A Long Guest in Someone Else’s Home

Phil Elverum’s connection to Buddhism has never been subtle. For over a quarter of a century, the artist and musician, recording under various aliases, including the Microphones and Mount Eerie, has repeatedly drawn from the great wellspring of Buddhist imagery and thinking, rooted in the weather-world of the Pacific Northwest terrain he calls home. On his 2019 song “Love Without Possession,” performed with singer Julie Doiron, Elverum contemplates a kind of love “that intrudes upon the peace I thought I had,” reflecting in part upon the devastating grief of losing his partner, Geneviève Castrée, to cancer in 2016, which he sang about on the album A Crow Looked At Me. Perhaps viewing the connection we find with others as an impermanent reminder of a deeper bond of endless energy passing through all life, the song concludes: “This sky mirroring emptiness/is where I first found you.”

Influenced by Buddhist thinkers both big and small—including seminal figures like Eihei Dogen, Beat-era writers like Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger, and the spiritually imbued science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin—Elverum has threaded many dharmic reference points within his work, with straw lines borrowed and repurposed across many recordings. But Night Palace, released in November under his Mount Eerie moniker, finds Elverum far more settled into a meditation practice than ever before. Now 46, the singer talks in an extended album “bio” about his “exaggerated solo excursions into the mountains with a trail-worn Zen poetry book and the insights that jabbed through.” In addition to sampling early Buddhist texts—the song “Empty Paper Towel Roll” is a loose interpretation of Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra—Elverum’s deepening meditation practice is apparent in the outlook that stretches across the entire album.

After several years of walking away from music, time in which Elverum worked in forestry to minimize the destructive inevitability of future fires, meditation was also a way back into songwriting. “In this fresh emptiness, ideas crowded in,” he writes on Substack. Night Palace, stretching over eighty minutes, captures this expansiveness, as Elverum ponders aging and the diminishing body, the life of a single parent, and, perhaps most poignantly, his relationship to place. In 2001, Elverum sang “My Roots Are Strong and Deep”; today, the song “Demolition” instead finds him accepting that he’s merely “a long guest in someone else’s home,” noting elsewhere on “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” that “all we have is stolen and can’t be owned.” In relation to the Lummi, Samish, Klallam, Tulalip, and W̱SÁNEĆ lands—known otherwise as Orcas Island and Anacortes, Washington—Elverum meditates and sees this place “emerging through the mist…,” before and beyond the language colonizers used to define it and violently steal it from Indigenous peoples.

Talking with Tricycle just two days after Donald Trump’s election victory inaugurated a fresh round of doubt about what our future holds, Elverum reflects on the Buddhist breadcrumbs in his earlier work and how he hopes to see the world heal from the imperialist poison still flowing everywhere. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

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In your biographic note with the album, you state, “As I aged and mellowed and stabilized, I finally got regular about meditating.” How did you experience Buddhism before that shift? I’ve gone through phases in my life of being interested in Buddhism and Buddhist ideas, and then phases of I gotta take this more seriously, before reverting back to a more homemade version of Buddhism. I’ve made all these records for all these years—decades, really—where I [weave] in these little ideas [around impermanence and nonattachment] that are totally lifted from Zen Buddhism. They don’t get acknowledged [by most of my listeners], but it’s so central for me. This new album is me really flogging it, being like, this is what I’m doing. But now Tricycle is calling and I have a bit of impostor syndrome [laughs].

Was there something specific that finally made that change possible? I went to a weeklong Zen meditation retreat, where I had to practice alternating [between] sitting and walking meditation for seventeen hours a day. Basically, a mandatory meditation situation [made the change possible]. It was hard, but then it became easier, and it really worked for me. I came home just being like, that was the best. It was so hard and transformative, and [I’ve] just kept it going since. 

Before then, I had an on-and-off-again [relationship to my] meditation practice. I used it as a tool, like, Oh, I need to shift my feeling today, or, Oh, I’m stuck in this particular way, I’m gonna go meditate, rather than the other version of it, which is just like brushing your teeth. That was sort of the shift for me—making [practice] more of a daily habit.

Your music has always seemed very Buddhist. I found Buddhism in my early 20s by way of Jack Kerouac and Dharma Bums, [and then] following the threads [of that] back to Hanshan’s Cold Mountain, translated by Gary Snyder. Seeing these people sitting still for years and years in a simple [hermitage] and looking out and watching the clouds change shape, that’s what I was into. 

As I made [my interest in Buddhism] more explicit on my records, like on the album Sauna, people started finding me that were like, “Hey, I’m a monk. I escaped from the temple and went down to a coffee shop and streamed it on my phone.” [laughs] That gave me more awareness [that there were many] serious practitioners out there.

I played a show earlier this year in San Francisco. Some Zen friends were there, and they were teasing me afterward about how overt it was, all the Dogen quotes, like I was covering Dogen in my songs rather than writing originals. [Previously], I’ve had the perception that people weren’t picking up these breadcrumbs because I’m making quote-unquote “indie rock.” I’m disseminating [these Buddhist ideas] in a weird place, and I am trying to blur the line and recontextualize these ideas using new vocabulary, like the song “Empty Paper Towel Roll.”

On the song “Demolition,” you connect histories of ’60s counterculture to ongoing fights for decolonization of land by saying, “Back to the land to Land Back.” You’ve talked elsewhere about being from northwest Washington because of your parents’ hippie roots, and how that’s shaped your life. How do you try to square that inheritance with the larger question of working against the colonization of where we live and how we might fight it? A lot of the ’60s and ’70s back-to-the-land hippie counterculture [folks] don’t have as progressive views as many would like them to. They were doing back to the land (specifically decentralist and antistatist environmentalism) and rejecting American imperialism, protesting the Vietnam War, but [they were] also not aware enough of Indigenous issues.

When I think of decolonization and personal roots and belonging, inhabiting a place and the sense of permanence—when you actually are [more concerned] with impermanence, and the role of hanging on to an awareness of history—-there is a contradiction there. I’m trying to hold both of those things [at] the same time.

My song “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” is basically just a bumper sticker. It’s a few lines, and it’s not a system of thought or a plan at all, but [it is] a spur toward an idea. From a historical perspective, this country has from the very beginning been this racist, corrupt, theft project for white men, and that truth is now more overt [and publicly accepted]. Now, the bummer is that so many people are actively [contributing to] that, and the facade of representative democracy is gone.

Despite all the terror of being alive right now, it doesn’t seem like you’ve given up hope. I’m thinking forward to the future. It can feel so apocalyptic to live in our times, but I have a kid, and that kid wants to have a whole life and maybe kids of her own. So I am thinking of one thousand years from now, and wanting to think about that healed world that we want to have, and what are the steps to get there, rather than just saying, It’s all terrible, let’s live out our time here doing the best we can, and then die.

This stuff is so rooted, but [dismantleable] if you zoom out a little bit more. What’s the responsible thing to do? Do we zoom out and [say], it’s all going to be fine? Or do we get worked up about the election, the jets overhead, this [endless] war? It’s a question of being engaged but not hung up.

I take a weird comfort in the perspective of maybe humans will survive, maybe not. We’re pretty stubborn, creative, and resilient, but what do I care? To actually live in the present moment and still be engaged with the maximum effort to improve things is, regardless of the outcome, a question of character. It’s not about the results but the time spent.