopia, as a place worth writing paeans to. Here, the chorus to “Every Day Is a Miracle” is instructive. “Every day is a miracle / Every day is an unpaid bill / You’ve got to sing for your supper / Love one another,” it goes, apparently without irony. That’s a fine sentiment, but it has very little to do with the world we live in.
There’s a naïveté on display that I’m sure Byrne is putting on for show, but it falls flat amid phenomena like the Trump-emboldened white-supremacist movement, the package bombs targeting minority communities in Texas, and the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people. This is an album more suited to the late ’90s than to today, which really comes into focus on “It’s Not That Dark Up Here,” a song that’s seemingly meant to question received wisdom. “Does winter follow spring / Like night follows day / Must a question have an answer / Can’t there be another way?” Byrne asks plaintively, playing it straight. “Would you like to talk about it / Would you like to pull my hair? / Plants have roots / But I don’t know if they’re deep enough to make me stay.” Metaphor and allusion only work when it’s clear everyone has a sense of what you’re talking about. There are occasional flashes that penetrate Byrne’s intentional obtuseness, such as on “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” the album’s penultimate track: “We’re only tourists in this life / Only tourists but the view is nice / And we’re never gonna go back home…. No, we’re never gonna go back home.” But more often, the listener just feels completely lost.
Now Only, on the other hand, knows both what it’s about and who it’s for. In both its straightforward telling and its emotionally resonant songwriting, Elverum’s latest work—a masterpiece—recalls the 16th-century Polish poet Jan Kochanowski’s Laments, which he wrote after his 2-year-old daughter died. “And help me mourn my sweet, whom in her May / Ungodly Death hath ta’en to his estate, / Leaving me on a sudden desolate,” the poet writes in his first lament. “’Tis vain to weep,’ my friends perchance will say.” Compare that to this passage from Elverum’s “Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup,” which is more elliptical but says much the same thing about the writer’s emotional state after a devastating loss:
I’m flying on an airplane over the Grand Canyon Imagining strangers going through the wreckage of this flight if it were to crash And would anyone notice or care gathering up my stuff from the desert below? Would they investigate the last song I was listening to? Would they go through my phone and see the last picture I ever took Was of our sleeping daughter early this morning Getting ready to go, and I was struck by her face Sweet in the blue light of our dim room?
Then he snaps out of his morbid fantasy:
And I know that’s not how it would go I know the actual mess that death leaves behind It just gets bulldozed in a panic by the living, pushed over the waterfall Because that’s me now, holding all your things….
Support urgent independent journalism this Giving Tuesday
I know that many important organizations are asking you to donate today, but this year especially, The Nation needs your support.
Over the course of 2025, the Trump administration has presided over a government designed to chill activism and dissent.
The Nation experienced its efforts to destroy press freedom firsthand in September, when Vice President JD Vance attacked our magazine. Vance was following Donald Trump’s lead—waging war on the media through a series of lawsuits against publications and broadcasters, all intended to intimidate those speaking truth to power.
The Nation will never yield to these menacing currents. We have survived for 160 years and we will continue challenging new forms of intimidation, just as we refused to bow to McCarthyism seven decades ago. But in this frightening media environment, we’re relying on you to help us fund journalism that effectively challenges Trump’s crude authoritarianism.
For today only, a generous donor is matching all gifts to The Nation up to $25,000. If we hit our goal this Giving Tuesday, that’s $50,000 for journalism with a sense of urgency.
With your support, we’ll continue to publish investigations that expose the administration’s corruption, analysis that sounds the alarm on AI’s unregulated capture of the military, and profiles of the inspiring stories of people who successfully take on the ICE terror machine.
We’ll also introduce you to the new faces and ideas in this progressive moment, just like we did with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. We will always believe that a more just tomorrow is in our power today.
Please, don’t miss this chance to double your impact. Donate to The Nation today.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and publisher, The Nation
He’s the one still alive, he realizes—and it’s hard to tell whether he’s ambivalent about that fact, or astonished at the absurdity of it.
Across both A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only, Elverum is obsessed with thresholds, with bones, dust, water, birds, nature itself. Foxgloves recur throughout his albums, the “first flowers that return to disturbed ground / Like where logging took place / Or where someone like me rolled around wailing in a clearing,” as he sings on “Two Paintings.” On A Crow Looked at Me’s “Seaweed,” foxgloves are an occasion to remember:
What about foxgloves? Is that a flower you liked? I can’t remember You did most of my remembering for me And now I stand untethered in a field full of wild foxgloves Wondering if you’re there Or if a flower means anything And what could anything mean in this crushing absurdity?
Grief, he’s saying, does strange things to the mind—it becomes hard to remember who you were before you were stranded, alone. Whereas A Crow Looked at Me was about the immediacy of grief, and coming to terms with how it crowds nearly every other feeling out, Now Only deals in the ambiguity of autobiography: Elverum goes searching in the story of him and Geneviève, though he understands the danger therein. In the album’s title track, Elverum elaborates:
As my grief becomes calcified, frozen in stories, And in these songs I keep singing, numbing it down, The unsingable real memories of you And the feral eruptions of sobbing, These waves hit less frequently. They thin and then they are gone. You are gone Then your echo is gone Then the crying is gone And what is left but this merchandise?
There’s no answer, but of course Elverum isn’t looking for one. Meanwhile, the music on “Now Only,” as on the rest of the album, is mostly strummed guitars under Elverum’s soft, evocative talk-singing. The songs are long; only one is under five minutes. And while they’re quiet, it’s hard not to hear the album as a sustained, 43-minute scream. Elverum has seen everything, and even now he can see Geneviève’s bones: “You’re still out there / In the spring upheaving, / Coming out of the ground, into air. / Is that exact fragment your finger that once caressed me? / Not that long ago, / I still can feel it.”
Bijan StephenBijan Stephen is a music critic for The Nation. He lives in New York and his other work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Esquire, and elsewhere.