Photo by Clarke Tolton/Justin Hollar
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear," C.S. Lewis wrote in his 1961 book A Grief Observed, a collection of observations about the death of his wife. Joan Didion tackled the same topic—the loss of a spouse—in 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking. "Grief has no distance," Didion wrote. "Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life."
For as universal as grief is, we don’t hear the word "elegy"—that musical lament to the dead, which casts a longer shadow over music history than even romantic love songs—very often. Yet the examples have always been there, existing and thriving still. The most popular ones seems to suggest you don’t pour grief on thick: The lightest of touches in elegies—like Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s tribute to the late Paul Walker with last year’s "See You Again"—tend to play the best to mass audiences.
But elsewhere, in more fragmented corners of music, there's a small handful of albums that show the desire for intense elegies, the sort of engrossing ruminations on mortality that listeners often contemplate alone, together. Arcade Fire’s 2004 debut Funeral reached a new level of openness about loss, from a band as extended family still grappling with looming questions about how to live. Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, inspired by the death of Stevens’ estranged mother, was another work in this vein, albeit emotionally resonant in a different way than Funeral's anthems. And in its own way, this year’s version may well be School of Seven Bells’ SVIIB, released last week.
The record is Alejandra Deheza’s nine elegies to bandmate Benjamin Curtis, who on December 29, 2013 died of lymphoma at age 35. At different points in the band’s career, Deheza and Curtis were collaborators, friends, confidants, lovers and—to hear Alley tell it—soulmates across lifetimes. In 2007, a handful of singles gave way to School of Seven Bells’ stellar 2008 debut Alpinisms. Through 2010’s Disconnect From Desire, their creative bond endured through separations both creative (Alley’s twin sister Claudia’s departure from the band) and romantic (Ben and Alley broke up before the album’s recording). In 2012, before Curtis’ diagnosis, the band arrived at its peak prolific output in recording and touring, bookending the year with the full-length Ghostory and the EP Put Your Sad Down.
SVIIB is the band’s final album, written before Curtis’ diagnosis and recorded amidst his battle. He was the band’s in-house producer and guitarist, recording instrumentals this time from his bed in various cancer wards. The album is at turns heartbreaking and life-affirming, lush- and austere-sounding, with dancefloor fillers, poppy R&B slow jams, and torch-song ballads. Like SVIIB, what you read below is the story of Alley and Ben, dictated by Deheza in her own words. This is her elegy.
The first time I met Ben was when we were on tour with Interpol in 2004. We were both in New York bands, but we had to go on tour to meet each other. It wasn’t until those tour stops in L.A. and San Diego that we interacted. We would see each other backstage, tell each other, "Hey, good show!" as we walked past each other. I was in On! Air! Library! [with my sister Claudia] and Ben with Secret Machines [with his brother Brandon].
But the first time that I actually looked into his eyes while we were talking, I felt like someone hit me with a thousand lightning bolts! We fell in love hard and fast on tour. It's definitely proof of past lives. I knew him. I’ve known him for thousands of years. I felt it in every part of my body that I knew that I knew him. From that moment on, we were inseparable.
We weren't upset with our respective bands but each lacked what became essential for us: each other. I had the idea for School of Seven Bells already. I stole the name from a documentary I saw about these thieves and their final exam [a secret society of pickpockets stealing seven items from seven pockets with bells attached]. Ben said he wanted in. He had never produced a record before, but he wanted to do it with me. But we were also apart a lot, at first. Secret Machines took off, they went on tour with U2… I wrote "My Cabal" [the lyrics to one of the band’s first singles] about how Ben was like a spirit in the ether, how I longed for him. In response, he made me "My Camarilla" as a B-side to the single, as an "I miss you" letter.
You’ve got to understand, we met, completely fell in love, and did music all at the same time. The whole arc is the story for SVIIB. It’s our relationship over almost 10 years. The record is about him, every song, in one way or another. It's crazy. I never vocalized it at the time, but all the lyrics are about him. It's all that was coming out. I never thought about it directly. But it needed to happen.
It's not a sad record. When we were writing this record, it was the happiest time in a long time in our relationship. We finally hit this stride where we were okay after all the shit we had been through. There’s a song on this record, "Confusion"—it’s the last song we ever wrote together, the last we ever recorded together—that’s really sad. In the middle of the vocal take, I was crying. I wish I could go back to that moment and run in and tell myself, "This is the last song you’re ever going to record together!" I can't even believe I didn’t realize that at the time.
I haven’t read anything spiritual or religious since he died. I don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows what’s on the other side after you die. I don’t think you're supposed to know. All I know is I was next to Ben when he died. And what I saw when he died, I can’t even put it into words. I didn’t want somebody else or a book to tell me what that was. I can’t really explain it any other way. It’s the wildest thing I have ever seen and ever felt, energy-wise.
I don’t think dying is a peaceful thing. When I think about how brave you have to be to allow yourself to let go, it blows my mind how brave he was. Ultimately, I feel like he decided to go that day. And we knew it was going to happen. We wanted him to be so at peace knowing we were at peace too.
I couldn’t be in New York anymore after that. I love New York, it will always be my home, but after Ben died, the city held a darkness for me. I couldn’t feel creative there, it was kind of stagnant. I needed to not have all these memories around me. I needed to heal. So I moved to L.A. to finish the record [with producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen and mixer Tony Hoffer]. In New York, I was constantly reminded of him. I'm reminded of the good things too, but I needed to wipe the slate clean in order to see New York in a totally positive way again. You could say I was dealing with old ghosts in that city.
I feel like I’ve been communicating with spirits and ghosts my whole life. Both of my parents were intensely religious, so there’s a whole mess of superstitions that comes with that. I guess I’ve always been like that too. I was raised in a family of funeral homes from a young age. It’s the family business from my mom’s side. She was like the Wednesday Addams of the family. There were always caskets everywhere. I remember it being very normal. I saw a lot of grief and mourning as a kid. But it was only an abstract point of view. Nothing could’ve prepared me for losing Ben. I was 100 percent not prepared for that at all. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of grief.
The memorial service for Ben was at Le Poisson Rouge, it was beautiful. Pictures of him all over the wall, his white guitar in the middle, with flowers everywhere. His family and I scattered his ashes in New York, too, at Shelter Island.
But I’ll see him again. Because when we met, it was like we’d met before in previous lives. And I do believe we have many lives. I know that because I met Benjamin.