Phil Elverum Returns To A Refuge As The Microphones

Phil Elverum has built and battled entire universes. From 1996-2003, his band, The Microphones, was mostly just him alone in a studio, as friends from Olympia sang and banged on instruments as needed. With a bull-headed bravado that comes from a dreamer's naïveté, chests swelled to the size of the moon, the dead flew off as vultures and the dawn promised something new every morning. Around the turn of the millennium, the music responded in kind as disorientingly layered acoustic guitar ushered in thunderously distorted bass, moaning sound collage, ragtag choirs and a furious cacophony of drums. This was Big Music for Big Ideas, even and especially regarding our (in)significance in the world, but could just as easily nurse a broken heart.

"I took my shirt off in the yard," he once yowled, baring his emotions clear. "No one saw that the skin on my shoulders was golden." The title track from The Glow Pt. 2 — an indie-rock album from 2001 that appeared on several year-end lists and decade retrospectives — bombastically called attention to youthful vulnerability, daring death to a duel, loudly sounding the barbaric yawp so many bright-eyed poetry teachers blithely encourage. "Innocent in a naive, idiotic way," Elverum would put it years later, laughing.

When I called Phil Elverum to talk about his first album as The Microphones in 17 years — the absurdly titled Microphones in 2020, a single 45-minute track — he was building a house. That's not a metaphor, but might as well be. On an island off Anacortes — the coastal Washington state town where he was born and has lived most of his life — he's about to paint some pine tar on the exterior siding. "We've been working on it all week," he says, mentioning the help of his brother. "Very sore and I'm very dirty."

He drew up the plans himself and gave them to an architect to make it buildable. "It's pretty small, but there's probably going to be room for a music corner in my bedroom," he says. "And maybe if