Phil Elverum felt stuck. Not exactly dire, but the way artists sometimes feel when they're especially busy. He had to deal with COVID-19, as well as the house he was building in rural Anacortes, Washington. Plus, he's a single mom with a full-time job. His well wasn't dry, but he did need a little rainwater to refill it.
The first offers started coming in when School of Song co-founders Blue Schaefer and Steven Van Vetten contacted him through his merch email in 2022, asking him to teach a songwriting class. Staunchly indie-minded, Elverum doesn't have an employee manning his inbox, but the pair were surprised when the Mount Erie frontman quickly replied and said he'd be on board. “Phil is a legend in the DIY world, and he's the only person behind that email,” Schaefer says. “We couldn't believe it was going to work out,” Van Vetten adds with a laugh.
At first, Elverum was a little hesitant about the offer. “I thought, 'You're the wrong person. I'm not a teacher,'” he says. But he decided to give it a go, and that first class led him to start teaching new things one after another. He's now releasing an album of Mount Ely songs later this year, and enjoyed his first experience with School of Song so much that he's teaching another class this month, this one on the art of releasing. “That class got me thinking more about this whole other side of the creative life,” he says. “It was perfect timing.”
Schaefer and Van Vetten came up with the idea for School of Song in 2020 after their friend Buck Meek of Big Thief came to them for advice on teaching online. Schaefer and Van Vetten are old friends from high school, where they forged a lifelong friendship playing music and rock climbing together. Schaefer studied computer science at Stanford University, while Van Vetten became a musician and teacher. Inspired by Meek's request, they pooled their expertise to launch an online school, where musicians have taught tens of thousands of students about songwriting and the music business over the past three years. Van Vetten taught his first class in 2021, and subsequent lessons have featured artists such as Adrianne Lenker, Robin Pecknold, Merrill Garbus, David Longstreth, and Bertees Strange.
Elverum taught his first songwriting class of 2022, recently imparting his wisdom as part of a multi-week course on the releasing process. Taja Cheek (who makes music as L'Rain), Miya Forlick, and Scott McMicken (Dr. Dog) also contributed to the lectures, with Cheek imparting his knowledge on June 9, Forlick on June 16, and McMicken on June 23. The classes will be held on Zoom at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., and can be viewed online after the fact if circumstances permit. (Elverum's classes are currently live.)
Schaefer and Van Vetten first reached out to Elverum because he was a legendary, prolific songwriter, boasting a discography stretching back to the '90s with projects like Microphones, Mount Ely, and his own name, D+. “His songwriting is so bold,” Van Vetten says. “Every album feels like he's really surrendering to the muse of that moment in his life.” Elverum brought that approach to a four-week class in 2022, instructing students to meditate and, shockingly, stop listening to music for a while.
“I looked at it as something subtractive, because I think we all have so many things to pay attention to,” Elverum says. “Creativity comes in the gaps between when we're talking, or absorbed in something, or listening. It comes from this weird blank slate.” So each week, students sit down in a dedicated composition space to write and record a new song. (Elverum's studio is a messy desk, and he writes everything by hand.) They then upload the tracks to a dedicated website. “I was amazed,” Elverum says of the finished work. “I was so inspired, not just by the songs themselves, but by the range, the diversity. To see the ideas I presented and hear the different responses people had… There are so many different ways to get inspiration and talent. I never thought of that.”
At the same time, Elverum began composing again. His last works were Microphones 2019This is the first album from this project since 2003. The album was released in 2017. The crow saw mea tribute to his late wife, artist and musician Geneviève Castrée, and the 2018 Only nowexplores similar themes. While he can't reveal the title or release date of his next project, he says it will contain 26 songs.
“What I'm working on now is how to tell that story,” he says. “It's quite long and it's divided into several chapters, so I'm trying to explain how they all connect.”
Luckily, he should be able to find inspiration in his recent School of Song class, which began by him asking his students, “Why release music in the first place?” “Maybe it's just a habitual thing in my mind, going way back,” he said, adding that the class was more about the philosophy of releasing music than specific steps, though he touched on that during the Q&A. “I didn't want to take for granted that everyone thinks you should release your music. I think it was because I was unsure or hesitant that I signed up for a class on releasing music. I wanted to respect that hesitation and actually ask the question, 'What's good about releasing music? What's wrong with making music and keeping it to yourself?'”
Elverum's real focus came in his final question, where he asked the students not to be too overconfident and not to worry too much about what the audience thinks. “I also tried to say, 'Don't be overconfident,'” he admits. “Because especially in our world, young men feel quite entitled. This is a pretty generalization, but I've seen it many times. We have young men who think that whatever they put out into the world is money. They're not encouraged enough.”
Elverum admits he was once one of those kids. Still, he's tried to fit his working-class lenses into rose-tinted glasses. He's had a long career, sure, but he's stayed on a particular path: releasing his own albums on his own label, working his own merch stand. “I love it,” he says. “It's exhausting and it's weird. It still freaks me out when I see teenagers come in and they're bashful and embarrassed and excited. They're at work. They take pictures of the guy at the oil-change place? It makes me feel so, like, delusionally working class.”
But it's a mindset espoused by School of Song. “It's a question of organic growth versus hyped growth,” Van Vetten says. “The way the music industry is modelled right now, there's a lot of energy put into hyped growth. The downside to that is that it's ephemeral. That's the tendency of this kind of exposure. And Phil is the polar opposite in that respect.”
He's a little skeptical, but hopeful, about whether his students can carve out their own little ecosystems today, as Elverum did in the '90s. Ultimately, he says, it's all about momentum and control. “All they need to do is rein it in to some extent and build an efficient little world,” he says. “Stop having so many agents and managers. Fire them all and do it yourself.”
“I'm in a great balance right now where whatever weird stuff I want to do, I'm sure enough people are interested so I can just keep doing it,” he added. “I'll probably never be famous, but that's great. It's good not to be famous. I'm happy to keep doing this.”