A Quote by Phil Elverum
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.
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Nirvana was happening when I was 14, kind of the perfect age. Growing up in Anacortes, Washington, it was close enough to Seattle that it seemed like a local thing.
For me, growing up in New York, it started with Elvis Costello and the Clash and then got into louder things like Bad Brains and Stimulators, because those were, like, the local bands. Then I started getting into bands from England like the Slits. I remember seeing Gang of Four at Irving Plaza; that was a really big show for me.
My activities were centered around school and football and church and senior high fellowship, and I got together with a couple bands and started playing parties, proms, stuff like that. It was the music that really worked for me.
There were no good bands in my town. You know, there's like this magic town where every kid started a band in high school, and half of them were good and have careers based on relationships built at that time? That wasn't what my life was like at all.
I listen to all kinds of bands. I like rock music, like, male rock bands. I'm more into that instead of female singers. I like Nirvana, Green Day, System Of A Down. I also like punk rock, and I love bands like Coldplay.
I remember in the days when we started, when we first went on the road, we went to Berkeley and played with Exodus. We couldn't believe another band was playing the same kind of music we were playing because there was only a handful of bands that were doing it.
After graduating college in 2010, I got to work - writing and co-writing all the time, playing and touring in bands, playing for other people's bands, working in coffee shops all over town.
With any "new" form of music, the originators are usually good bands that have good music and good ideas, like Nirvana. But then you get all the followers and wannabes, bands like Silverchair, etc...and that really sucks.
When we first started playing shows, we were all 17. Everybody started somewhere. There were guys throwing shows in condemned houses and backyards just for the love of music and for the love of what bands were standing for.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
I started playing guitar when I was 12 and probably from that age knew that I wanted to make music and make my own music. Playing with other bands like the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens was more like an apprenticeship for me than anything.
I get a chance to see new bands and new music. I've seen a lot of amazing local bands, bands that I think 'have what it takes', that they could become the next big thing. More often than not it doesn't happen.
We were fans of Green Day and Nirvana or whatever, but the bands we really loved were Chicago bands that didn't really sound anything like Alkaline Trio.
I first started going to shows when I was about 16 - seeing local bands. I mean, I loved music before that, and I played a bit of guitar when I was younger and thought maybe I'd become a guitar teacher or something, but when I saw other kids doing it, I was like, 'Whoa, these are great bands! I can do it, too.'
Bands like Nirvana had theatrical sensibilities, playing with image, challenging assumptions people were making about them, the apex being Kurt Cobain in a dress to make a point.
For music, I always just played music myself - and, I had rock bands and wrote songs and put bands together that were loud, but not especially good. That was sort of the place music had in my career.
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