Phil Elverum ‘can’t listen’ to songs he wrote about Michelle Williams

Phil Elverum has admitted he “can’t listen” to the songs he wrote about Michelle Williams after their brief marriage.

Phil Elverum “can’t listen” to the songs he wrote about Michelle Williams.

The 46-year-old singer/songwriter and the 44-year-old actress split in 2019, less than a year after secretly tying the knot, and Phil has admitted he “got dumped” and now finds it “embarrassing” to listen to the songs he wrote about their relationship.

Speaking to The Guardian newspaper, Phil – who lost his first wife Geneviève Castrée to cancer in 2016 – said: “I made all these life changes. But then it didn’t work, and I got dumped and had to move back home.

“The person in these songs was still alive; I couldn’t speak as freely about her, and felt more protective of her anonymity. I can’t listen to those songs now. [They were written in] a period of hopefulness, when I thought maybe understanding could be reached. And now I know that it can’t. It’s still a little embarrassing in hindsight, just because of how painfully it ended, and how abruptly. The trauma from that lasted a weirdly long time.”

Phil also admitted he underwent more therapy after his divorce from Michelle – who married Thomas Kail, 47, in 2020 – than after his first wife died.

He said: “It seems like [losing Castrée] should be a bigger trauma, but it didn’t require as much therapy.”

Phil has now moved on with a new partner but revealed he has been thinking a lot about his past relationships.

He said: “I’ve been talking recently with my partner, about the role of the past in one’s present, and about moving forward. I have a lot of layers of past; I have this daughter, and her mom died, and we have some of her things around. And I’ve got this new life, this new house I built, a new partner.

“I feel like I’m in the later stages of dealing with the loss and the grief. It’s not as raw. I’ve found peace. I get to live in the luxury of: I’m going to spend today looking at that cloud passing over the hill and thinking about what it means when a bird squawks at me. I take the responsibility seriously, to find something real and meaningful in this human experience.

“People say grief doesn’t end, that it’s with you for life and just changes. That’s true. I’m in a phase now where the role grief plays in my life is giving me this beautiful, deepening understanding of things.”