Me. Inspired by Gary Snyder's poem "Go Now", Elverum realized that he did not have to take meaning from Castrée's death, and could write frank songs that bluntly describe her illness and his experience. Having read the poem months before Castrée's diagnosis, he found it "stayed with [him] subconsciously throughout the 14 months of transformative cancer horror". Further inspiration was found in the works of Canadian singer-songwriter Julie Doiron, American poet Joanne Kyger, American rock band Sun Kil Moon, and Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård. Will Oldham's 1996 album Arise Therefore influenced the album's sparse production style. Elverum chose the title A Crow Looked at Me to represent the "uncomfortable feeling of applying significance to insignificant things". Composition and recording Elverum wrote and recorded the album between August 31 and December 6, 2016, at his house in Anacortes, Washington, in the room Castrée had died, and for which he credits the album's "immediacy" and "bluntness". He had earlier abandoned the room, opening its window to allow the weather, birds, and nature to take over. He reclaimed the room out of a need for a private space to work when not parenting. In an interview with KUOW, he said that he wanted to create positive associations with the room so that it would not be defined solely by Castrée's final days. He used a single microphone, an acoustic guitar, and some of Castrée's instruments. His decision was out of practicality, rather than from any intentional symbolic significance. The album was recorded onto a laptop computer, making A Crow Looked at Me his first album to be produced entirely in this way—he had before mostly used analog recording. He began the recording sessions after his daughter fell asleep or was visiting friends. In notes accompanying the album's release, he wrote that the songs "poured out quickly in the fall" while he was "watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house." He described writing lyrics on paper and then practicing until he had memorized each chord sequence—a first for him. He said that most of his initial songwriting notes took the form of a "formless, no-rhythm, no-meter, no-melody blob of words". This process was a result of habit, "just doing what I usually do", which was "to distil all the mass of words in my head into something a little more poetic and