A Quote by Phil Elverum

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 was 16. In the middle of the night, I took a taxi to the Detroit train station - or maybe it was the Pontiac train station? - and got on a train to Chicago, then transferred to a train to San Diego where my boyfriend was living at the time.
First paying gig, I got 20 bucks. I played at some really weird venue. I don't remember the venue; I just remember it was the last stop on the A train. It was, like, the Far Rockaways, Queens, and it was an audience of, like, three people.
Gravy Train!!!! started out as a joke where we'd crash parties and be really obnoxious, and then somehow we got somewhat famous, and it was really weird.
Japanese train signs, station signs, are really representative of the Japanese mind to me, because it always has the station where you are, the station you were previously at, and the station that is the next station. When I came to New York, I was very confused. It just doesn't say where I was and where I was going. But I realized after a while probably most people don't need to know what station you were previously at. But I think it's just some weird Japanese mentality that we need to know, we need to connect the plot.
I once did a Sprite commercial where I had to come out of the train station, jump out of a turnstile, jump on the side of a moving train. I had to run down the top of this moving train while it was going through the mountains and valleys. It was really hairy. I got my honorary stuntwoman card for that. I was proud.
If you've ever experienced being in an Indian train station as the train pulls in, even as a six-foot adult, it's incredibly scary. You just have people storming at you, bumping around you, without any regard to your safety.
I'd rather play a tune on a horn, but I've always felt that I didn't want to train myself. Because when you get a train, you've got to have an engine and a caboose. I think it's better to train the caboose. You train yourself, you strain yourself.
There was a time in my life I wanted that Olympic medal, and all I did was train, train, train and work harder than ever.
If a train doesn’t stop at your station, it’s simply because it’s not your train. Don’t try to flag down the conductor and convince them to stop there, even if their own map says that they should just keep going. You may not realize it, but there’s another train trying to come toward you, unable to get into your station because a train that doesn’t even belong there is being delayed there by your intensity.
If a train stops at a train station, what do you think happens at a work station?
One weird thing about me: I come home from practice or a game or whatever, and somehow my left sock always seems to get off my foot, and I end up walking around with one sock on.
'Long Black Train' was inspired by a vision that I had of a long, black train running down this track way out in the middle of nowhere. I could see people standing out to the sides of this track watching this train go by. As I was walking, experiencing this vision, I kept asking myself, 'What does this vision mean and what is this train?'
My music represents walking on train tracks in the middle of the woods, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. You walk down the tracks and you're walking every two tracks, and you've got your headphones on, and on both sides you've got forest, and in your rear is this long line of train tracks that's weaving through the woods. It's a very cool place, to walk along the train tracks because of the rhythm of walking every few feet through the woods. It's a good place to go dream.
While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.
I know stealing a foot is weird. But, hello, living in a house where a foot is available to be stolen is weird.
And if I would have taken lessons I probably wouldn't have done it, and what forced me to do all this weird stuff on the guitar was I couldn't afford effects pedals, I didn't have all this stuff when I was a kid so I just tried to squeeze all the weird noises I could out of the guitar, which brings me to building guitars.
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