Phil Elverum is an oddball musical alchemist from Anacortes, Washington. Recording first as The Microphones, then as Mount Eerie, Elverum has issued a slew of skewed songwriter records; most notably 2001's The Glow Pt.2 and 2003's Mount Eerie. In October 2008, he unveiled two new releases: Lost Wisdom, a collaborative record with Canadian songbird Julie Doiron; and Dawn a book/LP chronicling the six months Elverum spent, in the Norwegian winter of 2002/03, in a snowbound cabin inside the Arctic Circle. Whilst by the side of the road near the Oregon/Idaho border, the eternal traveller spoke.
Did preparing your journals for publication make you relive your “wilderness time” in Norway?
“Totally. This last winter, when I went back through it, it was disorienting, chronologically. I reread my journal several times, because I had to edit it, and I relived it each time. I kept a pretty in-depth journal.”
Was it like reading something written by someone else?
“Yeah. It was. It had been long enough that it was the old me. I had a stranding offer from a friend of mine, who is a publisher, who wanted to put out some kind of book. It’d been in the back of my mind since I wrote those journals that it was a book in waiting. So, I decided ‘why not?,’ and we made a book out of them.”
Is it a similar experience listening to old records?
“Partially. It feels like I’m listening to someone else, but I know it’s not literally someone else: I still recognize that I did it. But it can be hard to relate to stuff that’s only a year old. It’s a good thing, I like living in the moment. But maybe I’ve got a little too in-the-moment: songs don’t last that long with me, I get sick of them. And my memory is really bad: I have a hard time remembering things that I’ve done, shows that I’ve played, people that I’ve met before, names. I tell the same stories over and over and forget that I have. Maybe I’m just a spacey person, but I think a lot of it might come from making an actual effort of quote ‘living in the moment’.”
Do your records work like journals? Chronicling thoughts and feelings you might otherwise forget?
“Kind of. But condensed into poem form, rather than prose. Before I started running this record-label, I used to record so much that it maybe had more of that feeling, but, nowadays, that work takes up so much of time and, y’know, brain, that it’s actually become an effort to set aside time to go and make actual creative work. I need to delegate some jobs to people with my record label, I think, so I can spend more time being creative.”
Did you think P.W. Elverum & Sun was going to be so time-consuming?
“No. It’s not even really a real record label, I mostly just put out my own records. It’s just that now I’m putting out a few records at a time, and I still pack everything, do all the stuffing of records, everything. I like doing it that way, in principle. So I’m seeing how long I can keep it up.”
Does this recent rush of releases signal the end of a particularly productive period for you?
“It’s more random coincidence: Dawn is all the older songs that I wrote when I was in Norway, Lost Wisdom was recorded on a whim with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire. We weren’t planning on making an album, it just kind of happened. I am working on a new album, but that’s not finished. When I say it’s coming out next year, I don’t mean in January. It’s coming out next year sometime. I want to give myself time to make it a bit more.”
When did your path first cross with Julie Doiron?
“I was a fan of her band Eric’s Trip as a teenager in the ’90s, and she ran a record-label called Sappy that I would mail-order seven-inches from. I wrote the most embarrassing fan-letter, and Julie wrote a really nice note back. Then, she was on tour, once, and played in a bar in Seattle. My girlfriend and I weren’t old enough to get in, but we snuck in by pretending to carry her amps. At the show, we were right up at the front, making ourselves obvious. I think she realized it was me, that guy from Anacortes who’d written that really embarrassing fan-letter, because I guess she didn’t have many fans in that area. In my mind, she was huge: Eric’s Trip, Sub Pop, the grunge movement, etc. And, since then, I started playing more shows myself, and we ended up playing shows together. She’s such a friendly person that it wasn’t like I had to pursue her to become friends.”
So, she still very much remembers you from those long-ago days of teenaged fandom?
“I think so. I try not to bring it up. But, whatever, it’s no big whoop: everyone knows what it’s like to be a fan of something else. It’s been amazing, actually, having the friendship transition from the awkward fan/celebrity dynamic into something more down-to-earth, normal, like two people who know each other, and having that celebrity mythology dissolve. I remember when I was a teenager, in this pretty small town, the one record store was run by this guy who’s one of my best friends, now, but back then was the guitarist from Beat Happening, who I was totally in awe of. It’s an amazing experience to meet someone who you admire from afar, and then become friends with them.”
Have you had the situation happen in reverse? Where people who would’ve considered you a minor celebrity have become friends?
“Yeah, I’m sure it has. It’s kind of an uncomfortable thing, where I try not to even acknowledge it, but, to be honest, it’s there. A lot of my friends now I met through music; like maybe they set up a show for me, as a fan, and then we hit it off.”
Often you set up shows in odd places. What’s the strangest circumstance you’ve ever played a show in?
“Oh, man, I don’t know. That falls under the ‘memory loss’ category. I’ve played a lot of weird spaces, and a lot of those are just vague, blurred memories. But, okay: I played this wedding, once, for some strangers, in Virginia. Their family had flown me out, for this formal, religious wedding. I was doing it because it worked out with my tour-schedule, and they paid me enough money for the plane ticket. I didn’t know them. It was awkward, playing in front of the grandparents in tuxedoes, who didn’t know if they were supposed to be paying attention to me or just sipping champagne. Awkward.”
