Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Phil Elverum

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.

I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade.

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

Twitter is so stupid. I mean, it sucks!

It feels weird to play songs that I don't really... feel any more.

The Beach Boys were my favorite. I use to listen to their hits over and over, especially 'In My Room' and 'Don't Worry Baby.' There's something really sad about 'Don't Worry Baby.' Even though it's just a California song about racing cars, the melody is really sad. There's melancholy in 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.

It has happened a few times that I've found myself in a surprise mid-tour recording session.

Profound thoughts and profound experiences get revealed to be tricks that we play on ourselves, and poetry gets revealed to be just, like, some dumb words that somebody put in an interesting order.

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.

I sometimes think about the life that my daughter will have with no mom. What does it mean to have a ghost mom? Not that I can do anything differently about it. But it's an inferior version of what we had planned, you know? This was not our top choice.

After many days of grocery store food, sitting down for a deliberate, slow, expensive eating time can be the best.

On CBC Radio, the Canadian national radio, there's a show called 'WireTap.' The host is Jonathan Goldstein. It's amazing.

Eric's Trip is still a huge influence on me. The style of those recordings and the rawness of them is very inspiring. And the density of the distorted parts, amazing.

I'm pretty open.

In 2002 I did a big tour of Europe, by train, by myself, on foot, all the time walking from train station to the venue, in a weird town, in a weird country. I'd brought an acoustic guitar with me but it got broken somehow in transit.

I always like to play in beautiful cathedrals, when I can somehow get access to do a punk show there.

One thing I've heard that makes sense to me about grief is that there's this conception that it's a thing that you process, and then you're done processing it. But really it's not a thing that has an end, it's just what life is like now. You are living with this now, probably forever.

I want to create a life that is just healthy and peaceful - an enclave, really, of retreat. It's not helpful for the big picture. It's totally selfish to run away like that.

I got into Nirvana, and it was my sort of awakening into the idea that music could be like rough and crazy and local. And so I started to realize that there were bands playing in my town, Anacortes.

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 consume the news daily. I'm not avoiding it.

Music is only good sometimes.

In the early '50s, my great-grandmother and grandfather raised a baby gorilla named Bobo who wore clothes and played with the neighborhood kids.

My first band was called Nubert Circus, a very embarrassing, dumb name. It means nothing. We were kind of grunge. I would say we were more funny punk, a lot of songs about food and stuff like that.

I grew up without religion, but my parents have always been somewhat mystical about nature: The mountain is looking at us, stuff like that.

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.

I'm open to making any kind of music, or maybe making no music ever again. That's also an option, always. Who knows what'll happen.

I never want to keep doing the same thing more than once, honestly.

I'm actually not fussy. I enjoy getting into it and talking about anything, really. It feels good.

My shows have never been related to my albums at all because my albums have all kinds of crazy instruments and stuff that could never be performed live. I'm used to people expecting this 12-piece band to show up with three drum sets and an accordion.

There are some people that are trying to cure death, this tech immortality... That seems mentally ill.

I like Copenhagen, just because my shows there have been really good for some reason. Not that I love the city itself, but every time I play there it feels amazing. Pretty nice people there.

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.

I'm singing these songs about death and stuff. I see somebody who's, like, in their sixties or seventies at the show, and I'm like, 'Yeah, sure. Fair enough.'

I'm artistically satisfied and happy.

My daughter is like a tether back to the functional world, and I'm aware of how helpful that is.

I love things like the Criterion Collection DVDs. I think those are really well done. I like how far you can push the deluxe-ness of things like that.

After I made 'A Crow Looked at Me,' I remember people saying things to me like, 'You've made a beautiful tribute to Genevieve.' And I felt like, no! No no no, I haven't. I made a tribute to my own destruction and desolation. This is not a portrait of her. That's not who she was. She wasn't just a person who died.

There are a lot of names on the credits of 'The Glow Pt. 2,' but most of those people are just on one half of one song or something.

I am not satisfied with the ending of 'Mount Eerie' the album, so maybe by calling myself that, I am attempting to elaborate on the ending.

If I wanted to make big, bombastic, distorted, echo-y, trippy music, the atmospheric stuff, a studio is nice. But it's nice to know that it's not necessary.

I need some time to write songs and work on my thing, but I'm just living my life and doing family stuff and letting inspiration come when it comes. But I also don't feel a desperate need to keep pushing myself into people's faces to stay cool and relevant.

I don't think my music is that big of a deal - my entire life is parenting. The fact that I make records and go off and play shows is a small percentage of my day-to-day existence.

I used to have a musical group with a girlfriend called The Thunderclouds. It was like a Beach Boys cover band. And we would just figure out Beach Boy songs - break 'em into two-part harmonies. And, you know, we played a couple of shows around Olympia. It was very fun.

It's challenging to live in Anacortes. I lived in Olympia for five years, went on tour for a year, ended up in Norway for a winter, and ended up back in Anacortes. But I have a long life ahead of me. I'll probably live in many different places, and then die in Anacortes.

It's nice to have a band that can adapt to whatever show we're in, so we can play on a big stage or a house show.

I like a bass drum. A big one.

I can't bring myself to release an instrumental album because I feel like I want some meat on the bone. Something to chew on, lyrically and content-wise.

I'm mostly fine with anyone using my music for whatever. Everything's just compost that gets reused.

I start with the aim of making something instrumental, and then I'm just like, 'Agh, no, it's not interesting enough. I've got to say something here.'

When I first started recording music, I was actually singing about microphones, equipment, recording.

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

Somebody from Pitchfork Festival wanted me to have a Microphones reunion. It's a joke. It's just me.

I think that as a kid I was pretty drawn to melodrama.

I'm not a perfectionist. I don't have enough patience to go over the same details over and over trying to get it perfect.

I buy some black metal records kind of blindly, and I end up really liking maybe 30% of them. There's a lot of duds, for me at least, in black metal. I have kind of picky tastes about it.

I like the experience being in the audience and being overwhelmed by sound, like thick, oppressive loud sound and distortion.

Even when I was calling myself the Microphones I only really ever played new songs... because I feel, like, a pretty strong connection to the song when I'm performing it.

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.