Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum on the Lyrics That Changed His Life
How the historical references and emotional fortitude of Sinead O’Connor, Sade, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and more influenced the indie rock lifer’s own songwriting.
Words Matter is an interview series where songwriters whose work means a lot to us talk about the lyrics that mean a lot to them—the ones that imparted permanent lessons, helped shape their style, made them jealous, or left them awestruck.
Across more than 25 years of songwriting, Phil Elverum has staked out his own vocabulary. He returns to the same elemental imagery over and over: the rain, the fog, the wind. Listen to his words and his music long enough, and you may feel the damp chill of his native Pacific Northwest seeping into your bones.
Elverum’s go-to lexicon doesn’t feel lazy or repetitive. Instead, it serves to deepen the themes he’s explored his whole career as the Microphones and Mount Eerie—including loss, grief, and the puniness of humanity in the face of the natural world. “I’m not literally talking about the weather to create a pastoral picture,” he says. “I’m trying to talk about more subtle stuff, it’s just that this vocabulary is accessible to all humans on the globe right now and also through all of human history. I want to use words and images that people can connect to.”
He’s speaking from a spare upstairs room in his home on Washington’s Orcas Island, near the Canadian border. He calls this space The Workshop. There’s a white bench, a drum set, and a few guitar amps stacked neatly against the wall. A ceiling lamp hangs directly over his head, making it look like he’s in a continuous state of eureka! during our video call. Elverum is warm, with an easy smile. At 46, his hair is gray on the sides and darker on top, where it impishly puffs up. He’s got the kind of calm voice you could happily hear for hours, perhaps while listening to an audiobook about trees. It’s lunchtime, so every once and a while he dips his head down to take a bite of cabbage.
His new Mount Eerie album, Night Palace, plays like a culmination after so many years of trying out new sounds and songwriting styles. There are distorted freakouts and spoken word meditations. Folk experiments and metaphorical musings of love. Driving indie rock and fables about whales and fish. It’s a full life’s work, bursting with ideas and hard-won wisdom.
At this point, Elverum begins his songs not with words or music, but footsteps. He takes long, solitary walks through the woods around his house, paying attention to his cadence. He then starts writing in his unlined Japanese notebook, putting little dashes under the syllables to mark the rhythm of his feet. He’ll scribble some ideas, cross others out. He even uses a red pencil to make notations in the margins. Everything else—melodies, instrumentation, production—comes after.
Below, Elverum explains how the lyrics of six songs changed his life forever.
