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.

Phil Elvrum

Categorized in : Long War Nuts

All things in the world are singing a song, reciting a poem, inaudibly, to their surroundings, to the things they encounter.

Phil Elvrum

encounters singing song

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

Phil Elvrum

annoying care trying

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.

Phil Elvrum

records albums two

When someone close to you dies, the line is shifted really drastically about what is meaningful and what isn't.

Phil Elvrum

meaningful

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.

Phil Elvrum

hate moving thinking

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

Phil Elvrum

different interesting thinking

Death is natural, and it happens early for some people. I acknowledge that, and in the next sentence, reject it, because it just sucks. It hurts. I can at the same time acknowledge it as true, and then have my protest against it.

Phil Elvrum

hurt natural people

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

Phil Elvrum

destruction and-love reason

Nirvana really touched me as a teenager and started making me pay attention to music as a participatory thing that I could do. Music that you want to throw your body into it - that's a feeling that I'm not quite satisfied with having made yet.

Phil Elvrum

teenager feelings attention

It's a beautiful idea to focus on how everything is temporary and always in flux. It may feel bad now, but it will feel good later, and vice versa. To write about those things brings this satisfying feeling as a creative person. There's a lot of music out there that's like, "I'm so mad! I'm sad! I'm into skulls and crossbones and the color black," and that's just meaningless and shallow. So much of metal is about that and it's hard to find metal that is substantial and meaningful in terms of its content.

Phil Elvrum

writing beautiful meaningful

Profound thoughts and profound experiences get revealed to be tricks that we play on ourselves, and poetry gets revealed to be just, like, some dumb words that somebody put in an interesting order.

Phil Elvrum

dumb profound interesting

All the books on my shelves, when I would go to them to look for help with my anguish, they all just seemed so crass. They didn't get it. Those books don't understand. Nobody understands. The universe, nobody understands my agony, or my questioning, and it's this shift in what in the world around us could possibly be meaningful or helpful.

Phil Elvrum

meaningful book world

I'm not ... pumped about being alive. But I don't think about suicide ever. I have a kid. I think that's just an automatic shut-off of that idea. In fact, I just instantly went into the necessities of parenting, and I think it's been very good for grief. Because it's a reality check, I guess. I have very real tasks that need immediate attention all the time.

Phil Elvrum

grief real suicide

I probably wouldn't kill a spider now, I'd probably try to scoop it up in a cup and put it outside, but not for any reason other than I don't need to take other lives recklessly. But other than that, I don't believe in ... anything. Anything, anything.

Phil Elvrum

reason trying believe

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.

Phil Elvrum

stupid use mean

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.

Phil Elvrum

three mind fun

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

Phil Elvrum

bullshit mind people

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.

Phil Elvrum

nice house play

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.

Phil Elvrum

want attention people

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.

Phil Elvrum

kind trying thinking