February 13, 2025
Phil Elverum / Mount Eerie @ Brightworks School
Interview with Phil Elverum
Phil Elverum is a songwriter and musician from Anacortes, WA. After spending the middle and late nineties in Olympia making music in the local scene and bands like D+, Elverum released Don’t Wake Me Up (1999) on the beloved indie pop label K Records. The album was credited to The Microphones, a musical project that Elverum would release music and perform under for four more albums, culminating with The Microphones in 2020. In 2005, he also began recording under the moniker ‘Mount Eerie,’ named after Mount Erie on Fidalgo Island in Anacortes. His latest studio album, Night Palace, was released in November 2024. Alongside these songwriting practices, Elverum has remained a fearsomely inspired photographer, poet, web cartoonist, filmmaker, and letterpress printer.
I first came to Mount Eerie’s music while writing album reviews for Tiny Mix Tapes, a music and film webzine. The gutted sounds of A Crow Looked at Me (2017)—called “barely music” by their songwriter in interview at the time—inspired our founder and editor-in-chief Marvin Lin to write: “Those who have suffered through loss will have much to relate with on A Crow Looked At Me, but it won’t be a salve for your despair. There are no instructions here on how to deal with grief, no moralistic epiphanies or clever grandiose poetics. But it could, at the very least, help some of us better understand how grief functions in our own lives, how being reflexive about loss can help us accept that “We are all always so close to not existing at all” or offer insight into how we too can function when “someone’s there and then they’re not.”
Trying to hold Elverum’s catalog and practice in full—from the lo-fi gulps and experimentally textured gleaming The Glow pt. 2 (2001) to the spidering windshield cracks of Now Only (2018) and beyond—I couldn’t help but return to that word, “love.” We are always so close to not existing at all. But we do, improbably—or otherwise—with and among each other. Without love, we wouldn’t miss each other once we stop existing. In love, we sing songs. Love engines Night Palace (2024), an uncompromising poem insisting on nonmetaphoric decolonization, opposing alienation and genocide even as the world turns and burns on.
In late January 2025, I spoke with Phil over video chat about to-do lists, love songs, and what he calls the art life.
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Frank Falisi: Hi Phil. How are you?
Phil Elverum: Good. This sure took some doing.
FF: Yeah. I really appreciate all the flexibility on your end.
PE: I'm not usually so elusive. What are you in the middle of right now?
FF: I just got out of work. I work at the local library. I bounced out early, into the parking lot. So I apologize for the view of the steering wheel and library dumpster. How about you?
PE: I just reorganized my to-do lists into this eight column thing. I've got, like, eight major projects going on at the same time. In one browser window I have open, I’m buying plane tickets for a babysitter for a tour—it's a lot.
FF: Do you listen to music when you're just sort of writing, when you're working on the to-do list even
PE: No, I don't actually. I used to. But for some reason, I often forget that music exists for days on end. My mind is full already.
FF: Are the eight columns, are those across like forms and forums? How separate are they?
PE: There's some overlap. There's another tour, this property purchase that we're doing through family. A bedroom renovation. Re-pressing six albums, getting a new accountant,reorganizing all of the way my money flows, designing a coffee bag—I'm coming out with coffee pretty soon and preparing to sell coffee at the merch table on this next tour. And then six other miscellaneous construction projects that I'm supposed to be doing. I'm not even like writing songs or recording or doing anything that’s actually, like, who I am.
FF: Does it feel good to be doing things that are not who you are? I feel like I've decided to try and do things I'm bad at this year.
PE: Yeah, I mean, it's almost all I do: things that are not who I am. I don't know who I am. Because clearly I'm a guy that does all these other things, who talks to accountants and stuff. I'm not a songwriter. Like songwriting, I used to say it was like 5 or 10% of my life. But songwriting, recording, creativity…I think it's probably actually way lower than 5%.
FF: But those songs, and then performing them, that’s the stuff that happens in front of people. So I feel like that's who people assume you are?
PE: Yeah, that's almost diminishing way down. Because my family and domestic stuff is growing. And so I'm pretty much saying no to all the different tour or show offers that come up. I would love to be able to do all of it, but it just doesn't fit in with my life at the moment. Like, I got my guitar here for practice with my bandmates and I didn't realize that I hadn't touched it in two months, since I was on stage at the last show. I just hadn't even taken it out of the case.
FF: That must be such a strange feeling, sort of proof of this columned life we live. Missing that very familiar weight in your hands. Are the practices part of gearing up for this next tour?
PE: Yeah, that's the first column. It's in two weeks. It's not even that long of a tour. I had forgotten how much psychological space the prep for something like that can take up.
FF: When you’re touring, are you able to do the sort of routines for yourself that you need in order to live in that space? Are you able to get out for walks and meditate?
PE: No, I mean, maybe it's possible. If I really tried, I could probably do it, but I don't. I don't have a manager or a tour manager or anything like that. So I take all these roles on. Other artists I know are a little bit better at delegating that stuff. And for better or for worse, I just do it all. And so when I'm on tour, I'm like a driver, I'm choosing the restaurants. I'm a parent, because my daughter's coming on tour. So it's just, like, every possible role. Things like meditation and walks get pushed to the side.
FF: I mean, it obviously sounds very hard. Can you feel yourself wear down as the tour goes on?
PE: Yeah. I think I just sort of switch into a different version of myself that has more capacity to just go for it. And the wear down is probably subliminal. I haven't been on tour in a long time. So “touring” is, like, not even part of my life really anymore. And when I do, it's pretty short. This one is 10 or 11 shows. So I'm not living the rock and roll lifestyle at all. If anything, because I tour so little, I want it to be worth it. I'm making all these special merch items and I'm really trying to sell the tickets, trying to make it worth it.
FF: It's interesting to hear that your daughter's gonna be on tour. One of the things that was so interesting about that long bio that you included with Night Palace was your writing about motherhood, these ideas of parenting. Did you think about your own mother when you were working on these songs?
PE: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I thought of the long lineage. I mean, my own mother specifically, but also just even further back, the generations, the ancients. I think it comes up in the song, “& Son,” where it's just like reckoning with, like, right, I'm just a blip historically, not only materially, but also in relation to the ancients, whatever that means.
FF: Yeah, I thought about “Ancestress,” the Björk song, which has this feeling of old mothers, of blips and echoes.
PE: Yeah, yeah, totally.
FF: Did your mom influence your music taste?
PE: Yeah, my dad is the more musical of the two of my parents, but my mom is secretly an artist. I think she is. She wouldn't call herself one, but she definitely has a super artistic temperament, volatile and chaotic. Chaotic mind in that way. And when she does write—even just a birthday card—it's accidentally so poetic.
FF: That rings really true. I used to watch my mom doodle absentmindedly on notepads while on the phone. I would look at these flowers she’d make, which always had this feeling of accidental poetry. Speaking of stumbling into the profound, I was thinking about your song “Widows” from Lost Wisdom Pt. 2. In the last bit, when you and Julie [Doiron] are trading lines. And she sings, “If there's significance in where you live/ let it all go and follow love and intuition.” At the risk of feeling like Chris Farley talking to Paul McCartney, how do you keep yourself close to love and intuition when you're making a life, let alone making art?
PE: I think that's a good thing that art can do. Having an art practice is a way of maintaining your orientation towards intuition, just honing it. Maybe it's actually the best thing that art can do: direct both the creator and the experiencer of the art into that intuitive zone. It's like a self-regenerating cycle. But also, meditation is a good one, a good practice to let efforts and projections fall away, to return to that gut-feeling place.
FF: I feel like that’s one of the upshots of Night Palace. At the end of all of this effort, there’s this almost impossible feeling of uplifting feeling. “The constant catastrophes pound on the door/ And who isn’t my neighbor on this flaming globe?”
PE: I wanted to root it in the material, cultural, societal reality that we live in. We live among other humans. Like, I spend the whole album kind of drifty-dreamy, like reflecting on ancestors and sort of supernatural meanings and all this like kind of wishy-washy stuff (that I stand behind). But I wanted to bring it back down to the boulder. Like it ends with me just staring at a boulder trying to be like, concrete, not metaphorical. I’m also trying to square my Buddhist ideas of non-arising with this like…well, there's a boulder. Even that didn't arise? And we live in this flaming world and actually, global warming is real too. Even though non-arising is real too, you know? It’s squaring those things. I don't have an answer to it, but I just wanted to end with both of those things in my hands.
FF: Two hands really makes sense to me. I listened to “Ancestress” this morning by way of listening to some of those mother-ancestors that you write about. I was struck by Sade’s “The Sweetest Gift”; Sade also sings about the boulder! And the wind and the moon, these natural elements that rhyme with your songwriting. Does it ever seem silly to you, when we ask artists to comment about why they write about nature? “Why are you curious about the boulder?” seems eminently answerable by, “How could you not be?”
PE: I know my relation to that word or idea, to “nature” is so…like you say: why would you not be interested? Or like, what isn't nature? Like, are you into breathing air? I think that maybe the reason that question comes up in such a clunky way is because often, the reality is that most of us live with so much alienation from nature or the non-built world. And so it gets othered and objectified in this way. When somebody like me comes along, and I'm using these metaphors—a boulder, wind, whatever—I think I think it’s easy for a lot of people to hear it as a picaresque or pastoral. And that's always kind of frustrating to me. I keep forgetting that that happens. I'm like, haven't people gone outside yet, to demystify this?
FF: Even the language we use around it: you have to enter nature. We exist outside it all the time. I think we ask art to get us back to nature. And I don't mean to be dismissive: I realize that ecopoetry and environmental writing are discrete practices. Haiku too. There's a purpose to being intentional, including about language and nature.
PE: I think also bringing in things that, on the surface, might not seem to be “nature,” bringing that vocabulary into “nature writing” is so powerful. Like, there's a spider living in the gas tank of my car. Things are moving. I listened to this great interview yesterday. It's on the most recent episode of this show, Ideas, from CBC. It was about these billionaires that we have now who are ruling us, how they're trying to basically move to Mars or cure death, live forever, upload their mind to AI, be immortal. And how all of that is rooted in fear of death, fear of nature. And a fear of how death and nature are the same thing. Being societally accepting of death and its inevitability—it's a beautiful and participatory practice for all of humanity. We all die. Everything dies. That's how we come together. And that's how we, like, merge and how we make space for new people. And we’re in this weird technological moment where these billionaires are trying to be like, But I'm not that I'm, I'm special. I'm not even human. I'm going to be the first cyborg on Mars. How sad and fearful that way of thinking is.
I don't know. I brought that up because it popped into my head when you asked about nature writing and how sad it is that most of us are living with high degrees of alienation from these very universal cycles that are around us. Like, there's trees and wind outside your car window that I can see right now, you know? There's no escape, actually—we're just in nature.
FF: I remember when The Caretaker was releasing Everywhere at the End of Time. I remember having to square these questions about decay and disease and death in terms of nature. Decay is natural. That’s a natural process, part of time and biology. And disease—is that natural? It doesn’t feel like it, but maybe it’s a function of decay, and maybe there's a nature to it. I admire the way he confronts those squirmy issues with sound and music. We live far away from those feelings, understandably so, I think.
PE: Art is like a coping mechanism to live separate from it. Because it can be painful to watch your loved ones die. But not necessarily, you know? There's also beauty and love and connection and interweaving that happens through death. So both are true.
FF: Thinking about how we get to songs, and how songs get to us: I was reading the new Liz Pelley book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist —
PE: I just finished it yesterday.
FF: Oh amazing. The way she gets into the non-economic side effects of these streaming services and how they alter our distance from encounters with these holistic objects and experiences, that feels connected to what you're saying about these billionaires, this ceaseless streamlining of art. It fades into the background. I'm always turning on music. I'm always changing my environment in some way. I think that's kind of good sometimes. And I also think it's sometimes like, well, am I putting something in the way to get between me and a feeling?
PE: Yeah. I mean, I think that's kind of what music and art can be for, and not in a damaging way. I think my takeaway from the book is maybe that the new thing is the high degree of passivity that defines the time that we're living in. People clicking ‘play’ on Spotify and just letting it recommend whatever it wants to us. So it's not so much about how music can dampen our sharp perception of the world around us.
Because I think…I just think of shamans banging a bone on a rock around a fire 10,000 years ago. It's a mystifying experience. That's what art can do. That's what transcendental music is for, actually changing your environment, changing your relationship to what's going on and, and maybe breaking through to some like deeper understanding. That to me seems good. Maybe the ancient equivalent of Spotify would be like, the nine year-old or sitting around the fire, and the shaman’s banging the bone on the rock. And they're just kind of drooling, not really mindful. That's like the equivalent of lo-fi chill beats to study to.
FF: I think you're really right about the passivity. It's also interesting to hear you say that the mystification is a good thing. Often, it feels like criticism is a practice of demystifying phenomena that insist on their own inevitability, exposing these rotten elements of capitalism that get in the way for us, right? It’s easy to forget the other side of the equation, that art is a mystifying process.
PE: Yeah, I don't think art is necessarily the best tool for accurate articulation. I think it does something else. Having a photo-realistic painting is less impactful than an Edvard Munch painting, you know? That's what art is.
FF: You talked a little earlier about art changing your relationship to what’s going on—I’m curious when we bring the change to art. Like, there’s something about getting a crush or falling in love, and all of a sudden, the songs make sense. And suddenly, these love songs that otherwise feel like products or trifles—Perry Como’s “And I Love You So,” Dean Martin’s “Everybody Love Somebody,” Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You”—start to ring with truth. Do you think about love songs as a discreet practice?
PE: No, I don't. And sometimes I wish I did more, that I accessed that more. I know you're not necessarily talking about like person-to-person romantic love. You're talking about maybe a broader idea of love. So I guess in that sense, they're all love songs. But sometimes I wish I had more person-to-person love songs, because I do have a lot of person-to-person love in my life. I think I tend to just kind of want to keep it private, or that it's, like, too sacred to show off in this way. I don't know. There's a cool tradition of it though. There's a lot of really good love songs.
For me, that's really hard to get to that certain way that you're talking about though, because because those songs are so omnipresent, they become like wallpaper. You stop seeing them. It stops feeling like anything just because we've heard those words so many times or we've heard those sentiments so many times, it becomes harder to access a true feeling.
FF: In reference to some of Lost Wisdom Pt. 2, you used the word ‘embarrassed,’ to describe your relation to them. Which makes total sense: I think we all make art and things that we feel embarrassed about. Do you still feel that way? Do you think of a time theoretically in the future where those songs can become more like those Perry Como songs, songs for other people to go to? Does that make sense?
PE: Yeah yeah yeah. As songs, I'm pretty proud of them. I think that they convey something that I stand behind, just like, being in love and taking a leap towards a feeling. I used ‘embarrassed’ more in the biographical sense, about the person that I was writing those songs to. I wrote those songs after I had gotten dumped. I was with this person, Michelle, and she dumped me. And I was still in the early phase of negotiation. I thought I could convey my position as beautifully as possible with this, like, embroidered album of devotion and love and belief and hope. And maybe it can break the spell of the bad thing that's happening. And I became embarrassed later, after the album came out when I realized, like, Oh, she really is not interested in hearing me or knowing me. She's like, got a whole other family already. And so it, that's where the embarrassment came from. And I haven't quite come back around to being able to hear those songs and not feel those things. But whatever. I hope other people can hear them because I think they're pretty good. I think they're really good.
FF: I'm bringing this up selfishly. I really love those songs. Thank you. I think they were very important to me personally, at least for a chunk of my life.
PE: Thank you. Cool. Thanks.
FF: Thank you. Maybe by way of closing out and staying on love: how are feeling after David Lynch’s death? I know he figured pretty significantly into your own art.
PE: I mean, I loved him. He was a very inspiring figure in the world. And for me as an artist—I use his phrase, the ‘art life’ a lot, like as a devotion, as a way of asking, What's the point of my life? Like, what am I doing here on earth? Oh, it's the art life. It means like, maybe being a shitty parent sometimes, maybe, like, not taking care of myself in the best way, maybe being covered in grime and paint and whatever but pursuing the vision, whatever it is. He was a really good example of doing that. And yeah. He also loved smoking and died from it. So I mean, yeah, all these people…Gary Snyder is going to die eventually. He's another major dude for me and he's really old and apparently still healthy. But these artists get old and die if they're lucky. Sometimes they don't get to be old before. It's sad. But death is a beautiful, participatory, cultural interweaving.
Frank Falisi is a writer from New Jersey. From 2015 to 2020, he wrote for Tiny Mix Tapes. These days, he is an editor at Bright Wall/Dark Room, helps run Garden State Lantern, and studies film at the CUNY Graduate Center.