Deep Voices 113: Phil Elverum

An interview with the artist behind Mount Eerie and The Microphones

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This edition of Deep Voices is an interview with Phil Elverum of The Microphones and Mount Eerie. Elverum’s new album, Night Palace, is out this Friday. The above playlist is made by Elverum, consisting of songs that are in conversation with that record. If you enjoy this interview, please consider a paid subscription to Deep Voices to keep this project going. Thank you!

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In 2001, Phil Elverum, recording then as The Microphones, released The Glow, Pt. 2, an album of such ambition and earnestness that it reshaped what indie music could do. There were songs, yes, but Elverum was unconcerned with musical cohesion so much as conveyance of a feeling. The album was made up of clattering percussion, plucked acoustic guitar, crunchy electric guitar, whispers, and interstitials of various ambient moans and groans. Despite all that, it cohered, with the differences in sound, song to song, building to a grander statement of purpose. That statement being, as Elverum elucidated on the monumental The Microphones in 2020, a 45-minute song he released many years later, that he hoped his music would accurately reflect what he saw while, “standing on the ground looking around, basically.”

Elverum has a sweet and simple voice and he sings on The Glow, Pt 2, as well as his many albums to come after, of subjects as massive as love, nature, and the search for purpose, as well as the small observances that make up the humdrum stuff of life. He laments, at one point, “The awful feeling of electric heat.” He doesn’t do too much showy stuff with his voice, but there is one moment on The Glow Pt. 2, where he holds the note, perhaps trying to get you to pay specific attention to this point. What he says is, “There’s no end,” that final D breathing out for a long time. 

That line, “There’s no end,” shows up again, as the final words sung on The Microphones in 2020. What he realizes, after decades of artmaking and living, struggle and success, is that he still largely feels like the same person. “I never used to think I’d still be sitting here at 41 trying to breathe calmly through the waves but nothing’s really changed in this effort that never ends,” he sings. Continuation, unsteadiness, and the welcoming of the new as it mingles with the old are big themes in his work. 

Another big theme in his work has been grief, after Elverum’s wife, Geneviève Castrée, died, leaving him the single father of their young daughter. In 2017, he released, as Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked At Me, an album written from the epicenter of loss. It was a brutal if astonishing document, his knack for observation making the pain he so plainspokenly described electrically charged. That album marked a change in his writing, too, shifting from a poeticizing of those little life details to something closer to a blunt recounting of them. That stark narrative approach continued on subsequent albums, as he paddled through the grief towards something else. 

His new album, Night Palace, seems to be an arrival at a new place along his journey. But it has shades of earlier waystations. In spirit, Night Palace closely resembles The Glow, Pt. 2, with its loping pace, its playfulness. There are loud songs and quiet ones, rock songs and folk songs, and one that samples audio from The Big Lebowski. It contains moments of verse and moments of screaming. It’s a very, very alive album, and a pleasure to listen to. For an artist who has brought us along through his lowest moments, it’s difficult to not simply feel good when listening to the album. It’s not that the grief has been solved or fixed, but it has started to settle and become a part of him as he changes into a new shape. “When my life is worn to a nub, I too will be swept up,” he sings. Yes, not but yet. 

Before speaking with Elverum, I asked him if he would make a playlist of music of his choosing. He created a mix of songs that are in direct dialogue with the songs on Night Palace. Our conversation touches on many of those songs, along with his thoughts on humor, hope, fatherhood, and, one of his favorite lyrical subjects: the wind. 

There are parts of Night Palace that are silly, like on “I Spoke With a Fish,” where you talk in the voice of a fish. I think you have some song titles that are pretty self-effacing, too. So I wondered, is Night Palace a funny album? Have I misjudged your work as serious? 

Yeah, there’s jokes. Maybe a better way to think about it for me is that the humor is just interwoven. Even A Crow Looked at Me has moments of absurdity where it’s like, “Oh god, don’t joke around during this.” But I just think it would be disingenuous to say that life is not absurd and humorless.

Well, I think those are two different things, absurdity and humor. Night Palace has some punch lines. 

So the song “I Spoke With a Fish” is about some pretty specific ideas and has a quotation that comes from this Zen Buddhist sutra, The Mountains and Water Sutra by Dogen. I was reading that, while I was backpacking alone…you know, kind of a spiritual time. And I was like, “Well, how do I talk about this?” Of course I don’t want to be too earnest or reverent talking about the sutra, that’s so cringe. And also—okay, here’s what it is: in the Zen tradition, there’s a lot of humor. You hear about these Zen masters and students are gathered around them looking for wisdom, and the master just [Elverum makes a fart sound] and says, “That’s enlightenment!” I feel like absurdity and humor and uncertainty, they’re all kind of the same thing. That’s where I’m zeroed in. 

You sing a lot about uncertainty. 

I think a lot of people lately have a negative read on that word, but I think of it as not being too stuck on whatever your viewpoint or your perception is in that moment. It’s about that feeling of being able to be caught off guard, of being surprised, having things be ventilated, permeable, not solid.

Night Palace is an album that moves between different sounds and genres. Does that exploratory nature have something to do with the acceptance of uncertainty?

Totally. I was listening to early Sebadoh and one song is just a rock band playing, and the next song is this home-recorded acoustic thing with lots of chatter in the background, things that prod our idea that one thing is supposed to be still. As a kid, I was coming to that from being into Nirvana, Nevermind, where every song is basically the same three chords. And it’s great in that way, but I realized that, oh, you can make an album that is the same thing, but multitudinous. 

You do that within your own musical world. You often reference your own older songs in your lyrics. Across your songs, themes show up again. 

I like when that’s foregrounded, the interconnectedness of different pieces in an artist’s body of work. I like the trippers treat breadcrumbs for deeper listeners and nerds to follow and connect to. And for an even more surface listener to have this thread between things made obvious. Made clear.

You have a gagaku piece opening your playlist. What’s gagaku? 

Gagaku is this traditional Japanese court music that I’ve been into. It’s this hard, high flute music. I try to emulate it in the slow chord movements of Night Palace. I also love that the wood blocks snap you out of it whenever you’re getting complacent with a chord droning on. This is  music that I’m interested in, and maybe could go to grad school to become an expert about, but I won’t. I’m not a musicologist. I did order a shō from Japan, which I used on this album a few times. It’s a bamboo mouth organ with 17 bamboo pipes that you can finger to build these strange chords. I’ve tried to emulate that sound for 20 years using other organs. But I’m trying to teach myself how to play this really tricky, traditional Japanese instrument. 

How is that going? 

I’m bad at it, but in recording, it doesn’t matter, you can punch it to get it done. 

You included two Stereolab songs on your playlist.

The first of the two, “Anonymous Collective,” syncs up with my song, “Huge Fire,” just because of the drumbeat. It might not be immediately apparent to people that hear it, but this Stereolab song has been in my head since 25 years ago, the rolling tom thing. Often when I sit down at the drums I play something like that. “Huge Fire” came from me recording that beat and then building the song on top of it. 

Cocteau Twins is next. 

“Treasure Hiding” by Cocteau Twins is the model for “I Walk,” in that part A of the song is this oceany, slow build up, and then there’s this dramatic shift to part B of the song, where it all kicks in. I love that.

When you say it’s the model for the song, was that structure something you were consciously trying to recreate? 

In this case, it was very conscious. I was listening to "Treasure Hiding” over and over and being like, “I want to record a song that does that move, that does that slow foreplay, and then the big kick in.” It’s such a basic rock and roll move, but I forget to use it. 

Then Sinead O’Connor.

“Petit Poule.” I referenced that in the Night Palace album bio as one of the songs that I zeroed in on about motherhood that made me feel like singing from a caretaker perspective. So that syncs up with “My Canopy,” which is just a straight-up little ode to caretaking for my daughter.

You said in the album notes that the song is about motherhood. Why did you use that phrase, as opposed to fatherhood?

I think, because her mom had died, I was trying to wrap my mind around, “What am I? Am I just a father, or am I both? And what’s the difference between motherhood and fatherhood?” I even wrote about it on Lost Wisdom, Pt Two, on “Widows.” I was singing about me and the other mothers, other widows. I’ve always hung out with moms. I’ve been the one dad at the preschool drop off. That’s my community. I prefer the moms to the dads. These dudes are annoying. 

You have Florist, who I love, next on here.

I discovered Florist on this album, Emily Alone. What hit me on this song, “Celebration,” is the fact that she speaks and then she sings. I was like, “Duh, you can do that.” It’s so powerful. There’s this poetry form called haibun, which is a chunk of prose and then a short poem following it, that I’ve always been really curious about using in a musical context. This song does that. She speaks, and then the singing kicks in to bring home the prose piece, to make it blossom. The prose is the soil, and the poem is the flowering of whatever’s in there.

You have a moment of spoken word on Night Palace.

“Myths Come True,” is the song, and then also, in an extended way, the song “Demolition” is a really long prose chunk followed by a song. So those are both kind of haibun form. “Celebration” gave me permission to do that. Or reminded me to try. 

In an interview you did about Lost Wisdom, Pt. 2 you said, “that album was a step back into poetry and away from memoir.” I think Night Palace feels like both forms. 

Yeah, definitely. Especially “Demolition,” which is a poeticized bio or something. That polarity between memoir and poetry, or the sweet spot in between, or what’s the role of the autobiographical in works of art, it’s kind of a constant question for me.

On “Demolition,” you say, “I’m only 46 and I have so many hopes.” What are those hopes? 

I love being alive. I feel so lucky to be alive. I’m not jaded at all, and so I have so many artistic hopes and ambitions. I still have this grandiosity in me. All the stuff I’ve done so far is just laying the steps towards something big, though I don’t know what that is. Also, just as a human in life, I have hopes to sort out my existence and get my schedule right and get better at balancing all of the different opposing forces in my life, like my desire to be good at domestic life and be a good partner and be a parent, and also I want to go everywhere and live everywhere. I’m learning Finnish on Duolingo right now for no reason other than just curiosity. 

You’ve got a song by Earth and one by Ragana. What’s your relationship with metal and heavy music now? 

I’m not a scholar, but I love heavy music in general. I realized after listening to black metal in 2009 or 2010 that I had been trying to make a lot of those sounds on my early tapes and on Microphones albums. I was doing blast beats on drums, not knowing that that was a thing. Extremely quiet and extremely loud has always been interesting to me. 

You worked very overtly with black metal guitars on Wind’s Poem. 

Even on Night Palace, there’s some blast beats and screaming. I still like going all the way in that one direction and then going all the way back the other direction. The Ragana song, “DTA,” stands for Death to America. Seeing them scream that at shows, it was like, “Oh, yeah, it’s important to just say it all the way.” So that song is related to “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization,” where I just straight-up say I want America to die. It’s a quote from them, basically. That overt punk radicalism is important to me.

On “Swallowed Alive,” one of the heavy songs on the album, you have your daughter doing vocals. Was it purposeful, in that quiet/loud way you’re describing? 

I knew that I couldn’t scream as well as she could. We recorded that when she was five. She’s nine now, but four years ago, I had my recording stuff set up, and I thought, “This is a good time to stock up on some screaming.” So I set up a four-track for her, gave her a vocal mic, ran it through a huge bass cabinet with distortion on it, and let her cut loose while I played drums and  recorded some cathartic screaming in our little house. It was just recognition that she was the screamer in the family.

Is she still the screamer? 

She’s mellowed out. I’ve discouraged screaming since then.

Eric’s Trip is next, a classic indie group. 

Eric’s Trip is my favorite band. All their songs are so deeply internalized. I think songs with lots of fills, where the distortion is on for the whole time, but are also melodic—that’s the default mode of music in my mind. A lot of the songs on Night Palace are more straightforward, just classic drum and guitar based things, like “Writing Poems,” “Empty Paper Towel Roll,” and “& Sun.” A short song, no funny business. Eric’s Trip is my model for that early ’90s pop, punk, grunge, whatever. I was too old for Blink 182. 

Tell me about Thanksgiving, whose music you have released on your own label. 

Thanksgiving is Adrian Orange. I’ve known him for a while. He’s going through hard times, but he is a masterful songwriter. This song, “The Old Graveyard,” is always with me in my head. It syncs up with “The Gleam pt. 3,” which ends with me saying “to grandmother’s house,” which is an “over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house, we go” reference which Adrian’s song is also talking about. I love this idea of grandmother’s house as a place where we’re all headed. In my song, it’s about dying, basically, or Alzheimer’s, which I feel like is probably in my future. I’m thinking forward to that degradation that I saw my grandma go through, and probably my mom, and I just think of it as grandmother’s house, this matrilineal dream state that’s sad and hard. The Ursula Le Guin song [on the playlist] also gets referenced [on “The Gleam, pt. 3”]. There is a line quoted from this book of hers that I’m reading called Always Coming Home. It’s about this idea of, “I wonder if my daughter’s granddaughter will be old here someday,” taking a deep zoom perspective on this place where we live, thinking about the generations past in this kind of nourishing way, rather than like a panicky climate change, end of times perspective that I usually have. 

I hope this isn’t too morbid, but when you talk about your daughter’s granddaughter, and looking into that future, that’s a future that does not include you. Grief has been a big part of your music in the past, but maybe on Night Palace it’s not so overt. More recently, what role grief has had in your art and vice versa, what role has your art had in your grief? 

It just evolves. I think on Night Palace the grief question took the form of an acceptance of the mystical. “I Saw Another Bird” is a response to A Crow Looked at Me. Like, yeah, a crow looked at me. Another crow also looked at me. We’re face to face with the unknown, and birds are a symbol throughout history of emissaries between the afterlife and human experience. That’s not this distant idea from mythology, that’s my lived experience. So grief takes the form of that loving observation from the other world. It’s like there’s a ghost, but it’s benevolent, and it feels like walking alongside of it rather than running from it, or being crushed by it. I guess the idea of my daughter’s granddaughter, I hadn’t thought about it from the grief perspective. 

Sorry.

No, no, it’s okay. It’s all there too. Of course I’m gonna die. That’s the plan. Okay, here’s what it is: That piece, “Demolition,” is me being like, “Who am I?” on this West Coast of the United States with this European-descended colonizer culture that feels very much spread thin on this place. And underneath that spread-thin-colonizer-culture is thousands of years of indigenous inhabitation that we don’t know about or talk about, and I’m wondering how long, how many thousands of years it takes for integration to happen, for things to become harmoniously grounded in a healthy way, because it still very much feels like, at least on the West Coast, that these aspects of colonization are alienating us all from the place itself. I know I sound pretty hippy-dippy talking about this stuff. 

You don’t, actually. You sound pretty serious. 

I’ve always been pretty tuned into place, thinking and writing and living, and recently have realized that, “Oh, duh. Think about the indigenous perspective.” It all changes when you acknowledge that perspective. I’m not indigenous. My people have descended from elsewhere. In my one human life, I feel like I’m from here. It’s just about wanting to be part of a culture that maybe in many, many generations from now will have a more intuitive, integrated, and harmonious relationship with this particular place, rather than superimposing imported, globalized, complanated views on everything. 

Have you read the book The Overstory? It’s about trees and trying to have an understanding of the ancientness of the planet. 

That sounds good. That’s the word, “ancient,” wanting to think forward to my granddaughter’s granddaughter, using that as a way of living where the ancientness of things is more interwoven with daily experience.

This is kind of a dumb question, but I think a lot about how logistical circumstances often end up influencing creative decisions in art. In your albums you often talk about the wind and I honestly hate the wind, so I just wondered, do you run hot? Do you like being cold? 

I think I might run a little hot. I might be more tolerant of it, although there’s different kinds of wind. When I lived in New York for a little bit, I also struggled with the cold there. It’s a whole different thing.

What’s the wind like where you live?

Um, wet.

That sounds worse.

Nourishing. No, it feels like being in a cold humidifier, and everything is permeated with small droplets of water. I like that for some reason, but you have to have the right clothes, and then you have to go inside and dry off afterwards. It’s not the kind of cutting, piercing, violent wind that feels like a sword that’s trying to kill you. I get aggravated by spring wind. I go nuts. I hate it. Yeah, I guess the sound of wind is pretty present on this album. I’m not trying to make it feel scary or desolate, but to me wind is a signifier of impermanence and fluctuation. 

On Microphones in 2020, you say that when you were younger, “You stood glowing with ideas of what I might try to convey.” Do you feel like you did convey them? Do you still agree with those ideas? 

I have so much to say. Night Palace is long. I’m trying to say a lot of different things. I feel like there is more to convey than just uncertainty, even though all this stuff could be boiled down, in a way, to just that one word. I feel like having an artistic pursuit is actually the whole point of life for me. I think it’s such a crucial part of being a human. There were times in my life where I tried to be more dismissive of that and be like, all that matters is interpersonal love, or enlightenment or transcendentalism. In the nuts and bolts of being a human, walking around on the ground, having this secondary pursuit, something that is not related to making money or feeding the family or putting a roof over your head, is the whole point. When you remove that, I think I don’t want to live in a world like that. 

Do you see that as a universal truth that you want to encourage your listeners to pursue?

Yeah, I think so, although not necessarily in the same way that I’m doing it. It’s more about imbuing their experience as a human with things that exist outside the world of capitalism and daily routine and pragmatism, things that are nourishing on a deeper, spiritual level. Making something in which usefulness might not be immediately apparent. I don’t know if that’s too vague, but that’s something I want to encourage through these songs. If there’s a message, it’s pro ambiguity, pro pointlessness, pro meaninglessness.

I feel like the project of your art isn’t about any one thing, but about the amorphousness from one piece of music to the next to the next to the next. 

I wonder if there’s a downside to that, because in other people’s art and work, it does feel good when something’s a hit or when something’s a real banger, like [appreciating] Vincent Van Gogh’s best painting, rather than looking at his entire body of work and having to always look at this painting in the context of all these other ones. There’s a lot of power in the masterpiece. So I’m always trying for masterpieces.

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