Even aside from the music, everything about this Grouper album is great. The title is so evocative: Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill. It’s the kind of simple line that immediately puts a picture into my head. And then the cover, which doesn’t convey anything specific but makes me want to look closer and understand what it might be about.
Tonight on the bus home from work I was reading an excellent profile by Nick Richardson on Liz Harris (Grouper is her project) in the current issue of The Wire. And I read that the cover photograph is actually of Harris as a little girl, when she was being raised in a strange neo-Christian cult in Northern California. I only have this album on mp3s, and this is partly why I like to buy LPs, but hand to god I always thought this photo was of a doll. Something about the posture, the clothing, the scene—just didn’t seem real to me. Guess I never did look closely enough. And the idea that it was a doll was kind of creepy to me. But the idea that this is a photo of the woman singing these songs, taken when she was a kid, is something much more. Maybe I’m just dense and you knew it was a little girl or even Harris herself all this time. But for me this was new information and it sent a chill down my spine.
Apparently, as a girl she was once given a dare by someone older than she to drag a dead deer up a hill and she pulled it up halfway. This is a song called “Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping”.
73 notes