Word Therapy with The Microphones

Phil Elverum of The Microphones and Mount Eerie by Jacob Alvarez

Phil’s music is something you need to sit and take in. I like to absorb it all at once, whether that’s an album full of songs or just one 44 minute track. The latter serves as his latest release under his older moniker, The Microphones. As soon as I heard it, I replayed it, again and again. I was almost brought to tears. I can’t remember the last time music did that to me, so needless to say, getting to sit down with Phil and understand a bit of his process was nothing short of amazing. Hope you enjoy!

Hey! Just wanted to say thank you for taking time out of your day to do this, I truly appreciate it. I know you probably have a lot going on after your latest release.

• Yeah! No problem. It’s possible we’ll get interrupted. My daughter might come in at any point cause I couldn't distract her with her podcast cause I couldn’t find the device, (laughs) but anyway..

You’re in Anacortes I take it?

• Near there on a different island.

Oh cool. I know most states are doing their own thing during this pandemic, so has anything changed for you as far as your life goes?

• It’s changed in that I don’t have any childcare help. School was pretty crucial for my life cause that was my little window to get anything done, but it’s about to start up here, well a little bit. She’s in kindergarten so we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve talked to other artists and some have said that not leaving the house has been the best thing for them creatively and some wished they were touring and such. Where do you fall?

• It’s also been a pretty productive time for me, although I’ve always been sort of uh thrived in solitude. That part hasn’t really changed that much for me. I never really left my house (laughs), although I would go on tour. I do miss touring, but after becoming a parent, I started touring less. It became more complicated, I couldn’t just jump in the car and tour and sleep on floors and make no money (laughs). Yeah tour had decreased anyways.

Yeah, that’s understandable. To jump into the album, after listening to it, I kind of forced myself to look back into my past. Was that something you intended for the listener’s experience even though you don’t usually have much intentions for your music?

• Yeah! I know that I talked, let’s see. It’s autobiographical, it’s about me, I’m talking about my story. But my intention wasn't to draw more attention towards me and my story. I wanted to use the facts of my life to do that exact thing. To make people look at their own experience, not just their histories and their biographies, but our own relations to memories and pasts and the present moment. I hope that people listen to it and don’t think more about me (laughs), they think about their own selves.

Yes. I definitely did that and it was interesting. I read that you had an enormous scroll of writing for this project, and that you had taken pieces out. Listening to it, I could see, okay he’s highlighting these parts of his life, but what were the reasons why you may have found something to be unfitting?

• Well I didn't want to be gratuitous. I truly wanted it to be only the essential stuff that made it through, which maybe it might sound hard to believe that some of the things that are in there (laughs) I would define them as essential, but really they were. Everything that made it into the song serves a really important purpose and the stuff that got edited out, it just didn’t feel necessary to me even though it was interesting, I didn’t want to just run my mouth forever.

Yeah, so I’m curious, these moments are crucial for you. Did that make it easy to think back to them and recall the moments with specificity?

• No, a lot of it is invented or kind of like, I tried to be accurate with the specifics of my timeline and stuff, but I didn’t try that hard cause I didn’t really treat it as a documentary project, I treated it as an art project. So there’s lots of interpretation and invention but it wasn’t hard for me to remember. I was totally going on feelings. Like for example I’m talking about when I was 12 or 13 on a family trip to the ocean , my brother gets wet, and we had to hold him over the fire to dry him out; I’m pretty sure that happened (laughs) but like I couldn't find photographic evidence and I don’t remember what year or exactly where we were, but I do remember the feeling very distinctly, so that’s enough for me. That’s what I’m going on.

Wow, when you look at it that way, it seems much stronger. I also liked that you weren’t fixated on the name of bringing back The Microphones. I thought maybe you were doing this to be like, hey all of my work can almost be one long piece and this is just me and here is me changing and here is my story, it doesn’t matter what name I’m performing under. Was that what you were going for?

• Mhm, yeah that’s right. That’s the idea. I always thought of the name as a marker of time. I made these records that were called The Microphones between 1997-2002 and then I started making Mount Eerie records, but essentially it was the same. Just me and my recording projects, so it didn't mean that much to me. But people, because I’ve always been a little ambiguous on if it’s a band or if it’s just me, who’s even doing it, people attach more significance to that name change, and it ended up being kind of annoying (laughs) to me to have to talk about it for like ten years. People are like, “why’d you change your band name? what’s it mean?” and I was just like enough, it’s all so silly. To focus that much on this superficial thing, but I assume, last summer, I said hey I’m going to play a Microphones show, just this small thing in Anacortes, maybe I was only inviting more annoyance around it (laughs), so that’s my own fault. But once I did that, I started to think, what would it mean to go back to an old… sort of like putting on clothes that you used to wear 20 years ago and like they don’t really fit and it feels weird, but it’s still interesting in a way. That was how it was, and this long song came out of this exploration of that feeling.

And I think this song is what that feeling would be experienced like when trying on those clothes from 20 years ago, because I know you’re an artist that is not attached to the ego side of the music industry like how bands reunite to tour and then break up and then do it again. You dusting off the old moniker got a lot of attention but that’s not what you’re about, it’s more interchangeable and that makes it more about the art in that way.

• Yeah, and that trend of bands reuniting to play their old or classic albums, is, it’s not my cup of tea. I don’t also blame artists who do that and maybe just wanna have fun and maybe it makes money too. I tend to overthink things and really get into what does it all mean, it doesn’t have to be that way for everyone but that’s the way it is for me. I have had some invitations to do that, people being like “can you reunite the microphones and play at our festival?” and I’ve always said no. First of all, cause there’s no one to reunite, but also cause it would just feel gross to me. It would feel insincere and I’m hung up on sincerity I guess.

Okay, and jumping off of that, this idea of living out these past experiences, and sort of embracing them and growing from them. It was very interesting to see how you are wanting to move forward, but it almost feels like this past is looming over you somehow.

• Yeah, or it’s more like, we can’t deny the past. We can use it, as like a foundation to stand on and move forward, but trying to like pretend it didn’t happen or trying to outrun it or negate it; I’m talking about something so benign and small and low stakes like some albums I’ve made (laughs), but the same sort of philosophy can apply to the history of humanity. Also people that suffer from trauma and relate to their past traumas in this way, and this is really heavy, and maybe I haven’t earned the right to talk about it like this, but it does seem related. There are ways of responsibly holding difficult things from the past and using them, and learning from them in a good way, so that’s sort of what I was exploring.

Almost like therapy in that way.

• Mhm, like allowing the past to exist and also not being burdened by it.

And would you say that this piece of work is the strongest in that sense where you are not being burdened by your past?

• Kind of, or I just want to, it’s just me sort of organizing it, organizing the past (laughs). Organizing it and describing it in a really understandable way, so that there’s less ambiguity about it. So now after releasing this thing, I’m a little liberated from it and I can now totally move forward into whatever the next weird thing is, without this, with less baggage.

You trying to organize these memories, the song jumps from moment to moment from different times in your life, so what was the process of forming that like? Did you put memories together that you remembered clearer simply to serve the narrative?

• No, I don’t know how I ended up sequencing things the way I did. It’s not chronological exactly, it does jump around. I think that it’s more thematic, like there’s an underlying thematic flow. Yeah, I’m just trying to remember, the end of one idea fades naturally into the beginning of the next idea, and they might not line up chronologically, like I might be talking about seeing Stereolab and then all of a sudden talking about being 12 and at the ocean with my family. There’s a thread there, there’s something beneath the narrative that connects those things.

It’s more of that feeling you talked about earlier.

• Yeah, and I think that’s the way writers work. That’s the way literature works. That’s what separates a work of art from a work of just documentation.

And so did you approach the songwriting phase of this the same way, cause I can’t imagine how difficult it was to write over the course of a year.

• Yeah, it was a long process. It was a lot of moving things around, and actually it was very much on paper. I had these scraps of paper that I was moving around and erasing, and taping them back together. I scanned in this giant scroll that you mentioned and it’s for people that buy the LP, it comes with a poster of it so you can sort of see my working process.

That’s really cool. I have a few lines that stood out to me on this piece, one of which being “and who would ever want to live in a prolonged stagnation” and I know you are about what the next thing is. I was just wondering, is there a fear of stagnation due to being an artist and always wanting to challenge yourself?

• Yeah, it’s more just as an artist, I don’t want to indulge in the comfort of repeating myself and I also recognize other artists [that indulge], that never really goes well, or it goes well in one sense. People can make a good career out of repeating their same hits and they can still find places to play and feed themselves. That’s not what I want. I view this music project of mine in a different way and I want to keep pushing myself into new weird territory, or I would rather just not do it at all, if I wasn’t somewhere uncomfortable and new.

Do you recall the moment where you decided that this was going to be your next project or did it come out more naturally?

• I do remember the moment. It was last summer, I mean I had already figured out those chords. I knew that those two chords, two and a half chords, were gonna be used for a long song. I knew that it felt good to be in the space that those sounds created when you played them for a really long time, but I sat with that for three or four months before…I was in the middle of writing the songs for the previous album, Lost Wisdom Pt II, and there’s a line in one of those songs, the song “Belief” where it goes “now I’m back where I was when I was 20, trying to stop clinging to a dream” yeah that line: “now I’m back where I was when I was 20.” That was the seed that this Microphones thing grew out of, cause I was like, what does that mean to be walking around. I was walking in the forest here and my daughter was at school and I had my notebook in my hand and I was just like talking to myself and wondering around aimlessly (laughs). I jotted down ideas but that line was just circulating in my head and I kept thinking about what it meant to be so lost in looking back 20 years. That was the seed.

Did that line enable you to also include other lines that are nods to previous releases?

• It was mostly from that one song. Cause that song “Belief”, it also has the phrase “the true state of all things” which is repeated on this song, so a lot of it grew out of that. I only later then was like okay well I should get specific and have a section where I describe what it felt like in like the year 2001, then I should have a section for 1997. I wanted to create these accurate representations, like a snapshot of my life in that moment.

Yeah, and your surroundings do play a huge factor in your process from the photos used in the video and you talking about how you’d wander the forest alone. What made you gravitate towards that idea of being in nature? Cause I figured, you can live near a forest but that doesn’t mean you have to go in it, so there has to be that curiosity right?

• (laughs) yeah, I’m definitely interested in it. That’s true though. I don’t have to go out there, but I find that it’s what I like to do. I have free time, I don’t know. I grew up that way. My parents were always out in the woods, hiking and camping, that’s the world for me.

And I don’t know if you’ve read the comments on your Bandcamp for this record, but many people claim you embody the Pacific Northwest sound. What are your thoughts on that?

• Hmm, I don’t know. The PNW has so many different, so much music.

I also like this idea of boundaries that you talk about and how you tried to create one separating the Microphones from Mount Eerie and how you have said the latter was you trying to be more mature. I feel like many people, especially people in their 20s are forced to grow up fast or want to for some reason, so no one is able to really experience the present moment. And that’s a key concept on this record in my opinion.

• Yeah, totally. I think, it’s weird. I think in our culture, it’s a huge thing because the US is made up of so many different subcultures, but essentially western culture is, young people grow up fast, but also grownups act like teenagers (laughs) forever. So kind of nobody grows up ever, and like culturally, our country is so young in the big scope of things that we sort of act like teenagers, what am I saying here…I just mean that, to have a designated traditional phase in your life, like how in certain cultures, they send the young out into the woods for a week and they fast and go crazy and then they return to the village and are greeted with “okay you’re an adult now.” We don’t have anything like that, we just have to decide our own level of maturity and create our own rituals. I think that there’s something missing there.

I also think it’s this fear of uncertainty. A lot of life is basically that idea and I think you embrace that but people are not so fearless in that sense.

• Yeah, I feel like a lot of effort is made to cover up uncertainty or try to outrun it. It’s true. I don’t want uncertainty, but I want to let it exist to the degree that it’s going to. Plus the circumstances in my life in the past five years like cancer, death, childbirth, falling in love, getting my heart broken (laughs), having to move. So much crazy stuff has happened for me, for lots of people. Uncertainty is just inevitable, there’s no way I can outrun it. The only way through is to take deep breaths and try to go through.

Would you say that’s your motivation? I like to ask artists about their struggles with tough times in relation to mental health. Like you said uncertainty is inevitable. My mom has been battling cancer and there are too many fluctuations at once, it is a lot to take on. So I guess I’m asking, if these bad things have happened, what gets you to say “there’s more out there. I need to keep going.”

• Oh man, sorry. Well, when I was more in the thick of being close to the trauma of death and grief, the best advice that I got was to relieve myself of any ambition. When you’re really in the hot zone of trauma, all you need to do is stay healthy and let time pass, for as long as it takes. You don’t need to find any deeper meaning and I didn't try to. It was pretty helpful that I had this child to take care of because that made my job very clear. All I had to do was take care of the kid, but yeah, I would say treat yourself like that kid and feed yourself and sleep enough. That’s a good place to start. Asking the big questions and trying to find the meaning of life, that’s advanced. That comes way later.

That’s what I ultimately took from your song. Here’s this person who is always asking these ambitious questions that will most likely never be answered. Someone could argue why would you continue to ask them.

• I don’t think I expect to find an answer. It’s more of a statement that I want to spend my life with a high level of curiosity and exploration, because we are humans and we have these large brains for mammals and that’s a rare opportunity for us to get to be curious and poke around and investigate our own existence. Even if the only answers are chaos and uncertainty. I want to spend my life being curious.

That seems very healthy, but some people can get trapped there. In that idea of questioning why and never receiving an answer.

• Well, that I don’t know. I’m trying to figure that out too. I’ve been stuck in past difficult things. Only time passes and it goes away by itself, but it is true. From a therapy and mental health perspective, it is possible to get stuck there in an unhealthy way. I don’t know. I want the answer to that one too.

Couple more for you. What was it like to go back and reflect on past situations where you strongly believed you had answers or knew something to its fullest capacity and looking back on it years later, seeing that you knew very little? Not many people can go back and admit that they were wrong.

• I think that’s a value of mine. Being able to accept when I was wrong, or even seek out instances where I was wrong. It feels good to me. When I am having a difficult time and I’m talking to my friends or family, what I actually want from them is to say “no dude you’re seeing it wrong, here let me correct you.” It feels good to me, to be shaken out of my certainties. That’s how we grow and that’s where knowledge comes from.

I think that’s so important because you can truly learn from anyone, it’s just whether or not you’re pushing to have those conversations.

• Yeah, and it’s really rare to have a friend that’s close enough to tell you when you’re wrong. Most people are surrounded by people that are going to reassure their own beliefs. Our president is certainly that way. No one is going to tell him how wrong he is because they’d be fired. That’s not healthy, and I want the opposite of that.

Definitely agree there. To end this, the song is transitioning from having no lyrics to having lyrics then adding drums but it never quite changes. It’s like you’re in a room and you’re adding furniture but you’re still in the same room. The furniture also represent your different perspectives if the room (your song) is representing your life. Was this the intention?

• Yeah, kind of. I noticed that I kept going back to the image of a river, and I talk about that a few times in the song. A river that is long and goes through many changes and it’s always changing and moving but it’s still the same river. I look at all of the albums I made that way; they’re part of the same river and this song is like it’s own river.

Where you say “nothing stays the same. no one knows anything. someone else lives in the house I grew up in.” That put things into perspective for me in more ways than one, but I’m curious as to what you felt when you wrote that.

• That line to me was just another way of saying impermanence rules (laughs).

Thank you so much Phil for your time. I appreciate you as an artist and hope we can speak again soon once things get less crazy.

• Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for the conversation Phil Elverum.