Mount Eerie Comes to the Fox Theatre With a Double-Album Odyssey

The purest form of creativity requires absolute and unfettered freedom. No matter the medium, the artists who accomplish this do whatever they want, whenever they want, ignoring questions, suggestions or interference from the profiting powers that be.

Longtime indie musician Phil Elverum is a prime example. As the creative force behind Mount Eerie, formerly known as the Microphones, Elverum is as prolific as they come, with a long list of releases over the past thirty years, including eleven studio albums under his current moniker.

Elverum also runs his own DIY label, P.W. Elverum & Sun, from his home in Anacortes, Washington, where he records and produces all of his music. He’s never understood the benefits of being on a larger label, writing with a room full of professional songwriters or bigger PR campaigns. Instead, Elverum is content with carving out his own creative path, without strict deadlines or target audience feedback. He’s artistically free.

“That’s always been the case for me. Maybe it’s unusual, I guess, but I feel like I’ve been lucky to never have a label or a team or a manager or any kind of agent that’s breathing down my neck,” he says. “I’m essentially still a teenager making cassette tapes. But it’s working for me on this larger scale.”

He pauses before adding, “It makes me wonder. I guess I’m speaking from a pretty privileged position where it’s working, but I wonder like why do people choose those things, to have an oppressive and an invasive record label? I guess the payoff is that they can boost you and make more people hear about you. But still, it doesn’t seem worth it if what you have to give up is the whole point of the thing: the creativity.”

Elverum says it in such a casual tone it almost belies his entire philosophical ethos. But that’s Elverum. He lives an unassuming, private life in the Pacific Northwest, even though he’s considered an indie god of the early 2000s scene, bringing a folksy-yet-gritty texture and tone to the plug-in-and-play garage rock of that time.
But he admits the Mount Eerie project has been somewhat “dormant” in recent years. Before November, it had been five years since he had released an album, though there were some singles during that time. Then came Night Palace — a double-album odyssey filled to the brim with Elverum’s lo-fi love language.

While touring nowadays is planned around his daughter’s school schedule, he’s currently out promoting the latest 26 songs and will be at the Fox Theatre on Saturday, February 22. OIympia black-metal duo Ragana is also on the bill. Plus, Elverum will have some of his favorite brew from Camber Coffee available at his merch table, so bring your mug.

For Night Palace, Elverum made a point not to put any pressure on himself.

“I just gave myself no schedule and just said, ‘Live a good life that is geared towards allowing ideas to come up and don’t have any big plan of if I’m a musician or not a musician, if I’m an artist or what. Just the ideas. Just let them exist on their own,’” he explains. “That was really, I think, a good way to do it. That’s my ideal of this life. If no one cared about listening to my music or anything, I would probably still want to keep doing it. ... I didn’t have a ton more material, but once it started taking the shape of an album, I started to steer it in a way that was a little more focused.”

For someone as eclectic as Elverum, that means homing in on several things at once. Thematically, it’s deeply personal, brooding and grating, as he continues to process the sudden loss of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, who died in 2016 from cancer at the age of 35, and honor her memory. The title references a poem by Joanne Kyger, one of Castrée’s close friends, that was featured on the cover of Mount Eerie’s 2017 album, A Crow Looked at Me.

Depending on the mood, he uses lyrics to form the narrative, such as with “I Walk” and “Huge Fire.” Other tracks are more about ambiance, relying on soundbites taken from his natural surroundings, including “Wind & Fog” and “Blurred World.” Overall, “the songs are about how things never stop changing,” according to Elverum. That’s if he can even call them “songs.”

“Lots of these things I never really think about as songs because they’re more just like maybe a piece of recorded song, but you wouldn’t play it around a campfire,” he shares. “Maybe it’s closer to storyboarding a movie or something. It’s like a multi-sensory work that moves through sections in a really direct, experienced and emotional way.”

It’s hard to explain because writing each album looks different, but the point is to keep creating.

“It changes all the time,” he concludes. “I might not have the best perspective on it, because I’m just in it, but I’m trying to make it never stop changing.”

Mount Eerie, with Ragana, 7 p.m. Saturday, February 22, Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder. Tickets are $39.