I'm interviewing Phil Elvrum, what should I ask

It's for my college newspaper. Sorry that wasn't clear.

(played with him in Anacortes a month or so ago - some of his new stuff was SO great, esp. this one had a really formal lyrical structure:

what do I want with your ghost when I'm gone? I want your ghost gone

and some similar construction in the second verse, where there was a "perfect" i.e. same-word rhyme used, and then in the third verse:

what do I want with my house when I'm gone? I want the shades drawn

and it was such a great SONG moment, and I thought "Microphones done all formal-like could be really, really great, which leads to the obvious question #3: Would you work with an outside producer?

Yanc3y: much of the humor on Mt. Eerie is intentional. C'mon, he references The Big Lebowski at the album's climax!

Felcher: for most of that tour, Phil asked whoever was in the opening bands on any particular evening to be his impromptu backing band. So it was almost certainly a one-off.

Francis: have you seen the Tape Op interview? You can read it at
http://www.krecs.com/Press/_TapeOp.html

J0hn: can you elaborate on what you mean by "traditional" songs? Do you mean an album without the instrumental interludes & excursions into sound collage, and clear breaks between songs, or just more formal structure within the songs themselves?

You're right on about the new material. It's funny how his whole project used to be focused on cool-sounding textures and recording experiments, and now it's become so lyric-driven. I think a lot of people will be surprised by the upcoming live album.

That was sort of the idea behind the Little Bird Flies into a Big Black Cloud LP: it's just him and a piano or him and a pump organ, in one continuous take. People's reactions to it have been even more polarized than they were to Mt. Eerie. I think this is in part because people generally are weirdly less tolerant of Very Simple Keyboard accompaniment than they are of Very Simple Guitar accompaniment. Granted, he's come a long way as a songwriter in the 2 years since that was recorded.

Please if you wind up asking my questions don't credit them to me until after the interview's over

Understood.

Yeah - the new songs I saw him do earlier this month, as I said upthread, were quite great

This is a popular idea, but I don't see how it pertains to the first three Microphones albums. To Mount Eerie, maybe, but not to more than a handful of earlier tracks. As to his newer songs, there are aspects of traditional songwriting that come out better in accoustic performance than elsewhere, so it's hard to say what the songs will sound like on the next studio release.

A good interview question might be: how separate for him are the performance and the recording of a song?

Or you could ask the old standard "When are you playing in Britain again". And then tell me...

His theory about 'dangerous trousers' might make interesting reading.

Of course you may want to rephrase them. But you would probably surprise him if you mention Eric's Trip, not so much anymore since he covered Sand but the first album was such a homage both in terms of artwork and sound.

I don't know about that! "Don't Wake Me Up" is quite song-based, but "The Window" seemed to me heavily about SOUND rather than songs (even though my favorite parts of it were the song-like parts).