One afternoon, Eric Bachmann's son returned from school with a sheath of

pictures he'd drawn, all of them macabre. "There were crows and sinister

figures with scythes and tombstones," he recalls. On one, he had written

'DETH, SWET DETH,' and everything clicked in my head." Swet Deth,

Bachmann's first album under his Crooked Fingers moniker after a 15-year

hiatus, organized itself around the image: it's songs are about death, yes, but

there's a sweetness to them, a wry sensibility to his lyrics that comes from

having experienced many kinds of death and the life that follows in it's wake.

"Crooked Fingers" is a historically slippery concept - no two albums

sound alike or feature the same lineup in studio or on tour. Hearing parts in

these songs that called for instruments he didn't play or vocals that weren't

in his register, he found himself expanding the roster of guest musicians

further than he had on any album in his catalog, including Sharon Van Etten

("Haunted"), The National's Matt Berninger ("From All Ways"), and

Superchunk's Mac McCaughan ("Cold Waves"). But first he started with

family, friends, and frequent collaborators. Jon Rauhouse plays pedal steel.

Bachmann's wife, Liz Durrett, contributes vocals, as do members of his

touring band, Skylar Gudasz and Avery Leigh Draut (of Night Palace).

There is a freedom to this collection of songs, a groove to them that would

belie their agonies and anxieties were mere death the album's point and not

what comes before. For Eric Bachmann, that has been growth, as a musician

and as a man. Like the tree sprouting from the graveyard on it's cover, Swet

Deth is surprising and lush, a shock of color against it's morbid landscape,

proof of life in the shadow of it's opposite. "RIP Eric Bachmann," one

tombstone reads. As Crooked Fingers, he's never felt more alive.