Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum Starts Over, Again

The singer-songwriter talks about his brief moment as a tabloid concern, finding comfort in uncertainty, and turning lost love into something useful and good with his new album.
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Photos by Rin-san Jeff Miller

The last time I spoke with Phil Elverum was in the summer of 2018, at his then-new home in Brooklyn, not long after the announcement of his marriage to Michelle Williams as part of a Vanity Fair cover story on the actress. I had written about him a year before, and he invited me over to say hello. When he answered the door to the gorgeous townhouse, his new wife was not around. Nor was Agathe, the daughter he had with his first wife, Geneviève Castrée, who passed away in 2016, or Williams’ daughter Matilda, from her relationship with the late Heath Ledger. Elverum was still wearing the same weather-beaten T-shirt he might have worn in his small Pacific Northwest hometown of Anacortes, Washington, where he had spent a couple of decades building a modest profile for himself as a maker of hushed, contemplative, and intensely autobiographical indie music. Sitting on the couch in his new living room, my back to the open kitchen and facing the door to their backyard, I had the sensation that both of us were squatting in someone else’s house. 

Now, Elverum doesn’t live in New York City anymore. He’s not married to Williams anymore either; they quietly filed for divorce this April, after less than a year of marriage. After heading back to the Pacific Northwest, he sold the place that he lived in with Geneviève, and moved onto a nearby island populated by old hippies who grow their own food, where he and his first wife had once planned to build their own house. For now, he and Agathe are renting.

To hear him tell it, his nine months in New York felt fleeting and unreal. “It wasn’t quite long enough to find myself there,” he says over the phone from Washington. “I was definitely out of my comfort zone. I self-identify as Mr. Pacific Northwest, and I knew that the city would be a big step away from that bubble.” What made him uncomfortable about New York City? “Oh, I don’t know, everything,” he laughs.

When he and I met in Brooklyn, he had no immediate plans for another album; he was concentrating on setting up his new, complicated life in New York. But less than a year after his split with Williams, another record has surfaced. Elverum mostly wrote Lost Wisdom pt. 2 in the time immediately following the separation, and as always there are autobiographical snippets in the lyrics, intimate slices of his life bobbing along in the metaphors and allegory of his writing.

But unlike the stark and harrowing language of his previous two albums under the Mount Eerie name, 2017’s A Crow Looked at Me and 2018’s Now Only, the touch is softer, the lyrics dreamier. “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about/Back before I knew my way around these hospitals,” he sang wryly on A Crow’s “Emptiness, Pt. 2,” as he watched Geneviève die slowly and painfully of advanced cancer. But there are moments on Lost Wisdom pt. 2 where it almost seems like Elverum can bear to think about conceptual emptiness again. Despite the continued upheavals of his personal life, it’s a sign, maybe, of healing. The title of the new album pointedly establishes a connection to Elverum’s older discography: The original Lost Wisdom, a collaboration with folk singer Julie Doiron, came out in 2008. Doiron is back for the sequel, and her voice aerates these songs, gracing them with mellow light. 

Often, the opening lyrics to Elverum’s songs serve as tidy summations of their themes: “Death is real/Someone’s there and then they’re not/And it’s not for singing about,” he offered on the opening seconds of A Crow Looked at Me. On Lost Wisdom pt. 2’s first song, he presents a sort of prayer: “Please, can I go through this life unscared to see that nothing stays the same/No one knows anything.” Later, on a song called “Love Without Possession,” he puts the album’s theme even more simply: “What glows beneath all the pain and anguish? Love that doesn’t die.”

Pitchfork: This record feels both more and less personal than your last two. It’s less harrowing, for sure, maybe a little more abstracted. Was that an intention or a result? 

Phil Elverum: It’s definitely a step back into poetry and away from memoir. That’s partially just how it came out. A lot of it also comes from not feeling so comfortable speaking with raw detail and names and dates. I don’t feel like I’m writing in a vacuum of my own grief anymore, talking about things that don’t touch any other people. There’s something about living in Anacortes and having gone through this life of fear of cancer and death. I felt like I was definitely in a bubble and could say whatever I want because we’re all gonna die at any minute. I was able to delude myself into thinking that I didn’t have to be sensitive about what I said, like I could just like spill the beans.

You still allude to your marriage with Michelle directly a couple of times on the album, and you touch on what it was like to live close to someone who was being scrutinized. What did it feel like to pass under the beam of that scrutiny?

Mostly, it didn’t feel like anything, because that wasn’t the lived experience at all. We lived a very human existence, and that [celebrity] world mostly felt like an abstraction.

You address some of that celebrity weirdness. This is a record full of elemental images—embers and blowing winds—but then in the song “Widows” you suddenly sing: “The day the tabloids told the world you separated me/My phone began dinging more than usual.” And then at another point, you reference “This inhumane, delirious, absurd, other world that keeps trying to eat you.” It is very clear who and what that is about. 

Yeah, I do allude to that time. Partly, because here I am, making this album and putting it out into the public. So in some ways, I’m participating in that gross world that I want to avoid, and I want to recognize the contradiction in that. I recognize the playing field; I recognize how gnarly it must feel to live with those concerns. It’s a tough one, and I’m still kind of hung up on it. 

It would be amazing to write a song that could be sung 100 years from now by a teenage girl and still be relevant to her—that’s a dream of songwriting, maybe. But nonetheless, what I end up doing is writing these hyper-specific things about my own life in these particular months. That song in particular is about being disoriented about what’s real and trying to find some firm ground. I have all these versions of reality that I’ve lived in over the past few years—can they all be real? Can they all coexist? In that same song, I overcompensate in the other direction; I mention going to a bonfire and a garbage dump, getting stinky in the woods. I was just trying to find some middle ground between extremes.

Now that you’ve exited that world, do you feel like you learned something essential about how it works? Do you have any observations about it?

I have a lot of thoughts about making more social-commentary type songs. I’ve talked to my friends and family about it, but I haven’t gotten to the point where I feel comfortable or good making it into a song that I would then send out into the general public. There’s something not-beautiful, or not-useful, about talking about the disorientation of these cultural shifts. I wanted to make a record that would transcend the bad, hard feelings of a love relationship not working out, to make something that metabolized it into something useful and good. A lost wisdom. This is a record about finding comfort with the terror of uncertainty and staying with it, specifically within love and relationships. That’s everyone’s problem; that’s what everyone’s faced with. I wanted to earn something from this experience, for anyone who might listen to this. Surely there must be something to be gained?

Do you feel like it has changed you in some ways? 

I’m totally transformed. I’m onto some new place and trying to figure out everything again from scratch. I did think about changing my band name to go along with this feeling of everything being destroyed and born again. But I didn’t entertain that possibility for very long, because it doesn’t actually matter what the band name is—I had changed my band name once [from the Microphones to Mount Eerie], in 2004, and it is still such an annoyance to have to talk about what it even means. It’s also so meaningless and dumb. The amount of conversational space this insignificant detail can take up is just not worth it. It doesn’t matter what the band name is, you know?

You’ve been so prolific for more than 20 years now, making music even under the most trying circumstances. Have you ever experienced writer’s block?

I feel like I spend most of my time in a state of writer’s block! When things do come out, they come out quickly. I had one and a half songs after moving back across the country and I knew I wanted to make something with Julie Doiron, and there was this one week in late May where it would work for her to fly out. So I was like, “OK, in three weeks, Julie’s coming to record an album, and I don’t have an album.” I just sat down and did it. It’s never come out that fast before. It was an amazing state; for those three weeks, I always had my notebook in my pocket, and I was always kind of mumbling to myself and mulling over the lines. I would drop off Agathe at school and then go on these long walks. It was my only job, and it felt really good to keep that muscle super exercised. 

Your lyrics can be unusually knotty: If you gave a line like “I used to walk around basically begging the sky for some calamity to challenge my foundation” to a composition student, they might jump out the window. Do you spend a lot of time figuring out how to sing those kinds of lines? 

I do spend time trying to find good melodies, and I try to remember them when I do discover them. But also it’s mostly intuitive; I noodle around with the line until it sounds and feels right. And then, of course, some of the lines are just totally unmelodic; they’re almost like monotone mumbling, and it’s a stretch to even call it singing. 

I have this system of notation actually, little stacks of paper where I mark dashes under where the downbeat falls and a plus sign under where the upbeat falls. I use a red pencil to write the notes of the melody. Then I’ve gotten used to using voice memos to remember the things I don’t know how to write down. It was a whole method that came about when I was writing the songs on A Crow Looked at Me, when I needed to condense my creative times into these narrow windows where I had child care. Previously, I would be in the studio for like a year and fuck around and record all kinds of horrible parts and write the words and figure out the melody on the spot. But I haven’t worked that way in years now.  

Your last two records were such starkly personal accounts of death and trauma. Have people approached you with a new intimacy since you put them out? Have you had trouble responding? 

Yes, for sure. People have reached out in a new way. It happens in letters and emails, but also at the merch table. At almost every show, actually, someone would come up to me with tears in their eyes. And they were specific about the details of their experience, which makes sense, since I had put my own experiences out there in such an explicit way. It was mutually beneficial: I was telling my story to them, and they were sharing theirs with me.

It was a strange thing. Going on tour and playing those shows, people were coming to me and saying, “My fiancé died three weeks ago.” At the time, I was about nine months out from death; I was already doing a little better and I had a different look on my face. But people were hearing this album that was written from the blast zone, so when I went out, I sort of had to step backward and re-inhabit that time. It was hard, and super intense, but I felt like it was my responsibility. I tried to stay with it as best I could. I didn’t retreat from it.