Phil Elverum Quotes

I never think about rhythm versus melody; I've always just played to what's in my head.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

I love making music. I love being involved in arranging music. It's very natural to know what I want to hear next and come up with ideas that are variations of what might be good.

Whatever I hear in my head is what I play.

I couldn't find a way to write music with numbers and rules and schedules. So I tried to forget the academic idea of music and started to see if it was possible to do creative work, taking in all the influences I wanted to keep.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

It was spontaneously composed as I was playing it. And then I added a couple of other overdub textures on top of it after the fact. But it's one of those things where I wouldn't be able to sit down and specifically write that. That's just what came out.

Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

I wrote my first song at 6. I spent every day with the guitar, and I just made up songs.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

I try to write down every song that comes to me, even though I know that every song that comes to me isn't a song that I need to sing.

It is easy to write unthinking music.

I just write... I follow the melodies that I can't forget/the ones that pop up in my brain the most.

I like to tinkle at my piano when I'm working out a new song - I just put my fingers down and see what comes out.

I'd listen to a song and say, 'Hang on, I like that piano thing,' so I'd play the guitar like that and get the vibe from it, and it just evolved from the get-go. It was pretty obvious what to do; You don't think about rock n' roll: you just do it.

I feel like when I get into most rooms, melodies come really easily to me, and they sound good in my head. I never really know until I hear the song back and it's finished if it actually is good.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.

Writing music - particularly music without lyrics - calls almost exclusively on the subconscious.

If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.