Phil Elvrum Quotes

All things in the world are singing a song, reciting a poem, inaudibly, to their surroundings, to the things they encounter.

I didn't want to do a double album. I just felt like the last two records I made were like that, and a lot of records I was buying were like that, and it started to feel like it was too much music to digest at once.

When someone close to you dies, the line is shifted really drastically about what is meaningful and what isn't.

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

Death is natural, and it happens early for some people. I acknowledge that, and in the next sentence, reject it, because it just sucks. It hurts. I can at the same time acknowledge it as true, and then have my protest against it.

When I read War and Peace in Norway, really far away from humanity for a long time, it was such an amazing, affirming blast of "humanity" in all forms. It totally cracked my mind-nut open and rainbows shot out. I loved humanity and being alive, rather than wanting to bury my head in the snow.

Whenever I get a tweet that's trying to promote a thing someone cares about, I'm like, "how annoying!"

I've been thinking a lot about Anacortes and what it's like to be here, though I'm not trying to get people to move here - I would hate that.

For some reason focusing on destruction and mortality is more poetically exciting to me than hope and love.

I've always written songs with a visual counterpart in my mind that no one else can see.

When I sing the songs, there's a color tone and a place, and it's not a place that I remember in reality. It's usually based on a photo that I took - 'cause those photos don't look like the real world. The film distorts them, and the colors get exaggerated.

I'm not ... pumped about being alive. But I don't think about suicide ever. I have a kid. I think that's just an automatic shut-off of that idea. In fact, I just instantly went into the necessities of parenting, and I think it's been very good for grief. Because it's a reality check, I guess. I have very real tasks that need immediate attention all the time.

I probably wouldn't kill a spider now, I'd probably try to scoop it up in a cup and put it outside, but not for any reason other than I don't need to take other lives recklessly. But other than that, I don't believe in ... anything. Anything, anything.

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.

I learned how to sit on the couch in front of the fire and read a magazine, just for like eight hours a day, every day. It was... crazy.

I really like looking at other people's book collections when I'm at someone's house. I think it is an amazing cross section of a person's brain and lifestyle. I think everyone should photograph their book spines and make a website. Seriously.

It's a beautiful idea to focus on how everything is temporary and always in flux. It may feel bad now, but it will feel good later, and vice versa. To write about those things brings this satisfying feeling as a creative person. There's a lot of music out there that's like, "I'm so mad! I'm sad! I'm into skulls and crossbones and the color black," and that's just meaningless and shallow. So much of metal is about that and it's hard to find metal that is substantial and meaningful in terms of its content.

A lot of my songs are about death and the fleetingness of life. It just feels good to remind myself about that a lot. For whatever reason. And it's a beautiful thing, actually. It seems to me like it's a beautiful way to live in the world and to relate to things, with an awareness of temporality.

If my music is political in a way, and it might be, it's in the way of generating a sensitivity in people, a deeper awareness of the world around them. That's my goal, at least.

I like the idea of politically charged music a lot, but it usually seems to be preaching to the choir and ineffective.

Nirvana really touched me as a teenager and started making me pay attention to music as a participatory thing that I could do. Music that you want to throw your body into it - that's a feeling that I'm not quite satisfied with having made yet.

Twitter is so stupid. I mean, it sucks! It's not a good way to communicate and it's really difficult to use it for any functional thing.

To me, Twitter seems like a way for people to just let the world know about the most mundane bullshit that crosses their mind.

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.

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. The universe, nobody understands my agony, or my questioning, and it's this shift in what in the world around us could possibly be meaningful or helpful.

I was going to tweet every three seconds about every thought that went through my mind, and I did that for a few days. It was really fun, and funny to me.

People's attentions spans are getting shorter and shorter. I don't want to cater to that necessarily but, just for myself, it feels like more than 40 minutes of music is too much.

I think that I probably inevitably fetishize nature, although I try not to, because it's kind of embarrassing, repulsive behavior. I think it's just an extension of me being old-fashioned.

I am still not taking my "career" in music for granted. It is constantly surprising that it works. Generally my thinking about the future has this assumption of an impending apocalypse.

I wanted to lift the aspects of the lyrics and imagery that I found sincerely powerful and touching, plus the amazing musical extremities, and make my own thing. That's what making music has always been for me. Synthesizing a nonexistent kind of music that I wish existed because I wanted to listen to it.