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Phil Elverum on creating art from grief – The Creative Independent

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Try typing something like "creative blocks", "spiral", "world", "green" or "blue" and our snail will find what you're looking for. Something striking about the album is the level of detail—talking about the exact contents of what you’re throwing out from the trash can, keeping the windows open until it gets too cold for the baby. Two years ago, so before even starting to think about this album, I wrote guidelines in a notebook for new music that I wanted to make in the future. They were like rules. I remember sitting in a hospital waiting room thinking about what could music possibly even be. I referred to them a lot while making this. It was after I had finished Sauna and I thought, “Well that album’s kind of ungainly, what can I do now?” Oh yeah, here: “Songs in the future. No reverb. Close and direct. Dense with easy words. Don’t rely on hanging emotions or drawn-out notes. Engage the mind’s chewing teeth. Say everything as it is. No metaphors. Resist big-picture reflections.” I thi

Phil Elverum on creating art from grief Prelude Photo: Allyson Foster " href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/tci-assets/uploads/Mount%20Eerie%20by%20Allyson%20Foster%5Bgoodres%5D.jpg"> Phil Elverum Musician, Producer Phil Elverum is the Anacortes, Washington-based songwriter, producer, and artist behind the musical projects, the Microphones and Mount Eerie. The most recent Mount Eerie album, A Crow Looked At Me , is a song cycle about the death of Elverum’s wife, the artist and musician Geneviève Castrée, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four months after she and Elverum’s daughter was born.

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