Phil Elverum likes nature: looking at it, being in it, and using it as an ever-present component of the vast metaphors he conjures in the left-field folk rock he releases as Mount Eerie. Elverum has spent the vast majority of his life on the small islands between Washington and British Columbia. He grew up in Anacortes, a short drive over a bridge from the mainland. After a brief, uncomfortable move to New York in 2018, he returned to the Pacific Northwest with his young daughter, this time opting for true remoteness. He now lives on Orcas Island, where an hour-long ferry ride to his hometown is the fastest way back to the continent.

Elverum’s catalog — roughly 30 albums over the last 25-odd years as Mount Eerie, the Microphones, under his own name, and as one-third of D+ — is awash with natural imagery. (More than anything, he returns to wind, which he sees as the ultimate surrogate for impermanence.) But following the earth-shattering loss of his wife in 2016, he vowed to stop indulging in such poetics, opting instead for extreme realism. The first product of this new approach was A Crow Looked at Me, one of the most devastating records ever made.

His new album, Night Palace, is in many ways a return to his earlier methods. Full of fire, lightning, rain, wind, and fog, the 26 tracks on this 81-minute double LP search for eternity in these familiar subjects, as well as in the quotidian efforts he spent his last three albums painstakingly documenting. On “Broom of Wind,” for instance, he’s the sweeper, the broom, the object being swept up, and the wind all at once.

Elverum is more political than ever before on Night Palace, speaking in no uncertain terms about the evil at the root of the American project on tracks like “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” and “Co-Owner of Trees.” He’s also funnier: On “I Spoke With a Fish,” for instance, an unprecedented trap 808, a men’s chorus, and other bizarre elements culminate in a lull in which the fish, voiced by Jeff Bridges via a Big Lebowski clip, responds “I dig your style too, man.”

In late September, I called Elverum at home to discuss Night Palace, the pitfalls of nature fetishization, and the urge to write a blink-182 song, even if you’ve never heard one.

The FADER: You wrote in your bio for Night Palace that this album is about motherhood — how expanding “into the space of both parents” since your wife’s passing has reopened “the connection between the mundane and the infinite.” That’s one of the central tasks of great art, and this album attacks it in a different way than your past few projects, returning to the more metaphorical language you used in your earlier work in lieu of the realism of records like A Crow Looked at Me. Would you characterize it that way?

Phil Elverum: A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only, and to some extent Microphones in 2020, were part of a reactive writing phase where I was trying to not indulge too much in the poetic and tell it like it was. That’s what I’ve said, at least, but there was still a lot of mystery and metaphor and ambiguity in that writing. Even when I was like, “This is literal; this doesn’t mean anything,” it was with a wink and a nod: On A Crow Looked at Me, I’m talking about throwing away a toothbrush, and of course that signifies more than just the toothbrush. Everything is resonant with meaning, but on [Night Palace], there’s more of an acceptance of mysticism — the great mystery of some non-human world.

The opener, “Night Palace,” does a great job establishing the mundanity–infinity connection.

It summarizes a moment of seeing lightning in the distance but not being in the storm. It’s almost like seeing into the underworld; a portal opens to another dimension. But I was washing dishes at the time and had just put the kid to bed, and these things coexist. That’s what this album is about: washing dishes in the night after putting the kid to bed and looking out the window at the world and burning with internal lightning, with magic and fire.

Undergirding the whole song is a beautiful droning tone that sounds a bit like the THX Deep Note with a bunch of distortion on it. How did you get that sound?

I was so happy with that. I have an air organ, which is kind of like an accordion reed with a motor in it. You can find one at a thrift store, which is where I got mine a long time ago. I put two microphones on it, because it doesn’t have an output, and ran those microphones through extreme distortion. It was distorting the whole ambience of the room, the fan of the organ, everything. It was like being in a car wash. I started playing and whistling along with it, but I couldn’t hear my whistling because I was wearing headphones, and it was making this clashy distortion, like the notes were fighting with each other and the distortion in the air of the room. It was all accidental chaos.

You describe making the new album as a back-to-nature experience. You’ve also expressed an aversion to nature fetishization in the past. I don’t think of this album as fetishistic, but are you less self-conscious about that sort of thing now?

I spent a lot of years with some prickliness about this idea of nature. Admittedly, I’ve always written songs where I’m [singing about] wind and fog, and blah, blah, blah, mountain, trees. But in my mind, I was always using them as metaphors to say other things, so I would get annoyed by how frequently people would hear them only as surface-level pretty pictures rather than the more ambiguous ideas underneath.

I remember having a moment of acceptance, like, “Who cares?” Everyone’s gonna hear it in their own convoluted way, no matter what I do, so I’m just gonna embrace the fact that I’m from this place and this is my vocabulary. There’s always the danger of being swept into escapism by romantic imagery when we write about the places we live, but I realized there’s a tradition of writers doing it well and not being so hung up on if people get it right or wrong.

There are other songs on Night Palace that are quite literal, the most explicit being “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization.” What inspired you to write something so overtly political in the middle of this mystical album?

It’s an undercurrent of what I’ve always felt, and I realized I hadn’t been obvious enough about my political views [in the past]. I think this American project we’re living in is fucked up and damaging and has a gnarly history that’s ignored by most people, even my peers. That motivated me to be more overt about it, but not in a didactic or preachy way. I tried to find some eternity in it.

You have an interesting relationship with irony and have indulged in some light trolling at times. Do you think being a parent has made you more earnest about this stuff?

Probably less earnest. I feel like this album is my funniest. There are lots of jokes, and I got looser with it. That’s always been an element of me, but when I was younger, I felt an urge to separate my humorous work from my serious music work. Now, I’m like, “Who cares?” We should be honest about the fact that we all have all of these aspects inside ourselves.

I got a kick out of the email interview you did with a local paper in Ojai earlier this year where you started telling increasingly ridiculous lies as you realized the writer didn’t know who you were, and they just published them verbatim.

I didn’t write those answers. I have to credit my friend Jason Anderson; he’s been doing that for me and other friends since like 2005. He would make fake Wikipedia pages for people, stuff like that. Now we’re living in a time of like actual misinformation, but back then, it was a funny way to play with the internet by creating an alternate version of me that would sometimes appear in interviews talking about bodybuilding and guns and never saying “just kidding.” Now it’s scarier, but fortunately he adjusted the interview to be mostly about beekeeping.

“Huge Fire” is full of forces of nature — rain, wind, fire (of course), and others. Tell me about your relationship with fire, both as a destructive force and an essential part of human life.

When I was making this record, I was alternating periods of writing and recording with periods of doing [controlled burns]. Where I live, a lot of the forest is overgrown with small, dead trees that would be really bad in a forest fire, so I’ve been doing the work of cutting them down during rainy seasons and making burn piles and tending to these long, huge bonfires for days on end. Fire is a beautiful and scary metaphor for my favorite subject, impermanence: I’m not just throwing old trees into the fire; I’m throwing aspects of myself in, too. It’s a renewing, cleansing force. I always feel like a new guy when I come back from a bonfire day.

The song ends with the line “Three days of heavy rain and there’s still coals.” It’s as if you’re pitting fire against water, and water is the lesser of the two.

Maybe I was also trying to say it never truly goes out. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the eternal glow.

The eternity of nature as opposed to the impermanence of human life?

I haven’t thought about how those two things relate. I’m not making any claims that fire itself is permanent. Impermanence is the one permanent thing. I’m loving these philosophical questions, by the way. I made an album of pop-punk songs, and we’re going deep on philosophy.

You think of these as pop-punk songs?

Some of them. I’m trying to have the songs be enjoyable and joyful to listen to. I’m trying to explore interesting and complex ambiguities and mysterious terrain but make it sound like blink-182.

Which ones do you think sound like blink-182?

I guess none. I don’t know what blink-182 sounds like very much.