To be a DIY lo-fi indie legend in 2018, you have to be good at spreadsheets. Even when you live two hours north of Seattle, in the remote forested town of Anacortes, Washington, life involves “a lot of computer time.” Phil Elverum has been doing this for a while. He was best known as the Microphones, and his most prominent record was The Glow Pt. 2, which Pitchfork anointed the best album of 2001. Since then, Elverum has rebranded as Mount Eerie, releasing a daunting amount of experimental music: 41 LPs, EPs, and singles in the past one and a half decades, among them an excellent trilogy of fuzzy noise albums about the wind, moon, and ocean (go planet!). Dude even lived by himself in an isolated cabin in Norway for a whole winter—that record is called Dawn. The music is obsessive, sometimes impenetrable. It’s hermit rock, essentially.
But to most people, Elverum was still the Microphones until last year’s A Crow Looked at Me, an album about the loss of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, to pancreatic cancer. In the immediate aftermath, Elverum, an analog studio junkie, recorded the whole thing with an acoustic guitar and a laptop in the room where she died. It is a sad fucking album. It also might be Elverum’s most beloved work ever, even more widely adored than anything from his days as the Microphones. Except he can’t be sure, because K Records, the legendary label that put out The Glow Pt. 2, wasn’t so legendary at bookkeeping. At lunch the day of his New York tour date, Elverum says, “We don’t even know how many copies [The Glow Pt. 2] sold. There’s just no way to know. It’s just an endless black hole of information.” But on his own, having self-released nearly everything since, Elverum keeps better books. He has to. DIY means doing your own accounting, too, and nothing he’s put out himself has sold better than A Crow Looked at Me.
In person, Phil Elverum speaks like he sings: softly, thoughtfully, deadpan in delivery. He’s quietly funny in the way you might expect from someone who thinks about grief a lot. He also likes to nerd out on the nitty-gritty of record-making, which he does when he talks about his new LP, Now Only.
You write, arrange, and record albums all by yourself. What happens when you finish?
“So much,” he says. “That stuff you just described is like 10 percent.”
When I say Phil Elverum does everything himself, I mean everything. Lots of artists write all their songs and play all their instruments, sure. But how many of them master their records, design their jackets, fulfill orders on their website, and do their own publicity and book their own tours? (He only recently stopped scheduling his concert dates.) Elverum’s self-reliance comes from the reasons you’d expect: He’s uncompromising, neurotic, hates capitalism. But for him, going it alone is also the simplest process. “I’m like, I need to make a record. How do I do it? Do I pursue a record deal, which seems so spun out and convoluted? Or do I call the record-pressing plant and say, ‘How much does a record cost?’ ”
After we order our food, Elverum asks, “Do you want to hear about the mastering process?” I don’t. But he looks excited, so I let him proceed. I hear about cutting lacquer, carving records, metal stampers, liquid metal, a big press that smushes a blob of molten vinyl into something consumable. Elverum tells me about designing complex LP jackets with different paper stocks and paper finishes and foil stamping, calling companies for quotes over and over, even though he already knows the price. He updates his website—the same single-page blog he’s had since 2004. If you buy something on pwelverumandsun.com, that order goes to Elverum. Only recently did he stop doing all the shipping himself. “When people are like, ‘Can you sign my record? I want there to be a personal touch.’ I’m like, ‘You have no idea how much of a personal touch [there is]. If you smell a record, I stunk it up.’ ” Lucky customers will get boxes that have been scribbled on by Elverum’s two-year-old daughter.
Both Elverum and Castrée were artists—and after the diagnosis, the notion of creating art suddenly lost all meaning. A Crow Looked at Me charts this futility, remarking on how death isn’t for making poetry. On the record’s opening song, Elverum declares, “I don’t want to learn anything from this.”
He may not have wanted to learn anything, but the lessons were there anyway. A year later, his new album, Now Only, acknowledges—or at least interrogates—the role of art in grief. If A Crow Looked at Me is about the rawness of grief, Now Only accepts its absurdity.
“I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade,” Elverum says. “And I was thinking, Well, we still know about Michelangelo. He was from the 1500s. So he died a little bit less.”
Is that the goal? To die a little bit less?
Elverum is surprisingly uplifting here: “It’s not a fear of death. It’s more like we have this finite number of days alive on Earth. How best to use them?”
Now Only is a sequel to A Crow Looked at Me—spiritually similar, this time with richer instrumentation and the occasional touch of distortion. But lyrically, Now Only is stranger, sometimes facetious even. In the title track, over sunny country guitars, Elverum talks about how weird it is to play songs about his dead wife at festivals. The description of the experience, like many of the verses, comes out like a breathless run-on sentence: “I wrote down all the details of how my house fell apart, how the person I love got killed by a bad disease out of nowhere for no reason, and me living in the blast zone with our daughter and et cetera. I made these songs and then the next thing I knew I was standing in the dirt under the desert sky at night outside Phoenix at a music festival that had paid to fly me in to sing these death songs to a bunch of young people on drugs, standing in the dust next to an idling bus with Skrillex inside, the sound of subwoofers in the distance.”
There’s a matter-of-factness to Elverum’s delivery that never tells you how to feel. The effect: You listen more closely, lean in so you can hear the words. Maybe Elverum wants you to cry. Sometimes he wants you to be moved. I think here, with the reference to drugged-out teens and Skrillex, he wants you to laugh. Death is ludicrous, after all.
Elverum moves easily from ruminative, cosmic existentialism to carefully observed banality, and rarely does he ever land somewhere in between. Elverum opens the song “Earth” with: “I don’t want to live with this feeling any longer than I have to / but also I don’t want you to be gone / so I talked about you all the time.” Then he recounts burying some of Castrée’s ashes in their yard, only he didn’t bury them deep enough. Human matter surfaced, and Elverum sings it bluntly: “I saw actual chunks of your bones.”
The day the record came out, a friend texted me these lyrics from “Earth,” followed by his thoughts:
dude liek
what the fuck
how can you just. sing that
But the moment comes across as less melodramatic than you’d expect and, in its own way, disturbingly ordinary. Later on the album, in “Crow Pt. 2,” Elverum details making breakfast for his daughter. She asks to listen to her mother’s records, and recognizes the sound of Castrée’s voice through the speaker. Of the moment, Elverum sings, “I’m sobbing and eating eggs again.”
Elverum’s days in his hometown of Anacortes resemble what you’d expect from a single dad: He makes breakfast for his 2-year-old daughter, then they walk eight blocks to her Montessori school, then there are three free hours to do work—e-mail, lots of interviews lately—then he plans dinner, then he picks her up from school, then they go to the bookstore downtown, check their P.O. box across the street, then lunch, then they share a cookie for dessert, then grocery shopping, then cooking dinner, then eating that dinner, then his daughter is in bed, and then Elverum finally has a couple hours to answer more e-mail. A lot of computer time.
When Castrée was diagnosed with cancer, Elverum put up a GoFundMe page to help cover the obscene hospital costs. The appeal: “Life is 100% occupied by this humongous medical battle (plus the already overwhelming reality of raising a baby with less than 2 fully available parents). We don't know what the future holds and how long this uncertainty will last.” Fans turned up with money. When Castrée died, Elverum updated the page with a short tribute to her and signed off: “We loved her and everything is weird now. Thank you for all the money, all the support and love.”
Facebook comes up in our conversation, in no small part because the Cambridge Analytica story has broken the week we have lunch. Elverum has a Facebook account, but he doesn’t use it to promote Mount Eerie. Instead, every few months, he’ll post a photo of Castrée.
“I only use [Facebook] as a way of disseminating pictures of my wife. It’s not music-related at all. A few hundred people like it. It’s a nice repository of JPEGs of her,” he says.
We talk about some of the people in Silicon Valley working on radically increasingly the human lifespan.
“There are some people that are trying to cure death, this tech immortality... That seems mentally ill.”
The irony of it is that people in tech are trying to solve death, but the ways in which they do it seem to remove all the joys of living.
“Like people that get too crazy about health food or dietary stuff and remove the love of eating, which is the whole point of living.” With that, Elverum takes a big bite of his smoked salmon, sips of his grapefruit juice. The waiter comes by to ask how the meal is. Elverum tells him that everything is great, thanks.
After lunch, I wait for the subway. It’s an idle moment, so I open Gmail, I open Twitter, I open Instagram, I open Facebook. I think about Elverum posting photos of his dead wife and wonder how the algorithm will fuck with it. But maybe Facebook loves grief. People engage with that.
Throughout A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only, Elverum continually sings about his wife’s non-existence: “I sing to you, you don’t exist, I sing to you though.” There are some lines of spiritual thinking that would argue that Castrée does exist, in Elverum’s memory; that memory offers a kind of immortality, that people are only truly gone when they’re forgotten. (This is also the plot of the Disney movie Coco.) If Elverum keeps making meaningful art about his wife—and he keeps her memory alive on Facebook—she continues to exist. Geneviève Castrée is dying a little bit less, and so is Phil Elverum.
I made one mistake at lunch: I asked if Elverum would ever perform songs from The Glow Pt. 2 again, because I’m one of those awful nostalgic people who wants to hear the album they listened to in high school performed from front to back. Elverum is polite but slightly annoyed at the request. I’ve basically asked him if he’d sell out, like Weezer or some shit. “It’s all about hype and marketing,” he says. “It’s so gross.”
“Somebody from Pitchfork Festival wanted me to have a Microphones reunion,” he says. “It’s a joke. It’s just me. I’m essentially doing the same thing that I’ve done 20 years ago. There’s nobody to reunite.”
Elverum feels lucky, though. Even as a single dad, he’s never felt the financial pressure to force an album or a tour. “I’ve had more than zero dollars for a long time,” he says.
Touring isn’t just a means of survival for Elverum. He likes touring, even though he can only do short stints of it because he’s a single parent. But Elverum only wants to perform what feels authentic to him now. More to the point, the person who wrote The Glow Pt. 2? “That’s somebody else. There’s only the most tenuous link between me and all that work.” Elverum is playing death songs now because that is who he is at this moment. And maybe one day he will not be that person anymore—perhaps when he moves away from Anacortes, which is his plan this year—and maybe he will never perform these grief albums again.
Elverum’s noticed an audience shift at his concerts. It used to just be young people, since Elverum is stubborn about putting on all-ages shows, “which means grown-ups aren’t going to come.” But since A Crow Looked at Me, it’s young people and old people—the two demos that probably obsess about mortality the most. “I’m singing these songs about death and stuff,” he says. “I see somebody who’s, like, in their sixties or seventies at the show, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure. Fair enough.’ ”
He’s right. At his show in Queens that night, the crowd is a mix of young and old. Elverum plays songs exclusively from A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only—just him, his guitar, and a squat Christmas tree on stage, which exists solely for the purpose of giving the audience something else to look at. Elverum plays his death songs, throughout which the crowd is nearly silent. The performance is even sparser than the record, forcing people to lean in closely to listen. I hear sniffling, a little outright sobbing. At one point, someone behind me whispers, “Holy fucking shit.” It’s the first concert I’ve been to in a long time where nobody is Instagramming.
After the show, a friend who was also in attendance texts me:
I’m rekt
I didn’t know he was the microphones guy
I never heard these songs
But was crying after the first one lol