“How does it feel to be called the saddest musician in the world?” I asked Phil Elverum on a Monday morning from his home on Orcas Island. I thought this question, referring to the title of a 2018 Spinoff article, might make him laugh, but instead, he looked at me in seriousness. “I’m not into it,” he said, shaking his head, “It seems shallow to me.” Although Elverum admits he understands why that perception is out there. Under the moniker Mount Eerie, he has released 11 experimental folk-forward albums that have touched on breakups, political disillusionment, existentialism, the natural life cycle, and, perhaps most notably, grief. In 2017, he released the critically acclaimed album A Crow Looked at Me, written and recorded a month after the death of his wife, the cartoonist, writer, and musician Geneviève Castrée, when grief was fresh and emotions were raw. “But even within those songs, I tried to put humor and love in them,” he offers, “but maybe not everyone is ready to go beneath the surface.”
On A Crow Looked at Me, Elverum did the thing that most of us wish we could do: turn tragedy into art. But at the time of the album’s release and supporting tour dates, he seemed unsure about its toll on both himself and the audience (“It feels very much like I am going out there and reenacting a trauma and charging people money for it,” he told Double J in 2018). Ahead of his upcoming solo acoustic show at the Neptune Theatre, I caught up with him to discuss the album’s anniversary, parasocial relationships, and how to push through embarrassment to reach the magic of vulnerable exposure.
You began writing A Crow Looked at Me 10 years ago. Have you thought much about that anniversary?
Well, yeah, actually. Geneviève died on July 9, 2016. This past July 9, I didn’t notice it had passed. I forgot. Then the day after, I had crazy nightmares. When I woke up, someone pointed the anniversary out to me. The death anniversary is not something I try to remember. It’s not the day I want to commemorate.
When was the last time you listened to A Crow Looked at Me?
Well, I don’t throw it on for fun [laughs]. One of the songs came up on shuffle sometime within the last six months. I listened to it. I didn’t skip it. It was cool. It’s far enough away now that I can kind of hear it the way other people hear it, rather than being swept away by my own personal recollections.
Did you find that writing and performing those songs helped you? Would you recommend making something in the midst of grieving?
I don’t know if I’d recommend it… Well, maybe I would, because it really did help me, but that wasn’t my intention with doing it. I didn’t set out to do a self-help project in front of everyone, but I recognized how healthy it felt to digest and metabolize this stuff. In our culture, we don’t have a very organized or healthy way of integrating these things into our ongoing lives.
After I had made the album and I was still in it—in the core, in the hot part of grief—I brought my CD to group hospice therapy. I was like, “This is kind of relevant. I made this thing out of my grief,” and I realized that others in the group didn’t have a creative outlet for those feelings. There was a juxtaposition at that moment between the people in the room and me. I was like, “Oh my god, this really does help!” I felt like an expert at grief compared to them.
Have you experienced fans being emotional with you?
Yeah, it still happens, but it happened more when I was touring for A Crow Looked at Me. It was a new level of raw interpersonal intensity. I was out at the merch table each night just available to everyone. I noticed myself wanting to be open-hearted to each stranger that came up to me, because everyone’s experience with it is so intense and real, but I couldn’t be fully available to every person. It wasn’t sustainable. Eventually, I noticed a shell developing, which I hated, but it was necessary for survival. I’d look them in the eye and be present enough, and then go back inward. It still happens, but mostly through emails and letters. I respond, but I have to protect my own heart, too. It’s parasocial in a lot of ways, but I know I’m putting myself out there in such a way that lends itself to that.
Are there any artists that you’ve felt a parasocial relationship with?
I used to have recurring dreams about Björk. I don’t know why. It was like a dream world, supernatural something. But yeah, I felt like we were probably friends.
And then weirdly, and I haven’t really said this ever, I felt that way about the actress Michelle Williams. I would see her in Kelly Reichardt movies, and think we were friends. I felt like we knew each other. She just seemed like a punk friend of mine. I didn’t realize she was like mainstream famous. Then we did meet, and we… got married. It was a real mindfuck. It got so confusing. I felt so familiar with this person—the parasocial turned into reality and then came apart in a painful way. So yeah, I don’t know where I am with that stuff now.
One of my favorite videos on the internet is you being interviewed by MTV outside of a Nirvana concert in 1992. What do you remember about that night?
I remember being at the show, of course, but somehow I didn’t remember that little interaction with the camera outside until it went on to YouTube. I was with my good friends Brandon and Jeremy. It was my second concert—my first concert was MC Hammer. My dad drove us down to the Seattle Center Coliseum. It was thrilling, but also, we sat way in the back. The band was really far away. We had to squint. I was like, “Is this what concerts are like!?” I thought it would feel different—sweaty, close, and raw. I saw Nirvana twice—again on the In Utero tour, and then that was it.
What was your reaction to Kurt Cobain’s death at the time?
It was very sad. I was having a party that day for some reason, so all my friends came over. That friend in the video, Brandon, with blonde hair and the “Sliver” shirt, was obsessed with Kurt Cobain, so he was more the devastated one. I was really into them, but not in that parasocial, obsessive way. I was like, “Wow, that sucks. That’s so sad.” But he was, like, moping. Anyway, that party became sort of a wake.
Do you find yourself drawn towards public or private grieving?
What feels natural to me is private for sure, but then there’s this weird thing that applies to my life as an artist in general, which is [you] do the very raw thing that you would be so embarrassed to show to anyone, and then show it to everyone, because that’s where the electricity is. Eric’s Trip was my favorite band when I was a teenager, and part of what feels so alive about their music is the interpersonal tension in the band. They were singing to each other, about each other. It just feels so real and unproduced. It feels like a window into a person’s true experience and world. I think the highest thing that art can do is create that intimacy through distance; that’s why I like to dare myself to expose my vulnerable parts. I want to make something that feels alive like that.
How do you overcome the fear that comes with public attention?
Dissociation… which is probably not healthy. I close my eyes when I sing and kind of pretend no one’s there in a weird way. I don’t know how it works. It almost feels like a split personality or something. There’s just a lot of contradictions in me. I feel like a hermit at the end of the road, and at the same time, I want to take that hermit energy out to show it for a second, and then go back in. I don’t know what to make of that.
What do you think happens when we die?
I used to be a meat-and-dirt-and-bones-and-nothing type of guy, then I started entertaining the idea of the spirit world. Like communicating with the people we’ve lost through the natural world in a non-ironic way. That’s about as far as I’ve gone. I like the comfort and depth it brings to indulge in that type of thinking. It feels playful to me. I’m walking around talking to the birds, or not even animals, just the air itself. There’s not a belief system around that, more so a daily practice of surrender to who-knows-what and pushing aside that masculine/rational part of my brain that is resistant to blurriness.
Do you ever think about your funeral?
Not really. In that respect, I think I’m still a meat-and-dirt-and-bones guy. I want it to be kind of brutal. I want there to be no casket, just an exposed body on a rock somewhere with the birds eating it, so everyone can look at it and just see the reality of it. I recognize that’s kind of mean to everyone who would have to see it… so no, not really, but you get the idea.
Have you ever thought about what music you want played at your funeral?
No, but like one week after Geneviève died, we had a memorial at the Unknown, a church recording studio in Anacortes. I was setting up a really loud PA that morning, and blasting black metal, like Sunn O))) and Disaster. I just kept turning the volume up and up and up, and it felt so good. I was crying, and the deafening, shrieking, cathartic music felt so appropriate. No one else was in the room with me. That, to me, was the funeral. It was a kind of exorcism or something.
I know you are busy taking care of a baby right now, but do you have any ideas percolating in your mind or projects you’re itching to work on?
I’ve been writing songs very slowly in the little 30-second windows of free brain space. That’s always going on, even when I’m doing baby stuff. In a way, it’s the same inspiration as always—I always feel like I haven’t quite gotten it yet. I’m almost there. I almost said it clearly enough before, but now I want to try again and shed all the metaphors, decorations, and persona to talk about this present moment. I don’t want to talk about myself at all. Having a baby is a shortcut to having a zoomed-out perspective on the next 1,000 years, hoping that humanity does okay and that the nonhuman world does okay. That’s where my head has been—in a 1,000-year perspective.
