The Microphones - Microphones in 2020
Oct 10, 2022
100
I think this might be the third write up I've actually done for this album but there's just so much that I feel like I need to say. I'm bursting.
Phil Elverum is probably one of the most important songwriters alive and active currently. He has released masterpiece after masterpiece and his music has touched hundreds of thousands of people, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't like The Glow, Pt. 2.
Phil never stuck to one idea though, he always wanted to push the limits of what a song or an album could be and through his inspirations he did that. He says that a large part of his 2000 record It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water was inspired by the Red House Painters album Songs for a Blue Guitar and how it opens with a long repeated chord before any of the vocals kick in.
Phil wanted to do what all of his inspirations were doing and in turn he became so many people's inspirations himself.

If you're reading this, I shouldn't need to tell you who The Microphones, Mount Eerie or Phil Elverum are as at this point you should already know and if you don't then this must feel very odd to you. Phil Elverum who in fact is both The Microphones and Mount Eerie made a 44 minute song about his own life up until this very moment trying to answer the questions he's been asking himself in his music for years. This isn't an album for anyone to just jump into, you need context for this record and in all honesty, I believe you need attachment to Phil and his work as well to enjoy and appreciate this album to its fullest.

So why am I writing this again? My first write up was mainly a follow up review to my extensive and in-depth write up on The Microphones' album Mount Eerie which I'm sure most of you have seen and read by now. It served as a conclusion of sorts as I anticipated this album before its release to also be a conclusion of sorts, and I was right but, I didn't feel satisfied in what I had written. I didn't feel like I had done the record the justice it deserved, so I went back and wrote something new.
This second write up was a lot more vulnerable and cryptic which isn't really anything too new. I let my emotions out onto the page and did my best to express how this record truly made me feel inside even if it didn't make any sense to anyone but me.
The things I said in that second write up (which I will include as a Google Doc at the end of this if you would like to read it as I still think it's an interesting read and a good look at myself back in 2020) still hold true today but I believe I can word them better now than I could then. I've had time to let those thoughts spread wings and roam freely. It's been over 2 years since this album released and I still return to it nearly constantly; it's slowly becoming one of my most played songs of all time and that's remembering that this song is nearly 45 minutes long. There's something so immensely comforting and safe about this song that encapsulates me.

Over the past two years a lot has happened, of course it has, a lot can happen in two years plus we've had a crazy time in the world with covid and plenty of other things. I've definitely grown as a person since then and now and I think if you asked anyone who knew me then they would agree. But aren't we always changing? I'm not the same me as I was yesterday, and I won't be the same me as I am now tomorrow because that's just not how time works.
But there are still things that remain constant throughout your entire life: what you have already learnt; what you have already discovered. So, again I ask the question why am I writing this again for the third time? I'm changing and I'm learning; my life is not the same life it was two years ago; I'm in college now; I'm actually in education and doing something with my life and I feel amazing but, I'm also now a diagnosed epileptic as of 2021 which has been very difficult to deal with and trying to balance schoolwork with unpredictable seizures is very challenging but, I keep going.

"The true state of all things
I keep on not dying, the sun keeps on rising"

I don't really have a specific goal that I'm trying to reach in my life, that just isn't how my brain works. I do my best to go day by day or week by week. I of course have a rough idea of what I want out of my life as I've chosen specific subjects to take in college but professionally, I have no clue what I want to do. I just live each day as it comes.
There are so many questions I could be asking myself about my future but there isn't a point in asking any of them when I know they will get answered whether they are asked or not because that's the way that life works.
You are as in control of your life as you let yourself be. I am in control of my life, I know what I'm doing. I may not know what will happen in two years time but that doesn't bother me; if I wake up each morning to a new sunrise then I continue with only that day in mind.

There is no end, not really anyway. We are all a constant idea, a constant mesh of words, lyrics, phrases, and metaphors. We live through our ideas and we spread through them too. It's our ideas and our questions that stop our candle from going out. Phil has so many ideas and so many questions and throughout his life he has only gathered more and more. These ideas he's managed to carve into fruition through his music, but these questions were unanswerable. He was constantly looking for answers through ideas, trying to be clever, be new, and be himself in his music, in his sound, and in himself. This all came to pass in 2016 when his wife of 12 years passed away from cancer leaving him and his very young daughter alone in a now cruel, cold, and dark world; leaving him with no answers.

"I made a boundary between two eras of my life
A feeble gesture at making chaos seem organized
The roaring river carves on, laughing at my efforts
While the idea of something called "Mount Eerie" engulfed me
And time
Refuses to stop"

The Microphones aren't real, Mount Eerie aren't real, Phil Elverum is real. Phil stopped using the alias The Microphones in 2002 by quite literally burning a piece of paper with the word "Microphones" written on it in an attempt to separate himself from that name, that part of his life. It's futile and sort of laughable now, at least in his eyes. These are still all his ideas, his words, lyrics, phrases, and metaphors. Changing the label on the tin changes nothing fundamentally. It's still you.

Phil doesn't need answers anymore because the world doesn't give you those. You are as in control of your own life as you choose to be and Phil made the decision to connect the two fragmented parts of his life back together and he does that in the best way he possibly could; new ideas that only he could truly pull off.
I've gone this far without actually mentioning anything from the song itself but that's because I'm assuming pretty much all of you have already heard it by now because why else would you really be here. The song opens with around seven and a half minutes of a simple chord progression being repeated on an acoustic guitar. It's very simple but very, very effective. It's something that only a man like Phil Elverum could pull off and he's only able to do that because of everything we know about him. View these seven and a half minutes as the curtains rising as we await the spectacle that is Phil's entire life story.
This is very deliberately not an album, or song made for everyone because it isn't. If anything, this is a project made just for him much like A Crow Looked at Me was. These aren't things we are meant to inherently relate to as they are so incredibly personal and intertwined with Phil's life that we are but spectators, yet it is still truly enthralling.

Over the past two years this has been the record I think I've returned to the most. At any point in time, it really doesn't matter when, I can put this on and feel ok again almost as if Phil himself is comforting me by telling me this story because that's what this feels like. This album doesn't feel like an album, or really a song; it's a story.
I have a lot of personal attachment to this record, probably as much as Phil has when he made it. I associate this record with so many things, so many events and people. but every story starts somewhere.

Maukeiv. That name probably doesn't mean anything to a lot of people but to me he is the reason this story has become a part of me. He was the beginning of this never-ending story and will remain to be one of the most important people in my life. Before this album released me and him did our best to listen to every single project that Phil had released and we managed to do it together and it was worth it. It made the experience of listening to the full thing for the first time so much more special.

Time moves but so do you and while you can't control time, you can control yourself. I do believe this to be the best album of all time for everything that it has done for me and everything that it does for Phil Elverum. This is an incredibly, incredibly important record because it is so much more than that. This is a story, a life story about one of the greatest songwriters who will ever live.

"And if there have to be words, they could just be:
"Now only"
And
"There's no end""

Original rewrite: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CmJvJAM2um0v7vE8l1edpcpOWcYiUodFRDSbOOJmC2c/edit?usp=sharing

1 Comment
1y
Wow absolutely incredible review! I feel the exact same about a lot of the subjects you mentioned in a variety of ways. It’s awesome to see someone else have as big of a connection to it as I do. It’s so insane how Phil manages to write about his life story in a strangely relatable way. One of my favorite things to ever exist
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