MON., APRIL 07, 2008
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About the Album: The Glow Pt. 2
by Douglas Wolk
Phil Elvrum (sometimes spelled Elverum) has been an unstoppable music-making engine over the last decade or so. He's played with his own bands, the Microphones and Mt. Eerie, and has recorded albums with a cluster of other interrelated Pacific Northwest artists. His best-loved record, though, is probably 2001's The Glow Pt. 2, a suite of thematically linked songs about fire, self-consciousness and a difficult relationship. The record is alternately fragile and fearsomely intense, built on ideas Elvrum had been playing with for a while. ("The Glow" had been a song on the Microphones' previous record, It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water.)
Elvrum, who now lives in Anacortes, Washington, has now expanded The Glow Pt. 2 to a two-CD set with previously unheard songs from that period and violently mutated "destroyed versions" of many of the original album's tracks. He talked to eMusic's Douglas Wolk about the inspirations behind the album and the Olympia-based musical community he belonged to in those days.
On the origins of the album:
I don't remember when I thought of naming it The Glow Pt. 2 — it was my third album, and they were all pretty interconnected. I always liked the idea that the albums were all part of one long progression. It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water is a line from a song on my first album, Don't Wake Me Up. But the reality of it is that I kind of just accumulated songs and recorded them over the course of a year.
I think I realized midway through recording it that the first album could be about air, because I sang a lot about floating and clouds and sleeping and dreaming, and the second one was pretty clearly about water, and the ocean. So I thought: I guess I'm doing an elements theme, and this one will be about fire! It happened to work pretty well with what my life was like at the time — I was pretty emotional.
On recording at Dub Narcotic:
They moved, a few years back, to an old synagogue in a basement, but back in those days, Dub Narcotic was a giant warehouse room that had been the Olympia Knitting Mill. It was great. Huge wood floors, huge windows, a lot of seagulls making a lot of noise, and the traffic — it wasn't soundproofed in any way, which was awesome.
There's a lot of weird stuff on almost every song. On "The Mansion," for example, I played each note on a different track, instead of playing the chords on the guitar — I had a full track of just me strumming G on the guitar. And then I played it on the mixer, fading up each chord when it needed to be there.
On what you'll hear if you turn The Glow Pt. 2 up really high:
The whole album has this foghorn sound over the top of it. I was watching Twin Peaks, and I noticed that every time there was a scene at Pete and Catherine and Josie's house, very subtly there would be this kind of low foghorn in the background every 30 or 45 seconds. It was so subtle, but it was perfect — it gave you the idea that they were near the water. I decided that the album would be in that setting too, because it reminded me very much of Anacortes, which is where I live now and where I'm from. I wanted to really nail it down in that setting. I tried to record the foghorn here in Anacortes — I got these extension cords and chained them all together, and I got a really fancy mic I borrowed from a studio. But it didn't work out. It just wasn't foggy. So I ended up synthesizing the sound with a tape loop with just one note played on the bass, slowed down a lot, with a lot of reverb and tape hiss.
There were so many inside jokes, conversations and metaphors, in that hippie-punk artist community.
On the eight musicians credited on the album, and the Olympia scene:
There's just one half of one song ("You'll Be in the Air") with a band, and everything else was just me. I had to put their names on there anyways, but I didn't want to brag and say it was all me. Some friends sing on different parts and the saxophones on "The Moon" are done by Karl Blau.
I lived in downtown Olympia, and my friends who played music, Khaela (aka the Blow) and Mirah and a bunch of other people who don't put out records but were also part of that, all went to Evergreen at the same time. I was a few years younger than everyone, but I moved to Olympia and became friends with this pre-existing friend group. It felt very much like a utopia — college-age kids in a town where there are a lot of resources and you can pretty much do whatever you want, you can set up shows in strange places, you can paint a sign and hang it in your yard. There were so many inside jokes, conversations and metaphors, in that hippie-punk artist community.
On the new, expanded 2-CD version:
The vinyl was out of print and the CDs were about to run out, so we had to re-press anyway. And I'm a sucker for that kind of thing, the Criterion Collection — repackaging with bonus features. It's my most popular album, and there were additional recordings from that period, so why not?
I didn't really want to call the "destroyed versions" remixes, because remix tends to imply you added something or changed the song. I just kind of disassembled the songs for those versions. I really like, as a listener, to hear into the song: you get accustomed to listening to the album version, but it's nice to hear a different perspective all of a sudden. Like an a cappella mix of a song that [usually] has a bunch of instruments on it — it's really revealing. When you go back to the original version, it's so much richer.
On "Headless Horseman":
I think the movie "Sleepy Hollow" came out around then and I thought the Headless Horseman in that movie was such a badass. It was such a vengeful warrior, but so beautiful. That symbol applied accurately to the way I was feeling. I was like: fuck everyone! I want to ride my horse and just kill everyone.
On "Samurai Sword":
I just thought it was a really awesome image — me with a sword! I actually bought a samurai sword, on tour. It's just a tourist one, but it's kinda sharp. I bought it on the side of the road in Georgia, in a novelty Dungeons & Dragons kind of place. The song is about me battling a polar bear that... it's a reference to this song that Khaela sang, where the metaphor is that her heart wants to drag its prey back underground into its lair to gorge on it. And so I guess my song was like: "Oh yeah? Well, I have a sword!" Naming myself at the end of the song, I think, was the first time I did that. It wasn't like I was writing songs that were going to become traditional folk songs of our culture. They're my diary.
Elvrum, who now lives in Anacortes, Washington, has now expanded The Glow Pt. 2 to a two-CD set with previously unheard songs from that period and violently mutated "destroyed versions" of many of the original album's tracks. He talked to eMusic's Douglas Wolk about the inspirations behind the album and the Olympia-based musical community he belonged to in those days.
On the origins of the album:
I don't remember when I thought of naming it The Glow Pt. 2 — it was my third album, and they were all pretty interconnected. I always liked the idea that the albums were all part of one long progression. It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water is a line from a song on my first album, Don't Wake Me Up. But the reality of it is that I kind of just accumulated songs and recorded them over the course of a year.
I think I realized midway through recording it that the first album could be about air, because I sang a lot about floating and clouds and sleeping and dreaming, and the second one was pretty clearly about water, and the ocean. So I thought: I guess I'm doing an elements theme, and this one will be about fire! It happened to work pretty well with what my life was like at the time — I was pretty emotional.
On recording at Dub Narcotic:
They moved, a few years back, to an old synagogue in a basement, but back in those days, Dub Narcotic was a giant warehouse room that had been the Olympia Knitting Mill. It was great. Huge wood floors, huge windows, a lot of seagulls making a lot of noise, and the traffic — it wasn't soundproofed in any way, which was awesome.
There's a lot of weird stuff on almost every song. On "The Mansion," for example, I played each note on a different track, instead of playing the chords on the guitar — I had a full track of just me strumming G on the guitar. And then I played it on the mixer, fading up each chord when it needed to be there.
On what you'll hear if you turn The Glow Pt. 2 up really high:
The whole album has this foghorn sound over the top of it. I was watching Twin Peaks, and I noticed that every time there was a scene at Pete and Catherine and Josie's house, very subtly there would be this kind of low foghorn in the background every 30 or 45 seconds. It was so subtle, but it was perfect — it gave you the idea that they were near the water. I decided that the album would be in that setting too, because it reminded me very much of Anacortes, which is where I live now and where I'm from. I wanted to really nail it down in that setting. I tried to record the foghorn here in Anacortes — I got these extension cords and chained them all together, and I got a really fancy mic I borrowed from a studio. But it didn't work out. It just wasn't foggy. So I ended up synthesizing the sound with a tape loop with just one note played on the bass, slowed down a lot, with a lot of reverb and tape hiss.
On the eight musicians credited on the album, and the Olympia scene:
There's just one half of one song ("You'll Be in the Air") with a band, and everything else was just me. I had to put their names on there anyways, but I didn't want to brag and say it was all me. Some friends sing on different parts and the saxophones on "The Moon" are done by Karl Blau.
I lived in downtown Olympia, and my friends who played music, Khaela (aka the Blow) and Mirah and a bunch of other people who don't put out records but were also part of that, all went to Evergreen at the same time. I was a few years younger than everyone, but I moved to Olympia and became friends with this pre-existing friend group. It felt very much like a utopia — college-age kids in a town where there are a lot of resources and you can pretty much do whatever you want, you can set up shows in strange places, you can paint a sign and hang it in your yard. There were so many inside jokes, conversations and metaphors, in that hippie-punk artist community.
On the new, expanded 2-CD version:
The vinyl was out of print and the CDs were about to run out, so we had to re-press anyway. And I'm a sucker for that kind of thing, the Criterion Collection — repackaging with bonus features. It's my most popular album, and there were additional recordings from that period, so why not?
I didn't really want to call the "destroyed versions" remixes, because remix tends to imply you added something or changed the song. I just kind of disassembled the songs for those versions. I really like, as a listener, to hear into the song: you get accustomed to listening to the album version, but it's nice to hear a different perspective all of a sudden. Like an a cappella mix of a song that [usually] has a bunch of instruments on it — it's really revealing. When you go back to the original version, it's so much richer.
On "Headless Horseman":
I think the movie "Sleepy Hollow" came out around then and I thought the Headless Horseman in that movie was such a badass. It was such a vengeful warrior, but so beautiful. That symbol applied accurately to the way I was feeling. I was like: fuck everyone! I want to ride my horse and just kill everyone.
On "Samurai Sword":
I just thought it was a really awesome image — me with a sword! I actually bought a samurai sword, on tour. It's just a tourist one, but it's kinda sharp. I bought it on the side of the road in Georgia, in a novelty Dungeons & Dragons kind of place. The song is about me battling a polar bear that... it's a reference to this song that Khaela sang, where the metaphor is that her heart wants to drag its prey back underground into its lair to gorge on it. And so I guess my song was like: "Oh yeah? Well, I have a sword!" Naming myself at the end of the song, I think, was the first time I did that. It wasn't like I was writing songs that were going to become traditional folk songs of our culture. They're my diary.
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