Interview: Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie)

Phil Elverum is known in certain circles as “that guy who made some albums about his late wife” Geneviève Castrée and “that guy who was married to Michelle Williams for about a year.”

But anyone who’s spent time with his music — whether under the name Mount Eerie or The Microphones — knows it will outlive any and all celebrity chatter.

Prior to his Friday, Nov. 18, solo Mount Eerie show at Eulogy, Elverum spoke with Asheville Stages from his home in Washington’s San Juan Islands about conducive environments for creativity, his commitment to the DIY lifestyle and whether any of those brushes with fame left a lasting mark.

Edwin Arnaudin: You’ve been playing in Asheville for a while. What stands out when you think about past shows and visits here?

Phil Elverum: The mountains. [laughs] Yeah, I think of the landscape there. It's pretty powerful and distinct.

EA: For sure. And on the show side, you’ve played Harvest Records’ Transfigurations I & II [anniversary shows in 2009 and 2014]. I told [store co-owner] Mark [Capon] we’d be speaking today and says, “Hi” and that he can’t wait to see you again.

PE: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. [He’s] an old friend.

EA: Are there any other cities where the local record store owner and you are on a first-name basis?

PE: [laughs] Only my hometown record store, that I can think of. Yeah.

EA: [laughs] What do you think it is about Asheville that encourages connections on that kind of level?

PE: I think that Mark and Matt [Schnable] from Harvest are just special people. I'm sure there's something about the chemistry with them and Asheville specifically that harmonizes, but I think a big part of it is those are just very special guys doing a really cool thing. I think Asheville's lucky to have  them.

EA: Agreed. And you’re playing here at Eulogy, which is advertising this show as your only East Coast date. How did that come about? Are you friends with Bryce Franich, their music manager?

PE: No, it's kind of random. It was just an invitation that seemed fun. It worked for my schedule to fly out. I'm just coming out for the one show. It's part of the, I guess, opening month-long series of shows.

EA: Yeah, I was there Friday for the soft opening and it reminds me a lot of The Mothlight, which I miss, and they’re booking a lot of Mothlight-friendly acts.

PE: Cool. I’m looking forward to it. I'm also excited to see [opening act] Daughter of Swords. I'm a fan and I haven't seen her play or met her.

EA: And are you bringing a full band or playing solo?

PE: This one's just me solo.

EA: With Eulogy being a new music venue, not even a week old, and obviously your first time playing there, what are some performance spaces in the U.S. or abroad you’ve not yet played that are on your “bucket list”?

PE: Well, no specific ones. It's just such a weird time for music. Live music on a certain scale is really tough because Live Nation is buying a lot of venues. I'm not talking about smaller, DIY punk spaces, but just a certain network of venues. I think it can be rough to be outside of that one corporate circuit and it's pretty exploitative. There's so much turmoil around live music as well as recorded music. It's weird times. So, yeah, my bucket list would be to just continue avoiding that. Just to keep playing more DIY spaces, which always feels the best.

EA: Is it that similar ethos that’s driven you to self-release your albums for so long?

PE: Yeah, definitely. I'm a child of the, I guess, punk movement or independent music of the ’90s. And I've got these punk ideas that I value, and also are, like, annoying to live with [laughs] because they make life hard sometimes. But I stand by it. It’s definitely central. Lots of self-imposed rules or guiding principles — not just about releasing music, but, like, every little thing. I can be pretty crusty.

EA: And then do I have it right that you and your daughter live on an island?

PE: Yeah.

EA: What’s day to day life like there?

PE: it's great. It's a rural island, but not so small that we’re just, like, on a rock in the water. [laughs] There’s a town here. I drive her to school. We live, like, 15 minutes from town where the school is, so I drive her to school in the morning. I do my music work during the day and then I pick her up at the end of the day. And we live this peaceful life in a very beautiful place with lots of forest, and we’re very lucky to live in this kind of bubble of the natural world.

EA: Is that where you were when COVID hit?

PE: Yeah.

EA: Was the pandemic an especially fruitful time for you creatively?

PE: It was fruitful in a weird way. I had just finished this big album called Microphones in 2020, right before COVID hit. So, it was fruitful.

What did I work on? I worked on some book projects. I put together a Microphones box set. I made a monograph of my former wife's visual art. It was a fruitful time, but it was mostly, like, for a lot of people, especially maybe only during those first months of COVID, that kind of feeling of reassessing things and reorienting towards maybe a more grounded and peaceful existence.

I've just been remembering recently that feeling of, “Oh, there's no airplanes in the sky,” and, “There's no smog in LA, I heard.” [laughs] And it was just this real moment where I felt like, “Ah, maybe this is a chance to kind of correct the course of things.” But yeah, that didn't come true.

EA: Do you feel like you were able to hold on to any of those habits or changes from those early days of COVID?

PE: Yeah, I do feel like I have been able to. Although, to be fair, I was probably on a path of trying to do those changes already. But yeah, a goal of mine is to just continually reorient towards, like, meditating in the morning, being healthy, exercising. [laughs] Doing all of these sort of self-care things. And yeah, I've been on a roll with that stuff. It’s been going well.

EA: And how did you use that time away from the world to hone your craft? Did you experiment with recording approaches or ways of writing?

PE: Not really. My windows of time to do music writing and recording — which I kind of need total solitude to do that stuff — that was pretty scarce because there was no school. So it was just me and my daughter during COVID. I really require school to be in session to function. [laughs]

EA: [laughs] Yes, you’re very pro-education!

PE: Definitely. And whatever after-school programs exist, we're signing up for those, too. [laughs]

EA: [laughs] Well, you’ve mentioned in past interviews about wanting to make “more social-commentary type songs.” Have the events of the past few years pushed you more in that direction?

PE: Maybe, but I think I always am sort of torn between being kind of didactic and preachy and too overtly topical. That's where my brain is as I'm walking around during the day. But when it comes to the music that I actually make, I want to take a more zoomed-out approach and not get lost in the minutiae of what's trending this week or whatever. I think that that's what the role of writing and art can be, is to have some insight that takes a bigger scope approach.

Photo by Brian Lopez

EA: And looking at your personal and professional life, I think it’s fair to say you’ve had a few high-profile moments over the past decade.

PE: Mm hmm.

EA: As a result, from this side, there’s somewhat of an added celebrity mythos surrounding you existing separate from your music. Does that extra attention register for you personally?

PE: I doesn't register, no. I don't know if that's true or not, but my hunch is that it's not. [laughs] I mean, I guess I was married to a movie star for a minute, and that was a weird time. [laughs] It seems like a weird sentence for me to even say. But, yeah, that happened.

But mostly, even when it was happening, the attention around it was still an abstract thing. It didn't actually affect our day-to-day life, and in terms of, like, residual effects on our reputation, I don't know if there are any. I don't know — I'm still the same person I was when I was a teenager. That's how it feels. Just doing my weird thing here that some people like and most people don't understand. [laughs]

EA: It’s nice to hear that, and I feel like I hear it more and more. There’s a band from here called Wednesday and they get a lot of attention in Pitchfork and other big publications. And I interviewed them earlier this year and asked what they thought of the hype surrounding them, and they were like, “We only know about it because people tell us about it. We’re just out here in East Asheville, living our lives.”

PE: Totally. That is what it's like. I mean, maybe not for some people out there, but I suspect that it's like that to some degree, even for legitimately famous people. To be a human, a functioning human being, I think you have to still make breakfast every morning or whatever, you know?

EA: For sure. You gotta eat.

PE: There was a time, speaking of Pitchfork, like 2001 or something, my [The Microphones] album The Glow Pt. 2 got picked by them as the album of the year, and I didn't know — I'd never heard of Pitchfork; I didn't know it was a big deal. But that Wednesday story you just said reminded me of that.

I didn't know what that was. it seems to matter to people, and now, 20 whatever years later, it still has this mystique of that stamp of approval — “Oh, your life must have changed in that moment.” And it just totally didn’t. It didn't change at all. Maybe gradually over a decade, but I think that change was due more to me just, like, plugging away at this existence.

EA: And in that time, especially over the past decade, you’ve made some harrowing, cathartic music. Are any of those songs too painful to perform live?

PE: They all are too harrowing to perform live. [laughs] I sort of capped them off, the two albums I made that were specifically about death and grief [A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only]. I sort of did some touring of them, and then just drew a line and moved forward.

EA: So then what is making its way into your set lists these days?

PE: It's mostly what I'm working on now, to the frustration of the audience sometimes. [laughs] But yeah, I pretty much always want to play what's current for me. Maybe it's like half and half these days of kind of reinterpreting older songs. But, yeah, not those death ones.

EA: And what are your working on? What’s next for you?

PE: I'm writing and recording right now, so it's not quite clear what shape it's gonna take. I've got a lot of songs, and they're all very short. So, that's what I know so far.

IF YOU GO

Who: Mount Eerie with Daughter of Swords
When: Friday, Nov. 17, 8 p.m.
Where: Eulogy, 10 Buxton Ave., burial.com
Tickets: $37.47

(Photos courtesy of the artist)