The Rituals of Mount Eerie

Phil Elverum is as strange as he is prolific, and that’s a good thing. The singer, songwriter and producer lives on Orcas, the largest San Juan Island that sits off the northwest coast of Washington state. You can get there by air, but you’d be better off taking the hour-long ferry ride to reach the islet’s shores. Elverum is one of roughly 5,000 people who call Orcas home; his physical detachment from the continental United States contrasts greatly with the music he makes. Just before logging into our Zoom call, he went on a walk and found some chanterelles, he tells me, as the light cracks through the windows of his office space.

Days before our conversation, another single from Elverum’s new Mount Eerie record, Night Palace, entered into my orbit. “I Saw Another Bird” begins by calling to mind his torrential, grieving 2017 album A Crow Looked at Me: “So what, I saw another raven? I see them all the time.” There is a certain stroke of continuity in Elverum’s music; Night Palace has been billed by some as a sequel, of sorts, to the Microphones’ 2001 LP The Glow, Pt. 2. A song titled “The Gleam, Pt. 3” certainly fits the description. But that opening line in “I Saw Another Bird” fascinates me, if only because it feels, simultaneously, far away from and close to with a song like “Crow, Pt. 2” or even “Ravens.”

There is a contradiction, too, in the symbolism of a crow or a raven in the Mount Eerie vocabulary—or maybe it’s a gesture of growth, of seven years now passed and a certain displeasure with what grief once looked like versus what it has become now. “Maybe contradiction is a form of continuity,” Elverum wonders. “It ties two things together, even if it’s a negative bond. Those opening lines are intentionally supposed to be a little funny, or snotty, like a teenager. ‘So what, I saw another raven? I see them all the time”—I was trying to be self-aware in my dismissiveness.” Naturally, “I Saw Another Bird” pivots away from dismissiveness, diving into the deep marina of a beautiful connectedness. “But I’m wrong,” Elverum laments, “there is another world inside this one, it shines.”

For almost a decade, the imagery of birds has lingered with Elverum. It became part of a language people used while reckoning with their own tragedies and traumas, and the way we digest his work and talk about his vernacular certainly stems, in part, from A Crow Looked at Me—as that was a gateway into his lexicon for many—including me—who were far too young to find the Microphones 23 years ago but not online enough to be hip to those Mount Eerie releases circa 2012. But “So what, I saw another raven? I see them all the time” isn’t a commentary on other people’s perceptions of Elverum, or even their writing about him and his music. “It’s all commentary on my own self, on my own perception of my own self—my experience as a human,” he says. “I think it was meant to be relatable in that way, with how we all fluctuate between a feeling of significance and profound reverence and, then, pendulumming back to ‘Ugh, nothing means anything. Whatever, I have to go to work right now’—the pedestrian. Everyone swings on that pendulum.”

That commentary transcends in “The Gleam, Pt. 3,” a vision of the “mental mortality” that plagues us and a sequel to “The Gleam, Pt. 2” from The Glow, Pt. 2—a song Elverum wrote nearly 24 years ago about his closeness with his grandmother and her receding into memory loss. Now, two decades later, he’s revisiting that idea in a more direct way, because he feels like it’s “possibly in my future, dementia or Alzheimer’s.” I remember my mother talking about the act of sundowning once my own grandmother’s dementia turned her into someone unrecognizable—how memory loss so quickly becomes associated with light. For Elverum, it’s visual for him, manifesting in the “You have been blinded by the gleam, and then your sight came back” couplet. “I picture looking out over a horizon at shimmery water—vivid perception versus death, mortality and the ‘billowy black,’” he says.

There was a time when Elverum was making a new Mount Eerie album every year or almost. From 2008 until 2019, no more than two years ever passed between releases. Now, it’s been five years since he made Lost Wisdom, Pt. 2 with Julie Doiron. There was a Microphones album in 2020, a box set archival project, and an art book of his late wife Geneviève Castrée’s collected works that he made for Drawn & Quarterly in 2022. He taught a School of Song course in that gap, too. But the Mount Eerie title has been silent for half a decade, as he’s been making a life for him and his daughter Agathe, getting “small and local.” “Oh, also, I built a house,” Elverum says, laughing. “I didn’t build it with my own hands, but that was a lot of effort and time, moving into it—it’s an ongoing thing.” Eventually, he made good on the promise he first wrote about on “Seaweed” seven years ago.

But this is the same guy who has released over 30 albums since the turn of the millennium, under his own name, the Microphones, Mount Eerie and as a member of D+. “I always have this goal, or hope that, at some point, I’ll just chill out and get more regular with a domestic routine and not be so urgent about running from project to project,” Elverum continues. “And that is happening, it’s a slow evolution as I age. It’s probably that way for everyone. I look forward to, if I get to live to an old age, just sitting around and reading books all the time. Sounds nice. I could do that now, but I just can’t. It’s an ambition or an ideal—I fantasize about it happening someday.”

Elverum doesn’t miss the restlessness of it all or the desire to put out music at a break-neck pace like he did in 2005, when he released four Mount Eerie albums in one calendar year. But he never considered it to be an urgent matter to begin with. “That seemed like a regular schedule to me, an album a year,” he insists. “That’s plenty of time—a year in-between albums. That’s a lot of time—and it used to be, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, [a new album] every four months.” [Editor’s Note: The Beach Boys put out 11 records between 1962 and 1966.] “It’s all just perspective,” Elverum argues. “I go with the pace that the ideas are coming up. I don’t just release everything I think of anymore. I work hard on making stuff that I feel is worthy of attention.”

Far away from being a 20-year-old staying up all night recording in a spare room at The Business in Anacortes, Elverum made Night Palace on reel-to-reel analog almost exclusively during school days while his daughter was away. At 26 songs, it’s one of the longest and most ambitious things he’s ever released and it feels holistic to spend time with it. The act of healing isn’t a goal for Elverum so much as it’s a side-benefit. The center of this vocation is not to fix himself or to speak to a listener—it’s somewhere in the middle, where the focus is directed inward at Elverum’s own self. It’s an exploration of his experience being a human, to make something that enriches his time spent on Earth. Healing, as an act or as a reward, happens along the way, but not intentionally. “What is art for?” he asks me, before answering himself: “Explore what’s beyond human, what’s beyond practicality and pragmatism in our lives. It’s easy to just let that take over and be the only thing—to be like, ‘I gotta pay rent, gotta make dinner, gotta pick up the kid from school.’ It’s easy to let the ambiguous and unprofitable and anti-capitalist, illogical pursuit of art fall away, but I am constantly trying to re-center that.”

Elverum has, in the past, cited Gary Snyder’s writing as influential and “Broom of Wind” is named after a Joanna Kyger poem. After listening to Night Palace all the way through for the first time, I turned to my bookshelf and picked up my copy of Wendell Berry’s Think Little and started re-visiting it—because the very DIY nature of the record is mirrored by its existence not being bound to just the woods or the walks Elverum goes on. Nature is woman-denying, authoritarian landlords. It’s plugging a dead phone back in, or pissing outside at night. Night Palace reminds me of the environmental crisis that Berry wrote about—how it was, and is, not fixable by, as he puts it, “tinkering with institutional machinery.” The album is an 80-minute thesis on the philosophies of an artistic pursuit co-existing with an engagement to the practicalities of living—done without using art and poetry as a means of escape but as a vehicle for staying put. When he was writing it, Elverum found himself reading a lot about private property, following its origins to better understand why Americans have become so infatuated with the idea of owning land—ending up enmeshed in the challenges of Karl Marx’s writing, along with anarchist documents about squatting and trespassing, and coming out with songs like “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” and “Co-Owner of Trees.”

As Night Palace began coming together, Elverum became attracted to the concept of motherhood. It was a galvanizing idea for the record—being drawn to the expression of it and not so much the biological truthfulness. Many of us are thinking about it, too, especially in the context of a current political climate that is, partly, indoctrinated into the system of belief that we are expected, not merely encouraged, to bring children into the world. It got me thinking about the responsibilities of caregiving in that way, but I’m also somebody who isn’t physically able to reproduce without some kind of medical hand stepping in. But for Elverum, who lives rurally beyond this continent and is actively tending to the life that surrounds him—be it raising Agathe, taking care of the home they share together, or remaining intimate with nature—motherhood transcends the confines to which we are so often conditioned to understand it. “I knew that I wasn’t a birth-giver—a uterus-haver,” he says. “My daughter’s actual mother died and so, for me, there’s this layer that’s like, ‘What am I? Am I both? Am I, somehow, supposed to embody that aspect of parenting?’”

Elverum found himself often hanging out with just moms, at playgrounds and school events, in drop-off and pick-up lines. “That was my community,” he affirms. The fathers were at work and were classically less present, or maybe they were present but Elverum “didn’t relate to them as much.” “I found it more easy and pleasant to get into conversations with the moms, so it felt like these were my peers,” he says. “It started even before having kids. I realized I love all this music made by these moms about motherhood, about what that feels like in a zoomed-out, spiritual sense—Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Petit Poulet’ is almost like a cosmic perspective. On Universal Mother, her album, she’s taking this God-like nurturing approach to motherhood, which I think is very real. We talk about ‘Mother Earth’—there’s a lot there to explore. I found myself in it—being the caregiver for this kid and, also, paying a lot of attention to my role as a human on Earth and wanting to be nurtured by this place.” Night Palace is Elverum’s consideration of what it means to be both a nurtured child and the nurturer, how transformative love is a cause-and-effect that spans an existence and lingers in, out and through both grief and joy.

Elverum has written about transformative love before, and sourcing it is one of his greatest unfinishable pursuits. “Is there a difference between a kind of writing that is inspired by someone you love who is no longer with us and writing that is inspired by someone you love but you’ve departed from, or even someone that you are actively still loving?” I ask him. “I try and write honestly,” he admits. “It’s all entangled with stuff that I probably should work out in therapy, like attachment issues and projection—all the stuff that couples have to finesse, it manifests in the songwriting around those times. I can look back at Lost Wisdom, Pt. 2—I mean, I can’t actually look back at it. I’m still pretty embarrassed about those songs, even though I’m proud of the writing. It still hurts, who I was when I wrote them. I was in a pretty messed up state, in a way that I’ve moved on from. A difference is, if a person dies, then they’re not there to give a rebuttal to this thing I write. It can just be pure projection.”

The entire time Elverum was writing A Crow Looked at Me he wondered what Geneviève might have thought about certain lines or phrases—what kind of feedback she might have had for the way he captured her absence. “The songs were written to her, there’s a ‘you’ in the songs and it’s always her,” he tells me. “It wasn’t written with the idea that anyone else would ever hear them. The songs were pouring out of me, but behind closed doors of my own house. That was the world that those psalms were written in.” Back then, Elverum sang as if time had plum stopped so he could learn how to remember. Now, Night Palace stretches into the very eternity it covets, exiling quixotic eyesores and documenting every quotidian gesture so he’ll never have to forget.

Across Mount Eerie and the Microphones, Elverum works in “the same old, tired metaphors.” On Night Palace, it’s the rain and fog and the wind and the clouds—things that will, no doubt, go away but come back just as soon. These breaths are shorthand for him—wind being transcience and impermanence, fog being the opposite of clarity or too small of a perspective. As the album carries on, I am reminded of Ocean Roar and Sauna, of “I Walked Home Beholding” and “Planets.” “I like using those symbols and those statements, because that’s a big part of being alive for me, or at least my experience. Beginnings and endings, I don’t believe in them,” he says, letting out a big laugh. “A line that I use a lot in my stuff is ‘There’s no end,’ because I want to emphasize the interconnectedness of things. And that’s part of impermanence, right? Everything is just connected and changing and flowing. There’s a sequel to that song, or a reference back to this. That, to me, is closer to reality than saying ‘This starts here and ends here.’”

Two tracks that stand out are “Swallowed Alive” and “Wind & Fog.” They’re very noisy, heavy installments stationed in-between such gentle compositions like “My Canopy” and “Wind & Fog, Pt. 2,” creating jarring transitions that call to mind Elverum’s long-standing affection for black metal and Northern culture. He’s a storyteller, and even his most non-linear work is concise and intentional. Given how peaceful so many of the Night Palace songs are, the crushing, anguishing sequiturs accentuated the delicacy. Elverum prefers to call them “interstitial blips” instead of songs—pieces of music that are more transitional than situational. Juxtaposition and dynamics are elemental to him when making an album. “This is mostly true, I think, looking at my body of work—but not always, A Crow Looked At Me is the same tone the whole way through,” he says. “But, for the most part, I like to go to lots of different places. The sequencing of things—it’s important to have these alternative moments. On ‘Swallowed Alive,’ when I got it back from the mastering engineer, I asked them to make that song much louder, because I wanted people to [see it] as a jump-scare moment on the album. It’s important that it is shocking.”

The 81 minutes of Night Palace are full of “constant catastrophes” pounding on the door—bombings, genocide, forest fires, colonization, houses (including his own) built on stolen Indigenous land, a world turning inside out. But Elverum also writes about poems and the idea that living day-to-day is a masterpiece. “Is there a responsibility in writing about the world in earnest, rather than trying to make it some utopian falsity?” I ask. “Definitely,” he responds. “I feel it that way—to make escapist entertainment is cowardly, or something. I don’t want to do that with my precious, brief human life. I want to be honest and get into the real stuff. Personally, it’s hard for me to get on a soapbox and say it’s everyone’s responsibility, because making mere entertainment is fine, too, for others. I just have lofty goals, I guess.”

Systematically, too, we’re so often taught to censor ourselves in front of our children and not expose them to the harshness of the God-fearing world we live in. But Elverum’s daughter is seven years older now than she was when he made he built an epitaph out of A Crow Looked at Me. He doesn’t think twice about documenting the world in unpretty ways, even if it’s not the kind of world you want someone to grow up in. But, it’s the world that everyone’s being forced to grow up in right now. “If anything, I feel like I’m writing to her,” he says of Agathe. “She hears these songs as I’m working on them. This is the thing I do want her to hear. I do think twice about blasting Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! while I’m making oatmeal in the morning, which I do every morning. I’ve started to turn the volume down during the gory parts, because she’s listening. It’s a nuanced thing, finding the right balance between a kid’s awareness of what’s going on in the world and something that’s going to traumatize them that they’re not ready for.”

In Elverum’s own words, Night Palace is an album that points to “a moment of peace after long waves of turmoil and surrender.” “Catharsis” isn’t the right word for what I feel when listening to it—it’s something much more grounded, peaceful. But, that’s also the crux of the discussions Elverum is having with himself in the songs. “I found peace, I don’t feel as reactive as I used to,” he says. “If anything, I’m doing anti-Microphones in 2020. Instead of doing one really long song, I’m trying to do lots of short songs. That’s reactive, but in a mellow way. It feels like I’m in a, maybe, more mature period of acceptance and peace—slow happiness.” It’s funny that Elverum brings up wanting to write short songs, given that Night Palace’s penultimate song, “Demolition,” is 12 minutes long. It was the last thing he recorded for the album, and he had to re-do it a handful of times to get it perfect—and Elverum still has an itch to re-record it again, because it doesn’t “feel natural enough” to him yet. “I was like, ‘You know, it’s 68 minutes long. That’s not quite long enough,’” he chuckles. “No, I wasn’t actually trying to make it longer. It was going to be much longer, but I trimmed a lot and got it to where it is now. ‘Demolition’ came at the end, and it came out of this feeling of ‘I need to give all of this a little more straight-talk, a little more context and rootedness.’”

“Demolition” is, really, a spoken-word poem set to music—a lament of “no other home but here and now.” While Elverum isn’t going to set any records for the unhurried pace at which he sings his songs, this delivery style is still new territory for him. It’s a risk to ask somebody to lend their attention to art in any form for 12 minutes. Recently, he held a launch show for the book he made to accompany Night Palace and saw it as, possibly, the only chance he’d ever have to try performing “Demolition” live. “It’s really hard to do,” he says. “It’s much easier to sing a song everyone wants to hear you singing. No one wants to hear a guy talking. But I loved it. I loved doing a ‘reading.’ I think I want to try and do it as part of the regular set, but I anticipate people getting restless after eight minutes of me talking—people being like, ‘What the fuck? Play your songs!’ I guess that’s what I like about it, that it’s not boring on purpose, that I actually worked really hard to make it rich with meaning and beautiful words and to say a lot of different things in the most direct way I could.”

The final words that Elverum sings on Night Palace are swift, blunt: “I need new eyes.” Four words to describe prioritizing joy in “mystical ignorance.” It’s resounding and ambiguous, something that feels resonant without clear meaning. “I wanted to end on a new chapter opens-type of feeling, end on a question,” Elverum says. “That’s why [‘I Need New Eyes’] goes lots of places, like a pendulum swinging between understanding and being baffled by Buddhist ideas of arising and non-arising and me thinking I understand it. I’m staring at a boulder—which is a metaphor for thinking about climate change—or thinking about the responsibility of being a human and caring for others on Earth. That’s a boulder, that’s a certainty. Then, to apply this idea of non-arising—it’s all fluid projection. Those those things don’t easily square, so I’m like, ‘I need new eyes to see this contradiction clearly.’”

Elverum once said that the songs of The Glow, Pt. 2 sound nearly unrecognizable to him now that he’s 46 and far away from the Olympia punk he was when he made that record. But, on Night Palace, his younger self is ever and beautifully present, woven into the disjointed, refracting zen of his profound, middle-aged trail of noisy contrasts. He’s right at home, in the rubble of the Microphones and surrounded by a bounty of implications. Abandonment holds no currency in a place like this. “Am I the ocean or in it?” he wonders. You can see the storm, but you’re not always in it. Elverum puts his daughter to bed and bemoans all that may fall away, even himself, but with a charitable, murmuring contentment. Sometimes there is significance to all of this, but oftentimes none of it means anything. You may give an affirmation to a fish with a men’s chorus and an 808 beat behind you. Maybe, if the glint hits the water just right, the fish will affirm you back. No one else sounds like Phil Elverum, which is why Night Palace mirrors the uniqueness of being alive. As we walk the path, these songs dimple the earth like the contours of its mothering oneness. In the context of Elverum’s sprawling truth, we are reborn—our vocation is our ritual, and our domesticity plumes this brief, disorienting and beautiful listlessness we fashion into a lifetime.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.