Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie, the Microphones) is a humble legend living a humble life with his daughter and friends. He is now back with a brand new Mount Eerie album, Night Palace, out today (November 1) through his own P.W. Elverum & Sun label. So it was an honor to listen to the record beforehand and talk with Elverum all about it via Zoom.
To be honest, I have made interviews with lots of artists, but this one feels rather challenging in the sense that you are already so open and honest in your song lyrics. I’ll still try. I want to start off by stating that to me, Night Palace could be one of your deepest, most spiritual works yet. I know Zen Buddhism heavily influenced these songs, so maybe we can first talk about that aspect.
Phil Elverum: I’ve been interested in Zen for, I don’t know, 25 or 30 years, a long time. It’s just been sort of a casual interest. Or maybe it was not that casual. I feel like if I look back on the albums I’ve made, pretty early on, I was trying to say these kind of similar ideas of surrender and emptiness and some of the values of Zen. It is more recently that I’ve just been like, “Who cares? I’ll be more overt about it, rather than trying to use metaphors and code language or translate Zen ideas.” I’ve been just more straight up quoting Zen literature. (laughs) But I don’t consider myself Buddhist or anything like that. The religious aspect of it I don’t relate to so much, and I’ve never practiced formally in a temple. But I’m a practitioner in my own way.
I can totally get that. Whenever I’m out in nature, I find something to connect to in a deeper, spiritual sense. There is nothing religious about it, I just feel that. And I certainly believe there’s music in nature as you say in “I Heard Whales (I Think)”.
Yeah. I think there’s something that’s sort of transcends all the human religions. It may be an interaction like talking to a fish or having a two way interaction with the non human world. I think that is kind of at the heart of all spirituality in a way. That’s what I was trying to get to, something universal.
Would you go as far as saying that there’s music in everything?
Sure. Music is an interesting word and you could define lots of stuff as music, but sure, definitely. Especially after John Cage’s “4:33”. Actually, Cage is another musical Zen practitioner. He was a lifelong Zen Buddhist. So yeah, the music of the potential of the void. Music of silence counts as music too.
David Lynch is a practitioner of transcendental meditation, so the stuff he produces has that innate spirituality. You and Lynch also indirectly deconstruct the American Dream through Night Palace and Twin Peaks respectively. Do you align yourself with him and his work somehow, if that makes sense?
Yeah, I never thought about that exact parallel. But yes, definitely. Twin Peaks is a huge inspiration. Also David Lynch and his devotion to living an artistically rich life for so long is really inspiring to me. The ideal is to live my entire life prioritizing mystery in the way that he has.
If I were to divert from the topic for a second, who is your favorite Twin Peaks character?
Well, I like Agent Cooper a lot. I mean, he’s the hero. He’s just such a great character. A grounded, wise seeker.
A lot of your music is driven from accidents. What was the most beautiful accident you stumped upon while making music so far, do you think? Does a specific memory come to mind?
Yeah, I can think of one good example. It’s this sound that occurs a few times on Night Palace. I have this air organ back there. An old, cheap, thrift store organ. It’s a toy instrument almost. But I’ve had it since 1997 and I use it a lot. I was trying a new technique with it a couple of years ago where I had microphones on it, and those microphones were really distorted, and I was listening in headphones, so it was extremely distorted, but it still sounded like the chords, just a thick distortion version. Because the mics were so sensitive, every little finger sound I made was crackly. Then I started whistling along with the organ, but I was in headphones, so I couldn’t really hear my own whistling. So I was singing, whistling the wrong notes and just improvising, playing chords and whistling along. There was a clash and it became a new instrument, really. Maybe people will hear it and think that it’s a synthesizer of some kind, but it’s not. It’s just this accidental discovery. (laughs) I love that sound so much. It’s the main sound in the song “Night Palace”, and then it occurs in a few other songs as well.
Despite this album being 80-minutes long and containing many genre influences, it all flows so naturally. How much of the music you made in the past few years have you excluded from this album? Have you ever considered it to be longer?
Yeah, I did exclude some, but not a ton. It could have been longer. It’s a double LP, and there was a bit of a period where I was considering making it a triple LP and thinking, “That’s crazy. That’s a lot of music. Maybe nobody likes triple LPs. It’s too much. Everyone agrees it’s a bad idea.” (laughs) I decided to edit it down and be more gentle with people’s time and attention. But yeah, I truly tried to make something that was essential, to make sure everything on there was necessary and not redundant.
It feels necessary also in the sense that there is a narrative involved. You start off with self-exploration, and then it develops into something beyond you, you include the entire universe as well as the history of the USA and thoughts on post-colonization. There are even lyrics that refer to your past work. (“I used to dream that my roots were strong and deep. Then I dug down just barely and found Cathedrals,”) Do you feel you have reached to the end of a part of your journey through this record?
I think it’s more like a beginning. Or, you know, the middle something. Yeah, no, it does feel more like a beginning, because the last few year albums that I’ve made have been in this one mode of self-exploration, self-analysis or autobiography, especially Microphones in 2020. I just sort of was finished with that, wanted to start fresh and look outward. So yeah, Night Palace feels like that. It feels like a new start. I don’t know what’s coming next, but it ends on further exploration and more mystery. But you’re right. Within the album there is sort of a cycle or a narrative where it starts with small scale, inward self-exploration. Then the attention kind of grows outward into, like, “Where am I? What is this place? What is it like to live here? What’s the hidden history?” And then it sort of comes back around, I think, at the end, with “Demolition”, “Stone Woman Gives Birth to a Child at Night”, and “I Need New Eyes.” These songs sort of bring it back to integrating that self awareness with living. Living with open eyes in this place where I am. That’s the idea.
Do you dream often, and are your dreams often vivid? What did you last dream about?
Mostly my dreams are not that vivid. I don’t remember them when I wake up. I think that I do dream, but they’re not available to me when I wake up. The other day I dreamed that a friend of mine here, where I live, had collapsed and he was having a seizure or something, but he was very conscious in the seizure. We were all giving him massages and I was rubbing his bare feet and his feet were dirty and sweaty and kind of gross. (laughs) I was giving my friend this sort of affection and healing, and then somebody else was massaging my feet at the same time. So maybe it was a dream about the community taking care of each other or something.
That’s nice. At first, I thought this dream was slowly leaning toward the realms of body horror or something, but you wrapped it up really nicely in a really sweet way.
Yeah, no, it was wholesome. It wasn’t horrific. I mean, his feet were sticky and sweaty and gross in the dream, but it was fine. I was doing it out of love.
I originally meant to ask whether if you becoming more and more spiritual over the years effected the nature of your dreams somehow.
It fluctuates. I don’t think it’s related to my meditation practice necessarily. I don’t know what affects the dream thing. I sleep less. I’m getting older, so I think I just naturally am sleeping less hours than I used to. I wake up naturally pretty early and I’m okay with that. I like having those quiet early morning hours. I sleep seven hours a night instead of eight or eight and a half I used to. So maybe that means that I don’t remember my dreams as much because I’m sleeping less. I’m always a little bit tired.
For my next question, I want to show you a video of a younger you.
Oh yeah! This video.
A friend has requested that I ask you of a concert memory from the 1990s that holds a special place in your heart.
I saw Nirvana twice. I think that video is from the first time, when they were on the Nevermind tour. It actually wasn’t that great of a concert experience. It was so huge and we were sitting in a sports stadium really far away. They were on the TV screen and clearly felt uncomfortable. They played their hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” really badly on purpose, because they hated it. It just wasn’t a good one. (laughs) The first early concert experience that really is memorable, I sing about it in Microphones in 2020, it’s Stereolab at a small college near where I grew up. Just a small college show. Stereolab in their kind of drone phase before they became a little more mathematical and jazzy. It was so powerful, just the drone and the power of this trance that they were doing. That really changed things for me.
I would say that Stereolab is still very underrated.
Yeah. There’s so many different versions of Stereolab too. I think of maybe early Stereolab with a driving drone, which is like one chord, but then they sort of changed into something else. They have had many different versions and they’re all really interesting, but that early one is the one that lives in my heart.
In your interview with Anthony Fantano, you say that your daughter is very musical too. What is she up to lately? Do you still learn new bands and projects from her?
Yeah, totally. I just got back from driving her to school, and we listened to the radio. She’s going through a country music phase right now, but mainstream country, which is pretty funny because every song is about whiskey, but there are songs she likes pretty much. She says she doesn’t like pop music as much anymore, but I don’t know. The country music she listens to is pop music. So I learned stuff from her. It’s not like I become a huge fan of some of the stuff, but sometimes when she’s not there, I’ll put on some stuff that I’ve discovered from the pop station, like SZA or Halsey or Miley Cyrus’ live album, which is pretty wild sounding. (laughs)
I kind of expected that after 100 Gecs, maybe she would go more experimental. But I also know that the country music scene is huge right now, right? There is some interesting stuff there.
Yeah. It’s becoming. Lots of not-country artists are doing country albums, so it’s just all kind of getting integrated, I think.
Yeah, and we are already living in an eclectic, post-genre age.
Definitely.
When you check out your streaming platform’s history, what are the last three things that you listen to?
I was listening to Liz Phair on the drive home after I dropped my daughter off. I no longer listen to the country station when I’m in the car alone. I don’t have to anymore. (laughs) I’m also reading a Joni Mitchell biography right now. All I’ve been listening to is weird late period Joni Mitchell albums, like this album called Turbulent Indigo from 1994. I love it so much. I just discovered it.
Speaking of biographies, what have you been reading these days?
Lately it’s been a lot of biographies or music and art history books, but normally it’s not that way. But yeah, right now it’s this Joni Mitchell biography called Traveling by Ann Powers. Before that, it was a Norwegian novel called Boathouse by Jon Fosse. And before that it was a history of the record label 4AD by Martin Aston, which was kind of a challenging read, but I did it anyway. (laughs) So it’s all over the place.
Which one was your favorite?
Boathouse, the Norwegian novel. It was so weird and also short. I plowed through it.
Let’s imagine we’re at a Musicians Theme Park 100 years from now, where every artist or band featured has their own memorial stone with a certain lyric by them written on it. Which one of the lyrics would you like to see written on your stone?
Probably “There’s no end.”
You can check out Mount Eerie’s Bandcamp profile here.
