Here I am in Anacortes, finally, and there’s no moon.
I was sure there’d be a moon. It was full a day or two ago, but
tonight is cloudy and the sky is dark. “Why did we come here?” the
Microphones are singing on my iPod as I wander around. “Someone made
posters, and we called for directions.”
I’m here to see Mount Eerie—formerly the Microphones, also
known as Phil Elverum—perform at the Department of Safety, a
converted fire station in the middle of sleepy downtown Anacortes that
can’t help but remind me of my old sleepy Eastside suburb and its own
all-ages venue, also a decommissioned fire station.
But I’m really here for more convoluted, maybe embarrassing reasons.
I’m here because the Microphones’ 2001 album, The Glow Pt. 2,
is being reissued this April by K Records, and I’ve been kind of
obsessed with the album for the better part of my adult life. I’m here
to try to understand where The Glow Pt. 2 comes from. I’m here
because the opening lyrics of the album’s third song, “The
Moon”—”I drove up to the city at night/And found the place where
you grew up”—have been stuck in my head for years, and I’ve
decided to take the words as instructions: Anacortes is where Elverum
grew up. I’m here because I hoped the moon over Anacortes might sing to
me, might reveal some mystery. The moon, however, is not
cooperating.
The audience at the Department of Safety sits on floor pillows and
old couches. Elverum plays an acoustic guitar in the dark, sitting on
the lip of the stage next to a projection of trees, water, and slowly
shifting clouds. Every once in a while, he triggers a fog machine whose
motor sputters and skitters like a jazz drummer loosely brushing the
high hats. It blows real clouds out in front of the projected ones.
Then the fog sets off the Department of Safety’s smoke alarm, eliciting
friendly laughter from the crowd.
It’s not so different from the first time I remember seeing the
Microphones play. This was in the fall or early winter of 2000, at the
now-defunct Arrow Space in Olympia, a small, hardwood-floored loft with
a low stage situated around the alley and up a steep, narrow flight of
stairs from the old Phantom City Records. Elverum played an acoustic
guitar, backed by some kind of tape recording; the crowd sat on
scattered floor pillows. I don’t remember as much of that show now as I
wish I did, but I remember Elverum singing “The Moon,” the song pulling
me in with its initial melody (gentle, hushed, heartbeat slow), then
sweeping me up in its rush of furiously strummed acoustic chords and
rapidly whispered lyrics (overlapping memories of romantic road trips
and lonely homecomings) speeding headlong to its sudden endpoint. Its
scenes of camping out on beaches and rooftops, its homesick sense of
place, its existential staring contest with the titular satellite, its
feeling of safety and strength in the face of “certain death,” its
alternately dense and spare layers of sound—all of this is
resonant and alluring in a way that’s hard to describe even years
later. It’s a perfect entry into the Microphones’ universe.
The Glow Pt. 2—part one was a single song, “The
Glow,” on previous album It Was Hot, We Stayed in the
Water—is epic. More than an hour long, it’s full of simple,
acoustic folk songs, expansive multitracked forces of nature, as well
as clangorous and ambient studio experiments, from drums overdriven
into the sound of wind to an intermittently sounding foghorn inspired
by a similar sound on Twin Peaks.
Elverum’s songs look to the phenomena of the natural world as muse
and metaphor for romantic love as well as existential wonder and dread.
“I Want Wind to Blow” yearns for a storm to sweep the singer out of the
ordinary world, to animate him with life; “I Felt My Size” recasts a
cave and a campfire as the universe and the sun, dawn and darkness with
life and death. A recurring theme, on songs such as “I’ll Not Contain
You” and “I Felt Your Shape,” is the impossible desire to hold on to
fleeting things—people, feelings, the physical world, life
itself. Throughout, Elverum plays with scale, leaping from minute
observation to macrocosmic dilemma: In the album’s title track, “The
Glow Pt. 2,” the mundane act of Elverum taking his shirt off in the sun
becomes a confrontation with death, with him worrying: “The Glow is
gone/I forgot my songs.” The album ends with the furious drum storm of
“Samurai Sword,” followed by the half-song of “My Warm Blood,” which
cuts off into lingering ambient hum and echoes of the album’s first
track. It’s a deep, enveloping record that’s as inviting as it is
impenetrable, at once frankly confessional and self-mythologizing,
carefully constructed but intentionally rough.
The reissue, out this week on K Records, comes with a second disc of
added material—newly recorded songs, “destroyed versions,”
instrumentals, and a new sleeve with collected old photographs of
Elverum and friends. The alternate versions reveal hidden dimensions to
the album’s songs or hint at the way they came to life as they were
recorded. Of the newly revealed songs, “Where Lies My Tarp?” a version
of which also appears on the out-of-print album Singers, is
the most satisfying. It’s as precious as anything on The Glow Pt.
2 proper, a sweet song of love deferred, Elverum’s quavering voice
and shape-shifting metaphors backed by twangy guitars, relaxed
drumming, and a multitracked chorus.
In the seven years since The Glow Pt. 2‘s release,
Elverum’s self-contained universe has expanded, collapsed, and begun
again, attracting a legion of fans in the process. He released a final
record by the Microphones, a concept album called Mt. Eerie (named after a real mountain in Anacortes but with an extra e)
in which Elverum journeys up the titular rock to face Death and the
Universe. Following that record, Elverum disappeared to Norway,
presumably to grapple with Death and the Universe there, then returned
to the states as Mount Eerie (at this time, Elverum also added the
second e to his last name). His songs became ever more
self-involved and reflective, still unfolding through multiple parts,
sequels, and versions across different albums, with Elverum referencing
and sometimes refuting old songs, singing about his old self, naming
names of old loves. It’s an immersive body of work that encourages and
rewards obsessive attention.
Nothing Elverum has done since has entirely eclipsed The Glow
Pt. 2. The album finds him at the apex of his productive prowess
and his songwriting skill. Elverum summons from his studio both vast,
turbulent spaces and small, delicate stillness, his simple acoustic
songs emerging from and then disappearing back into a dense, shifting
sonic fog. The songs form their own world, not like the designed
narrative of a concept album, but like a naturally occurring
environment, a place discovered rather than constructed.
When I learned it was being rereleased, I determined to find its
source, to visit Anacortes and to revisit Olympia (where he recorded
The Glow Pt. 2, where he and I both used to live), to try to
see the moon and Mount Eerie as they appear in his songs.
On a Monday morning in February, a month before the trip to
Anacortes, Elverum picks me up at The Stranger offices in
Seattle on his way to Olympia, where he’s stopping to pick up a few
boxes of freshly arrived vinyl copies of the soon-to-be-released
Glow Pt. 2 reissue. Then he’s heading south on a road trip
that will take him to Marfa, Texas. The canopied bed of Elverum’s
pickup truck is packed with blankets—this is where he’ll sleep en
route—and the cab is stuffed to the roof with bags and his
guitar.
Elverum is wearing sandals, even though it’s maybe 50 degrees
outside, along with plain khaki pants and a coarse gray and brown
sweater. He has short brown hair and piercing eyes; he speaks softly,
but he’s not awkward or shy. Even though I’ve met him before, and even
though he doesn’t look the least bit mystifying in person, I’m still
kind of stupidly starstruck. Listening to his albums, it’s easy to
build up an impossible vision of Elverum. For instance, I’m
irrationally shocked that Elverum drives an automobile—he should
be walking barefoot to Texas or just floating on the wind or something.
Of course, I know Elverum is a person, if a uniquely gifted one, and
not some Olympian deity. He’s used to such misconceptions, though.
“It’s kind of been an issue for a long time,” he says. “I’m not
always camping and riding a horse around nude with a sword, you know.
It kind of feels out of my control, even though I realize that the
mythology is maybe because of my songs.”
He sympathetically recalls how he idolized Sub Pop and K Records as
a kid, how he had some romantic idea of Olympia as “this world of gods
walking the earth and living in this new way.” The mythic proportions
of Olympia are easy to get swept up in. For over 25 years, the
state’s capital has been an epicenter of punk rock, independent music,
and DIY culture. It’s where Bruce Pavitt founded Sub Pop as a zine in
1979. It’s where Calvin Johnson founded K Records and Beat Happening in
1982, radically challenging the punk-rock orthodoxy with the idea that
independent music could be twee and fun. It’s where, along with
sister-city Washington, D.C., Riot Grrrls and Kill Rock Stars erupted
in the early 1990s. It’s the reason Nirvana dethroned Michael
Jackson.
I moved to Olympia in the fall of 2000 to go to the Evergreen State
College—Elverum would have been about halfway done making The
Glow Pt. 2—mesmerized by the romance of the place. I lived
in a house, since burned to the ground, where Elverum played a
Valentine’s Day show during which he poured a bottle of red-colored
corn-syrup blood over his head and all over the living-room floor. I
interned at K Records the summer of 2001, mostly filling mail orders
while Elverum and Mirah were likely upstairs recording. I volunteered
at Yo Yo a Go Go, where Elverum and some friends played for a
continuous 45 minutes (there was a clock radio set up onstage),
switching instruments from organ to piano to drums to guitars, one song
bleeding into another, never pausing. I snagged an advance copy of
The Glow Pt. 2 when it arrived at K, and listened to “The
Moon” at home over and over again, totally fixated; it would be years
before I fully discovered the rest of the album.
We’re driving past the Tacoma Dome and Elverum is giving me his
biography, talking about growing up five miles outside of Anacortes on
a lake in the woods.
“For maybe 10 years of my childhood, we were building this big house
on the other side of the lake,” he says. “My room was the first to be
finished on the bottom floor, so I moved in first. The whole rest of
the house was just the skeleton, no walls, and no roof. My room was
three walls, and a tarp flapping in the wind. It was around then that
Twin Peaks was on, so I would watch these Twin Peaks episodes and be like, ‘Good night! I’m gonna walk down the trail now
and go to my weird room that looks exactly like Leo’s house.'”
As a teenager, Elverum got his driver’s license, started hanging out
in town more, and got a job at the Business, Anacortes’s lone record
store, owned and operated by Bret Lunsford, formerly of pioneering
Olympia twee punks Beat Happening. Elverum set up a studio in the back
of the store and started staying late after work recording, sometimes
until two in the morning. These recordings became the first Microphones
tapes. Elverum started playing with Lunsford and Karl Blau in D+,
recording in Olympia with Calvin Johnson at K Records’ in-house studio,
Dub Narcotic.
In 1997, Elverum moved to Olympia to go to Evergreen. Lunsford
suggested that Elverum call Johnson and ask to be Johnson’s apprentice
at Dub Narcotic. “I was really scared to do that, but I did, and Calvin
was like, ‘Yeah, sure, kid.’ End of discussion. No actual plan made. So
I went to college. He just gave me a key to the studio, and that was my
apprenticeship: ‘Figure it out.'” Music quickly took priority—a
tour with D+ and Johnson’s funk project Dub Narcotic Sound System made
Elverum a week late for school, and he dropped out (or, in the parlance
of Evergreen, “took a break”). “I didn’t need to go to school, because
I knew what I wanted to be,” he says. “And I was already doing it.”
Elverum fell in with artists like Mirah and Khaela Maricich
(Lunsford’s cousin) and “a lot of other people who don’t happen to put
out records” and spent most of his time in the studio. Back then, K
Records lived in a large, white warehouse on the corner of Jefferson
Street and Legion Way. The studio was upstairs in an expansive room
with wooden floors, big drafty windows, a small kitchen, couches, and
piles of vintage gear set up in various corners and islands.
By the time I moved to Olympia in 2000, Elverum had more than
figured out Dub Narcotic Studio. He had become an instrumental producer
for K and a fixture at the studio, adding his spacious sounds, odd
touches, and helping hands to records by Beat Happening, Dub Narcotic
Sound System, Mirah, Khaela Maricich, Old Time Relijun, Karl Blau, D+,
and others. At the same time, Elverum was writing and recording the
songs that would become the Microphones’ masterwork.
Today, K Records and Dub Narcotic Studio operate out of an old
synagogue just a few blocks away, across some train tracks and up a
shallow slope. We pull up and Elverum offers me a tour.
The studio in the basement of the synagogue isn’t as spacious and
open as the old Dub Narcotic Studio, where Elverum did his definitive
recordings, but it’s cluttered with all the same arcane recording
equipment. Some street-level windows let in a little natural light, but
it’s nowhere near the solarium that the old space was. It seems too
small and plain.
“About all I would ever use was this 16 track,” he says, pointing to
an antique mixing board. “And it was breaking. Sometimes still, it’s a
13 track, sometimes it’s a 15 track, and it’s really unpredictable.
You’ll record something and it’ll play back totally distorted or
sometimes it won’t be there at all. I just worked that in. A lot of the
sounds on the album are not intentional.”
The weird, old, wooden speakers Calvin Johnson had were difficult to
mix with, so Elverum mixed most of the album on headphones. He recalls
scanning the Olympian classifieds for the piano that would be
used on The Glow Pt. 2, how Maricich made a sign saying,
“Come, Piano,” and how it must’ve worked; he holds up what’s left of
the sign now, just “Piano.” He recalls long solitary stretches in the
studio as well as sleepovers and dinners, group recording experiments
and work on other bands’ albums, in between all of which he was working
on his own.
He says, “The Glow Pt. 2 took a year because it wasn’t like
I had the songs, here’s the album, I’m gonna go in the studio and
record an album. The way I’ve always worked is, I would have an idea of
a sound, I’d experiment and see if I make this sound, and from that it
would take shape as a song, and I would write lyrics in the end. The
writing of the song was the recording of it.”
This spontaneous creative process coincided with romantic strife in
his personal life, which not surprisingly manifested as all manner of
inclement weather and meteorological distress on record.
“I was in one of those kinds of relationships where you don’t know
if you’re going out or not for years, and it goes back and forth,” says
Elverum. “I guess a lot of people already know, because I use her name
in songs about it; it was Khaela from the Blow. But as much of a
struggle, frustrating, heartbreaking, back-and-forth thing as it was,
it was also a learning experience and very productive. Not just the
recording of songs or whatever, but the thinking and conversations that
came out of that, between the two of us, and with myself. What does it
mean to be connected to someone in a relationship and what does
individuality mean? Where is the border? I guess it was a lens to
reexamine my own existence, and be like, ‘Hey, what do I really want,
and why am I so fixated on this person, what does it mean to be a good
person with healthy attachments?’ I think that’s what those songs are
about.”
He goes on, “Like, ‘I Felt Your Shape’ is basically about hugging,
the difference between hugging someone and grabbing them and squeezing
them and not letting go, or hugging them in a lighter way where you’re
feeling their shape. Not in a desperate, grabbing way, but in a way
that’s sensitive or something.”
He explains that the album’s use of recurring images and themes is
indebted to another band, the relatively obscure Canadian indie-rock
band Eric’s Trip.
“I was really into interconnected, self-referential stuff,” says
Elverum. “Like part twos, and part ones, and a line from this song
reappears over here, but in a different context and it’s referencing
something else. There was a lot of that going on [with Eric’s Trip],
and that was my portal into their music. One song would be part two of
this other thing. It felt like a treasure hunt.”
In between the two K Records buildings, across the train tracks and
some halfhearted blackberry patches—which, Elverum says, used to
be so tall and thick that hoboes cut tunnels into them and camped
within—is the house where Elverum used to live, the Track House,
named for the tracks that brought trains rolling by just a few yards
from his old room. “That’s my old room,” says Phil, pointing to an
upstairs window. “That one facing this way. That’s where all of The
Glow Pt. 2 happened.”
The house is now painted all black. It’s one of a handful of
properties owned by a dentist who is, in the popular lore of Olympia, a
satanist, and who supposedly paints the houses black to lower the
property values so that he can pay less in taxes. On the peeling porch,
some of the place’s old gray-blue coat is visible. There’s a rickety,
green velvet-upholstered chair, wobbly and sunken, on the sidewalk by
the house. “This is my old chair,” says Phil, kicking it gingerly. “I
bought it at an antique shop. It’s still got some life in it.”
“You can see into the studio from here,” he says, turning to point
two streets away at the large, multipaned windows of the old Dub
Narcotic Studio. “Sometimes, when I was recording, I would climb onto
my roof here to see whether or not anyone was in there. These two
blocks were like my whole life. I wrote ‘The Moon’ just walking around
here one night.”
In total, it’s honestly not much of a tour; it’s two blocks long,
and there’s really nothing to see. The building that used to house K,
where Elverum did all his definitive recordings, is a “wellness center”
now. His old house belongs to someone else, and they scowl at us from
the upstairs window as we walk back by. The new studio is just a
basement full of cool, old gear. It’s weirdly deflating to learn where
all those sounds and songs came from—this broken mixing board or
that Canadian grunge band or that trying romance. It all seems too
small and plain and close. And, at the same time, removed: Stalking
these blocks, even unearthing the sources of things, doesn’t get you
anywhere near the worlds Elverum has created. As enraptured as I’ve
ever been with the album, I’ve never really, rationally thought it to
be more than an astounding work of art. On some level, I had these
mythic expectations, but I knew of course that they were going to be
dashed.
“It’s funny,” says Elverum, back at the synagogue. “This is like a
ghost of that
studio. And that house is my old house, but it isn’t
really my house.”
The Glow Pt. 2 absolutely dwarfs these places. It’s big
enough to get lost in for years. It’s a universe. It seems impossible
that these few streets, or an old 16-track mixer, could have ever
contained the thing.
So, four weeks later, there’s no moon over Anacortes, a quaint,
quiet town that would seem suburban if not for its distinguishing old
downtown strip and its proximity to the ocean. I decide to climb Mount
Erie (the real one, single e), and it turns out to be
dispiritingly easy. You can drive right up to the top of it, where
there’s some nice views, easy parking, an outhouse, and, of course, a
cell-phone tower. The only hint of the supernatural is a plaque, in
memory of a teenager who fell from the mountain’s sheer rocks, that
reads, “Due to a fall on Mt. Erie, August 26, 1992, I was changed in an
instant from mortal to immortal.”
At the Department of Safety, Elverum is busy setting up his merch
table and his projector, and, as he warned me via e-mail, doesn’t have
time to talk. I sit around before the show feeling less like a reporter
or a critic than a sad stalker, enviously trying to find some place,
some phenomenon that doesn’t exist. Of course, you can’t visit
Elverum’s imagined Mount Eerie any more than you would be able to talk
to his moon, even if the sky were clear.
In an e-mail some time later, Elverum further demystifies the Glow I
came out here to find:
“There were a few different big words I was stuck on back then: ‘the
Gleam,’ ‘the Pull,’ etc. Eric’s Trip/Elevator to Hell did that same
song titling technique, and I thought it was cool and dramatic, kind of
literary feeling, like chapter titles. ‘The Glow’ was just one of my
‘the’s.”
“In the first song, called ‘The Glow’ [from It Was Hot, We
Stayed in the Water], the Glow was a glowing window that you see
as you are freezing to death in the snow, or the light you go into
supposedly when you die. But then, during The Glow Pt. 2, it
became one’s inner ‘life force’ or whatever, like the fire that the
elephant is stoking on the cover.”
I’ve been grasping after all the details of this record’s creation,
all its mythological sources, hoping to hold the thing or inhabit it.
But it’s both too big to contain and too small to enter, and there’s
really nothing here to grasp. It’s only a little
disappointing.
But that night, after leaving the Department of Safety to catch a
midnight ferry, there is finally an almost supernatural moment: I’m
walking up the dark, moonless path to my friend’s cabin, on an island
across the water from Anacortes, in the woods, and the wind is roaring
through the trees, and the trees are groaning above me in the dark.
It’s the only sound in the whole world.
When I get to the cabin, there’s a fire flickering against the damp
cold. There’s a record player and three records, one of which happens
to be The Glow Pt. 2. We listen to it in its entirety, facing
the heat from the fire, the confines of the room, the hum of the
record, the surrounding night. It sounds as fantastic as ever.
Mount Eerie play Thurs April 17 at the Vera Project, 7:30 pm, $9/$8, all ages. With WHY?, Julie Doiron, Generifus.