Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum Names 10 Dinnertime Albums You Should Own
Crate Digging is our recurring feature series that takes a deep dive into music history to turn up several albums all music fans should know. In this edition, Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum lists 10 albums perfect to spin while cooking and eating dinner.
Phil Elverum’s got something of a reputation for being, as he put it, a “devastating, weight-of-the-world-guy who writes these death songs.” Indeed, through his recording projects The Microphones and Mount Eerie, he has delivered some of the most heart-wrenching, deeply affecting indie music of the last few decades, be it the pair of albums he released after the tragic passing of his wife (A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only) or his contemplative return to The Microphones (fittingly titled The Microphones in 2020). While his latest crop of songs, Night Palace, is just as introspective, existential, and poetic, it also once again reveals Elverum as the playful, deconstructing experimentalist he always was.
“I’m a pretty jokey guy actually,” he explains to Consequence. “So, there are jokes in this album. It’s like big picture, serious stuff, mundane stuff, profound stuff — and jokes. I just wanted it to be representative of real life, the full spectrum… I have this ideal of saying big things or exploring the big mystery of existence and also smirking during it. Like, the recognition of the absurdity of existence: It’s funny.”
Between softly sung descriptions of mornings in naturalistic settings and musings on what it means to be walking the earth, there are references to The Big Lebowski and wordplay inspired by I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (a program Elverum admits “changed the way [he] thinks about language”).
The sonics of Night Palace are just as interested in play, shifting between different tones and instruments from tune to tune or, often, within the individual songs themselves. In contrast to Mount Eerie’s last album, the mostly acoustic and concise Lost Wisdom, Pt. 2, Night Palace has everything from black metal-inspired guitars to trap-influenced high-hats. Its sprawling nature even had friends of the songwriter likening it to Elverum’s much-celebrated 2001 effort The Glow, Pt. 2.
“There’s rises and falls, versus other albums that are a little shorter or more stuck on one idea,” he says. “This one and The Glow, Pt. 2 have a lot of different ideas that go through. It’s more of a narrative. More of a — God, I hate the word ‘journey,’ but I can’t think of a better word to use than ‘journey.’ It goes from A to B to C to D to E.”
To celebrate Elverum’s latest (ahem) journey, he sat down with us to share 10 records he spins while cooking and eating dinner — a sacred time in the Elverum household.
“In our house, dinner lasts like two hours or five hours or something, you know? We stretch it out and I love it,” he explains. “We don’t ever just heat something up in the toaster and eat it over the sink and peace out to other rooms. I’m really into the gathering of it.”
Put on your cooking apron and listen to “Broom of Wind” from Mount Eerie’s Night Palace below, and read on for the 10 albums Phil Elverum soundtracks his evening meal to.
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