Phil Elverum

I don't get to make many choices in my life as a single parent.

I reach out. I ask for help. I tell my story.

These people that worked with my dad doing landscaping were in a grunge band so the music on the cover of Rolling Stone was in a very real way connected to people practicing in the woods near my house while I was home doing my homework.

I am so thirsty to do my projects whenever I have a spare moment.

It's interesting to think about the different forms one place can take.

I remember discovering that I loved recording - that breakthrough when I was in high school getting to record for the first time.

I want to not be associated with death or cancer, I don't want that life.

They're all true - the cliches like 'one day at time' and 'ups and downs.'

Clear Moon' is more... clear I guess! It's more round-sounding and it's slightly gentler. 'Ocean Roar' is more challenging and weird and darker and heavier - the idea was for it to feel like a thick fog laying on your head, versus a clear sky with the moon in it.

All the books on my shelves, when I would go to them to look for help with my anguish, they all just seemed so crass. They didn't get it. Those books don't understand. Nobody understands.

Recording and touring are totally separate universes for me and it's strange and refreshing when they invade each other momentarily.

Every tour is different. Sometimes I'll get a band together and sometimes it's just me.

I do like playing music with other people.

I just play under the name Mt. Eerie. I started doing that in 2003 and I've pretty much been doing that since then.

I'm pretty open.

Life here (in the Pacific Northwest, not in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland or the chain of buildings connecting them but in the rest of the place, out west and east from the north-south I-5 river) can sometimes feel like a half-dream, half-myth.

My grandpa is the funniest person in the world, straight up. But mostly everyone in my family groans when he is 'on.' I am his biggest fan.

I've sort of accidentally put myself in this position where I opened up the story of my life, and of course people want to reciprocate and open up to me. I'm OK at it, I don't make people feel worse, but it's strange to find myself in this role, all of a sudden, that I never would have pursued.

For awhile the only thing people were talking to me about my music, that's all they ever said: 'You must be a nature lover. Are you camping all the time?'

We had a simple 8-track studio set up in the record store where I worked. And just staying after work and experimenting, realizing what was possible with recording - that's why my project was called The Microphones at first. Because it wasn't even songs really. It was just sound.