Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum on the Lyrics That Changed His Life

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.

Sinead O’Connor: “Troy” (1987)

Phil Elverum: Sinead O’Connor might be the artist that I’ve listened to the longest, consistently, since I was a preteen. I liked her before I liked Nirvana. This is one of her early hits. It starts so quiet, and the first words you hear are: “I’ll remember it/And Dublin in a rainstorm.” It’s like the way a great novel pulls you in within the first few words. “Dublin in a rainstorm” is so specific, so visceral. It’s setting the scene of the world that the song unfolds in. You’re just there.

The line “There is no other Troy for me to burn” references a Yeats poem—which I learned about on Genius—but it also references ancient history and the Trojan War. I love when a song is about the present moment but also kaleidoscopes out to all of human history in this graceful way. I love a scavenger-hunt feeling: weaving confusing threads to tie it together and admit that it’s all connected, rather than pretending that ideas are original, like, I thought of this and I’m not inspired by anything, because I’m a genius. That’s just not how it works. That’s not what life is like. Everything comes from something else. So to admit that and flaunt it is always a cool move. When it’s done well, it opens up the work.

Were there any references like that that you drew from while making Night Palace?

Tons. Actually, the vinyl comes with a huge 4-foot-by-6-foot poster, where one side is the cover painting blown up really big, and the other side is filled with extensive annotation and footnotes where I just come clean with all of my references. It includes poems or songs that were quoted, or even somebody’s Substack post.

Sometimes these references are totally not necessary—my friends call them “tripper’s treat,” like for people who are listening really closely to a Grateful Dead tape and hear somebody in the background say something, and they’re like, Ah, I got the clue! But every song on the album has some kind of reference. On “Empty Paper Towel Roll,” I say, “too small a slice of the night sky,” and that’s a reference to the Tim Robinson sketch show I Think You Should Leave: “You must have used too small a slice of toilet paper when you wiped, and you got mud pie on your hands.” [laughs] The phrase “too small a slice” is so unmistakably specific.

Do you remember when Sinead O’Connor’s work first clicked with you?

It was the famous Saturday Night Live performance, when she tore up the picture of the pope. I was probably 12, and my dad was watching it—he’s an omnivorous music listener, always funneling things my way. He was a fan of hers. I didn’t know about Ireland and Catholicism or whatever, but my dad’s reaction to that moment was so huge. He was like, “Whoa. I can’t believe she just did that! This is huge! Oh, my God!” That was my first memory of Sinead O’Connor crossing lines in a way we never see, just that some subversion is happening. For a kid from out in the woods to witness something a little off in this big monolithic cultural institution was thrilling.

I was surprised to see Sinead among your choices, just because so much of her music is very dramatic in such a different way than yours.

That is what I’m going for, honestly—I just can’t sing like that. [laughs]

Sade: “Lovers Rock” (2000)

This is another one about the transportative power of opening lines. It’s less specific and concrete than “Dublin in a rainstorm,” but I like the ambiguity in it: “I am in the wilderness/You are in the music/In the man’s car next to me.” It could be read a lot of different ways. Maybe she’s in the mental wilderness. Maybe she’s in the car and spacing out, looking out the window. I’ve always thought about it as the actual wilderness: Sade is crouched in a ditch by a freeway on the edge of a forest, and she’s smeared with mud, and she hears music. [laughs] All of those interpretations are so beautiful and sad, with a feeling of alienation—two different worlds coexisting. Wilderness and music are also these two polarities that are important to me and my thinking and my writing.

Sun Kil Moon: “I Watched the Film the Song Remains the Same” (2014)

On his album Benji, which includes this song, Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek used an austere, plainspoken writing style that seemed to have a big effect on a lot of artists and albums—including your 2017 record A Crow Looked at Me, which you wrote in the wake of your wife Geneviève Castrée’s death. It almost felt like Benji gave people permission to write in this particular way.

That’s exactly it. I might have first heard this song in the month or two after Geneviève died. It was in that 2016 window of time where everything was scrambled in my brain about my relationship to art and music. I hadn’t written any songs for A Crow Looked at Me, and I was also like, I’m not going to write songs about anything ever. I’m out. But I was reading Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle books, and I read an article that said Benji did something similar. So I listened to this song, and everything opened up. I realized I could write about the nuts and bolts of my life without trying to posture with wisdom. It let me start writing in the notebook again. The first thing I wrote down was a song that became, “When I Take Out the Garbage at Night.” I just was like, Oh, wow. I noticed the night sky. Weird. I don’t know what to say about it, but I’m just gonna write it down. Wheels started turning.

Since Benji came out, Mark Kozelek has been accused of sexual misconduct by many women, and he has denied any wrongdoing. Does news like that change how you hear the music?

Definitely. I barely ever listen to his music now, but this song actually did change my way of writing for many years. I’m over that style now—well, I’m not over it-over it, but I made a few albums in that mode, and I don’t want to exploit people’s attention.

As a younger person, I was obsessed with [Kozelek’s ’90s band] Red House Painters, but for years, before Benji, I had tuned out his music. And one of the reasons I stopped listening during those years was because I saw Red House Painters, and he was just this grumpy jerk on stage. It was a subtle thing, just how he was making comments to the sound people. By that point, I was playing shows of my own, and I understood the dynamics of what goes into making a show happen in a small venue. Everyone’s just doing their job, so I was pretty intolerant of people being assholes to the workers. Sometimes seeing beloved artists is a bad thing to do. It really can ruin it.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Marquis de Tren: “64” (1999)

This song is like a fable. I love the tone of all the songs from this record, Get on Jolly. They’re barely songs. They’re slightly hanging together. And they’re all derived from these old poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, from his book, Gitanjali. After hearing this EP in my mid 20s, I went back and read tons of Tagore, and I remember that feeling of discovering Will Oldham’s music and then discovering this old Bengali poet from 100 years previous. The ability of saying deep and spiritual things in these little fables was an ideal for me: being lofty without trying to hit people over the head with it.

Eric’s Trip: “May 11” (1993)

Eric’s Trip is my favorite band. This came out on Sub Pop in ’93, when I was an impressionable teenager loving the alternative music explosion in the Pacific Northwest. I had never really heard lo-fi, home-recorded music before I got this tape. It was the texture in this song. There’s a dog barking—it’s the noise of the world coming in and becoming musical. One voice is singing only in the right ear, and the other voice is singing in the left ear. Just weird production choices that are immersive. And the song is so beautiful and short; I never like it when people go to the chorus for the second or third time, I’m like, We already heard that! 

As far as the lyrics, there are only a few lines: “Driving through the mountains/Staring at the trees/Are you sleeping?/Or are you watching me?” It’s two people on a road trip through mountains—are they connecting or are they not? “Floating higher than all the stars could be.” It’s that teenage intimacy, that feeling of closeness and magic. 

The two singers in this band and on this song, Rick White and Julie Doiron, were breaking up while making this album too.

You can feel the tension of that. It’s almost like, I don’t need to see that, but I can’t look away! They were teenagers in a rural place in Eastern Canada immersed in their own micro social scene. That’s what I love about it—it’s that expression of that feeling. Maybe it connected with me because I was in Anacortes, Washington with my small group of friends and all our dramas. There’s something universal about that smallness. The feelings are so charged.

I actually sampled “May 11” on my first album, Don't Wake Me Up, which has a song about listening to this song called “I Felt You.” I sampled Julie Doiron and I later became friends with her. We made a couple of records together, which was a dream.

Adrian Orange: “A Flower’s Is Mine” (2007)

This one’s really close to me. He’s a very close friend of mine. I produced this album and I’ve always championed it, and I’ve released some of his music. When I was first trying to pick these lyrics that changed my life, they easily could have all been Adrian Orange lyrics. I narrowed it down to this song, because it has these lines: “All my thoughts and dreams are blanketed by a soft darkness/Like a candle in the basement burning slow and jubilant.” He just nailed something that is close to what I’m often going for in my songs. The candle in the basement is this recurring image for me. It’s a glow, this small, internal flame. It’s such a basic image: A candle is a real thing that we all have, and a basement is a very normal thing too. But put them together and it’s like a fable.

I was listening to this song, and it actually sounds like he says the candle is burning “slow into the void,” not “slow and jubilant.”

I might be wrong. I always heard it as “slow and jubilant.” I have that feeling all the time. Whenever I look up the lyrics of a song I’m familiar with, almost every time I’ve heard something wrong. [laughs] Some people are very lyric-oriented, but I’ve never been that kind of music listener. Usually it takes me five or 10 listens before I notice the lyrics at all; usually I’m hearing the snare sound or room that the guitar amp was in.

How long have you known Adrian?

Probably coming up on 20 years. He’s younger than me, and I met him when he was this magical savant teenager that was writing these very wise songs. We became pretty close friends and traveled and toured and recorded together. And then… he’s got some pretty major mental health problems, so we’ve not been in touch in a substantial way for a long time. But his music is still my favorite.

It’s crazy thinking about the role of dormant mental illness before it comes out, and how that might fuel an artistic vision. It seems like that’s a common thing throughout history. I was at an art museum recently, and they had this Vincent van Gogh painting of irises, and I just started crying because I was thinking about my friend Adrian and mental illness and artistic genius.