Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie, the Microphones) on the Song He Wishes He Wrote
Phil Elverum has been moving forward by living in the past. Following a trilogy of autobiographical Mount Eerie albums beginning with 2017’s stark and grief-stricken A Crow Looked at Me, the 42-year-old songwriter is preparing to release his first album under the Microphones moniker since 2003. On Microphones in 2020, he digs back even further. The album, which flows as a single 45-minute track, finds him delving with journalistic detail into his earliest days making music. He lists the CDs in his car, describes a scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, discusses his recording equipment and his desired bass tone. “I don’t even think of it as a song, really. I thought about listing it as an audiobook,” he explains from his home in Orcas Island in Washington State, filled with art, instruments, and natural light.
Elverum is similarly introspective when considering the song he wishes he wrote. At first, his thoughts turn philosophical—his initial answer is “a shaman hitting a skin drum with a bone, a thousand years ago”—but he ends up picking something closer to home: “Fire Dream,” by his friend and collaborator Adrian Orange (aka Thanksgiving). The song appears on Adrian Orange & Her Band, a 2007 album that Elverum himself produced. In conversation, he is able to recall nearly everything about the sessions, but his passion extends beyond their working relationship: “I still don’t understand how that magic was accessed,” he says of Orange’s songwriting. “It’s a masterpiece.”
With a sad, slow melody, “Fire Dream” sounds a little like a Christmas song transcribed as a funeral march, in 6/8 time. Orange recorded the song with a large band featuring horns and auxiliary percussion, resulting in a sound that some critics compared unfavorably to Afrobeat and reggae. “I can understand why people would hear it one time and think, ‘Ugh, who’s this twerp doing African music?,” Elverum says in retrospect. “But that’s not what this is.”
More than the music, Elverum’s interest in the song comes from the lyrics, which he also annotated line-by-line in an essay he sent after our interview. (“I didn’t want it to send it to you in advance to this just so you could come at me with your own ideas,” he tells me.)
In both his essay and our conversation, Elverum is passionate and precise, occasionally bringing to mind the deep reflection that comes up throughout Microphones in 2020, of how one person’s past can unfold into a greater understanding of the world itself. “I love engaging with my history,” he says. “It seems worth understanding the past and really digesting it so that a new present moment can be born, finally. That’s the value in hindsight.”
When did you meet Adrian Orange and what were your first impressions?
We had a show together in Chicago in the basement of a Mexican restaurant in 2001 or 2002. We became very close friends. We toured and recorded and shared a lot of ideas. His songwriting used simple language and everyday occurrences but somehow tapped into these deep, almost spiritual observations. And he was doing it at such a young age. That part is crazy. Who’s this teenager with all this wisdom? What’s going on here? I still don’t know the answer.
Adrian has an approach to songwriting that I share. The songs are always evolving, in a folk-music tradition. This version of “Fire Dream,” which I think is so magical, is a thing that happened in the studio that day in 2007. I didn’t realize how good it was when we were recording it. I was setting up mics and just making sure it got captured. It was only later when we were mixing the album I realized.
The song opens with a dream: a fire moves from his bedroom through the world. It’s a striking image. Are you drawn to art that discusses dreams?
Well, it’s just like in life: describing your dreams to other people is kind of dangerous... Dangerously boring! If I look back on the albums I’ve made, there have been times when I was focused on something more overtly mystical about the dream world. But my interest has always been from a Buddhist angle, in the tradition of talking about our waking life as a dream—a way of describing the illusion of existence.
In this song, I think he’s talking about a real dream that he had, but also it’s an aspiration: I wanted this to happen. It starts at the place that music comes from: the internal world. That is the source of creativity. He’s talking about dreaming to share it and spread it all through town, and then waking up to be like, Oof no, didn’t work. Harsh! This song is about that polarity: having a passionate creative idea that you want to share. Crossing the divide between one’s enclosed self and the world outside us, which is terrifying and cold. It gets at the heart of what we’re all trying to do. We’re trying to share our tenderness.
There’s a question in the lyrics that reminded me of your writing: “My god, what has become of this world we could share?” It feels a turning point, the culmination of his story.
That’s exactly it. It’s so melodramatic and Shakespearean. I love that, because it is a lamentable and deep loss that he is describing. I think Adrian was living as a truly open person. I know that line comes from the experience of having nothing, walking streets, hitchhiking to shows—and not in a sad way. In a very euphoric, poetic, engaged way. I aspired to be like that, but I was a little more stable. I had a house. I was married. I also was writing weird songs and driving around, sleeping in my truck. That’s who I am. I just wasn’t as gnarly as Adrian was. I’m romanticizing it, but he earned the right to speak about the world we can share.
Especially in recent years, your songwriting has become so specific to your own experience as an artist. I was curious what you hear in other people’s songwriting that you think about incorporating into your own.
It changes over the years. Lately, it’s been lyrics. Adrian is able to talk about bad food packaging and shiny paint jobs on mid-priced cars—and it’s not gratuitous. That’s all he has to say and you’re there on the sidewalk with him. Poetry works better when you are grounded. Recently, I’ve been listening to Phoebe Bridgers, and she is really good at getting hyper-specific. There are ways to abuse that too: overused specificity. But I think she is able to bridge the poetic version of songwriting with more feet-on-the-ground stuff. That’s what I like.
Are you good at keeping up with new music?
No! I usually feel so out of it. Occasionally I encounter new stuff, but it’s very random by a friend sending me a song or if I happen to click on a thing. I don’t explore very much. Most of the music that I listen to now is with a five-year-old in the house, so it’s music that she’ll tolerate. I’m secretly giving her a musical education but that means playing stuff that mostly is song-y and with words—not so much experimental metal. I try to get that in there too, but she’s starting to catch on. She’s like, “I don’t like the screaming one. Can we put on Joni Mitchell again?”
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
