“Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar,” Max Porter wrote in Grief is the Thing With Feathers. It is “everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.” And yet grief, loss, the act of dying, where we go, what becomes of those left behind, are still near-untouchable subjects, death a taboo beyond all others. We have barely begun to consider the glory of it, the banality, the wonder.
Death was a subject that had long fascinated Tunng’s Sam Genders; a preoccupation not born out of the macabre so much as a curiosity about the fundamental purpose of existence — but also a hesitancy he had noticed around others’ grief; a wish to be supportive in the right way, to say the right thing in the face of loss.
He read a great deal on the subject: Brandy Schillace’s Death’s Summer Coat, Megan Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK, the American surgeon Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Around the time of Tunng’s sixth album, 2018’s Songs You Make at Night, Genders found Max Porter’s novel Grief is a Thing with Feathers, and was struck by its power. Its viscerality and rawness and rage. Its beauty and love and connection. He passed Porter’s book around his band members.
