Quotes from Phil Elverum

I'm artistically satisfied and happy.

I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade.

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.

Being a musician means I am 'hanging out' a lot, like driving on tour or being at a show or whatever, so maybe there's more time to interact with peers and develop jokes.

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'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 like a bass drum. A big one.

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.

Twitter is so stupid. I mean, it sucks!

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.

It is something I've noticed - that my audiences are young. My only thought has been because I play all-ages shows. Even so, they're pretty young, and sometimes I'm nervous the content of my songs - these weird, ambiguous, philosophical ideas I'm trying to articulate. Are the kids getting it? Is it going over their heads?

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?'

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

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.

It's easy to get swept up in the day to day ridiculous things that are in the news. They're not meaningless, they're legitimate and worth being engaged with. But it's easy to get overwhelmed and swept up and forget what real life feels like.

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

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.