Phil Elvrum quotes:

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.