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Music

Everything Sucks So Here’s a Blog in Praise of Phil Elverum and Michelle Williams' New Marriage

The world is garbage so let's celebrate something that's not.

Off the top of my head, here’s a list of things from the past two months that have sucked: Donald Trump saying he likes Putin; Donald Trump saying that, actually, he doesn’t like Putin; that dumb conversation on Twitter about internships; Nicki Minaj releasing a shitty song with 6ix9ine in which they jack Valee’s flow; Nicki Minaj and Future announcing a tour with 6ix9ine; the length of Drake’s album; Facebook’s monopolistic control of the media finally catching up to all of us and sending all of the media companies in the world off a cliff; Kris Bryant going on the DL for the Cubs; this stupidass shirt; Grusk; Twitter’s conversation about Grusk; Kanye West doing that whole thing; children being separated from their families when they aren’t old enough to complete sentences; the universal recognition of what a fact is completely crumbling; Russ; people using sentences that somehow involve the words “avocado,” “millennials,” and “retirement;” the image of Donald Trump taking a giant shit in the White House; the discourse.

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The list could and does go on, as these are things that suck that’s genuinely just off the top of my head. But sometimes, when everything sucks, there’s a sweet, sweet moment of relief when you forget how dumb the world in 2018 is.

Today, that moment happened for me when I learned that Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum and Michelle Williams got married earlier this month at a private wedding in the Adirondacks. I’m not here to comment on the personal lives of musicians and celebrities, but man, this fuckin’ rules. Seriously. It kicks ass.

If you didn’t know, between his two albums since A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only, Elverum has released some of the most heartbreaking music of the last year and a half: beautiful, introspective, and real songwriting that ruminates on the death of his previous wife Genevieve Castrée, who was killed by cancer just a couple years ago. The music is arresting in how urgent it is, just laying out facts about how she died, and how he’s left with his daughter alone. Then, take Michelle Williams, the incredible actress whose roles in Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine, My Week With Marilyn, and Manchester By the Sea all earned her Academy Award nominations—and whose former husband Heath Ledger, with whom she has a daughter, died in 2007.

In Vanity Fair, Williams calls the relationship “very sacred and very special…The way he loves me is the way I want to live my life on the whole. I work to be free inside of a moment. I parent to let Matilda feel free to be herself, and I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.”

Everything sucks, and it's probably dumb how much joy this personal relationship between two people I've never met in my life brings me, but come on, this is Good. Thank God.