Bonus Tracks // Phil and Agathe Elverum's 'Morning Listening Diary'
What a musician (Mount Eerie, The Microphones) and his daughter listened to in the pre-vaccine heart of the COVID pandemic.
In the Winter of 2021, Phil Elverum — you might know him as Mount Eerie, or The Microphones — and his then-five-year-old daughter, Agathe, started to keep a pad of paper and a pen on the table where they ate breakfast together. Every morning, Phil would pick a record or a radio station, then jot down whatever thoughts came to mind while listening: about the music itself, about memories from his own life, about parenting, about the pandemic. Agathe would add drawings.
After the vaccines arrived and the world opened up, the project tapered off. But recently they turned their private project into a print zine, now available for purchase.
As a longtime fan of Elverum's music and approach to being an artist in the world1, I was excited when he agreed to let me snip some entries out for this special installment of "Bonus Tracks.” (For new subscribers: the core offering here is short essays in which a writer engages centrally with one song. “Bonus Tracks” is a looser space for… other approaches to the interplay of music and life.) In the zine you see reproductions of Phil and Agathe’s handwritten pages, a few of which are reproduced below. But I’ve also typed them out for screen/phone readability.
I want to stress that these excerpts don't capture the full effect of the zine, which comes in large part from the effect of reading one day after another after another, noting patterns and divergences: another morning, pancakes again, school closed, school open, busy practical thoughts, deep moments of awe and wonder, another morning, pancakes again, music on vinyl, music on the radio, music on the computer, Agathe's drawings dancing through it all.
I recommend it to anyone interested in thinking about the ways music flows through our lives. Which is to say: I recommend it to anyone who likes Tracks on Tracks. Plus, oh yeah: there are some great, off-the-beaten-path song recs! (And not just the ones highlighted here.)
January 23, 2021
Woke at 6:30 on purpose to begin work at dawn on my woodshed construction project. KUGS2 is playing "Knockin on Heaven’s Door" by Ladysmith Black Mambazo (reggae version3) that was SO good. Playing reggae at sunrise from the hippie college radio station while making kale juice from the garden before going to do forest carpentry all day makes me feel like a happy island cliché.
January 25, 2021
Random 7-inch grab: Pond, “Wheel/Cinders.”Psychedelic noodling guitar, Nineties, huge shorts with Guatemalan fabric, floppy medieval weird sock hat, wandering Seattle Center during a festival, this was my soundtrack, me vs. the world.
January 29, 2021
Tchaikovsky, “Nutcracker, Side 3,” don’t recognize these parts. This was Agathe’s choice. She’s scrutinizing the characters on the jacket. Last night going to bed she said “I’m filled with the Christmas spirit” and was so cuddly and sweet.
Oh, I didn’t recognize those parts because it was playing at 45 rpm, all hyper and fluttery. Oh yeah, classic now.
February 5, 2021
Brigitte Fontaine, 13 chansons décadentes et fantasmagoriques, from before she was making those spare records with Areski it seems. More just a chanteuse. A weird deep yé-yé girl.
This record I remember buying at a cool store in Kingston, NY around New Years 2018/2019, a memory that makes me flinch with pain still, that whole segment of life refusing to heal, every memory and physical fragment of association, like this record, recalling repeatedly a cascading avalanche of one thought leading to another, a strange long complex very realistic dream that ended bad and hindsight imbued the whole thing with terror and menace. When will this record get to just be itself again?
March 4, 2021
Le Jardin de Heavenly. I wish I had the vinyl of this. Yesterday I put on Heavenly for the first time somehow (via the computer) and it’s really hitting the spot. I got into these people later, Marine Research era, and now going backwards is feeling exactly on target. On Discogs their records are coveted and expensive. Something in the exact balance of sweetness and harshness seems just what I’m missing in the college radio singers that come through KUGS. This is a good example of that sweet beauty with a necessary bite.
March 16, 2021
My Name is Nobody soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. Agathe is into this stuff. Yesterday blasting The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly I caught her standing next to the speaker with eyes closed, intently absorbing something deep in the music. It’s so cool. This music is perfect for her, cinematic, dramatic, weird, made of unusual sounds. Her eyes look up and away, thoughts blasting.
June 12, 2021
Rust Never Sleeps, Neil Young, “Powderfinger"
Me: “What kind of music is this?”
Her: “Rock … no wait, rock/country.” ✹
I keep a running list of books by or featuring Tracks contributors at Bookshop.org. Whenever you buy a book using a link from a Tracks essay, or from one of my Bookshop lists, I receive a small commission.
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Here are some Tracks pieces in a similar vein to the one you just read:
89.3 KUGS FM, the student radio station at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. It’s streamable!
feat. Dolly Parton!
Oh my gosh!!! This made my heart swell. Thanks for putting the book on my radar. I love phil and now I love his Agathe too. 😭