Can Phil Elverum teach you how to become a DIY legend?

Phil Elverum felt left out. Not in any terrible way – just like artists sometimes do when things get really busy. There was Covid to deal with, as well as the house he was building in bucolic Anacortes, Washington. Plus, he's a single parent, a full-time job. The well was not dry, but it definitely needed some rainwater to fill it.

These first drops began to fall when School of Singing Co-founders Blue Sheffer and Steven van Betten posted his business email in 2022 and asked him to teach a songwriting class. Fiercely independent, Elverum doesn't have an employee manning his inbox, but the guys were nonetheless shocked when the Mount Eerie frontman hit back a little later saying it was a game. “Phil is a legend in the DIY world, and he's exactly the one behind this email,” says Sheffer. “I couldn't believe that worked,” adds van Betten, laughing.

At first, Elverum was a little confused by the offer. “I said, 'You've got the wrong guy. I'm not a teacher,” he says. He decided to give it a go, though, and that first class opened the floodgates. He now has an entire album of Mount Eerie songs due out later this year, and enjoyed his first experience with the School of Song so much that he ended up teaching another class for them this month, this time at Art of the Release. “This class made me think about this whole other aspect of the creative life in a deeper way,” he says. “It was perfect timing.”

Sheffer and van Betten first conceived School of Song in 2020 when their friend Buck Meek of Big Thief approached them about teaching online. Sheffer and van Betten are old friends from high school, where they played music and rock-climbed their way into a lifelong friendship. Schaefer went on to study computer science at Stanford, while van Betten became a musician/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 industry over the past three years. Van Betten taught the first class in 2021, with artists such as Adrianne Lenker, Robin Pecknold, Merrill Garbus, David Longstreth, and Bartees Strange taking the reins for subsequent classes.

Elverum taught his first songwriting class in 2022, before more recently offering wisdom as part of a multi-week course on the release process. Taja Cheek (who makes music as L'Rain), Miya Folick and Scott McMicken (Dr. Dog) also contributed lectures, with Cheek dropping knowledge on June 9th, Folick on June 16th and McMicken on the 23rd June. Classes are held on Zoom at 11am. and 6 p.m. PT, and are available online after the fact on a case-by-case basis. (Elverum's class is up now.)

Sheffer and van Betten initially approached Elverum because of his status as a legendary and prolific songwriter, with a discography stretching back to the '90s with projects such as Microphones, Mount Eerie, his own name, and D+. “His songwriting is very fearless,” says van Betten. “Each album feels like he's really surrendering to the muse of that moment in his life.” Elverum brought this approach to the four-week course in 2022, instructing his students to meditate and be surprised! — stop listening to music for a spell.

“I thought of it as something abstract, because I think we're all overwhelmed with a lot of things that we have to pay attention to,” Elverum says. “Creativity comes in the space when you're not already talking or busy or not listening. comes from this kind of weird blank slate.” As such, students would sit down at their dedicated writing station each week to write and record a new song. (Elverum's is a messy desk in his recording studio, where he writes everything away.) They would then upload their tracks to a special website. “My mind was blown,” Elverum says of the finished products. “It was so inspiring, not just the songs themselves, but the range, the variety. To see the ideas I was presenting and then to hear the variety of responses people were giving… There are so many different ways to be inspired and be talented. I would never have thought of that.”

At the same time, Elverum found himself writing again. His last release to date was Microphones 2019his first album under this project since 2003. This album followed in 2017 A crow looked at mea musical tribute to his late wife, artist and musician Geneviève Castrée, and in 2018 Only now, which explored similar themes. While he can't reveal the title or release date of his next project, he says it includes 26 songs.

“That's something I'm working on right now: how to tell that story,” he says. “It's quite long and there are different chapters in it, so I'm working to explain how it all comes together.”

Fortunately, he should be able to take inspiration from his most recent lesson at the School of Song, which began by asking students: Why release music, anyway? “Maybe it's a normal thing my mind does — it zooms in on the ancients,” he says, adding that the class was more about the philosophy of releasing music than the specific steps — though he did address them in a Q&A. “I didn't want to take it for granted that everyone thought they had to release their music. I guess some people signed up for a music release course because they weren't sure about it or were hesitant, and I wanted to respect that hesitation and really ask the question, “What's good about releasing music? What's the problem with making music and keeping it to yourself?'

It is this last question that Elverum addressed, asking students to be less precious, to worry less about what the public might think. “And I also tried to say, 'Don't be too confident,'” he allows. “Because especially the young men in our world, they feel quite entitled. I'm generalizing a lot here, but I've been through it a lot. We all have those young men who just assume that all they have to make of the world is gold. They just haven't been discouraged enough.”

Elverum admits that he was once one of those young people. However, he has tried to keep a working-class lens on those rose-colored glasses. He's had a long career, yes, but he's stuck to one particular path: releasing his own albums on his own label and working his merch desk. “I love it,” she says. “I mean, it's tiring and weird. I'm still amazed when a teenager shows up and is all shy, embarrassed and excited. I'm at my job. Do you also take the picture of the clerk at the oil change place or something? I feel very, very delusional working class about it.”

But that's a mindframe that the School of Song espouses. “It's about organic growth versus advertised growth,” says van Betten. “With the way the music industry is shaping up right now, there's a lot of energy towards growth. The downside to this is that it's such a flash in a pan. That tends to be the arc of this kind of show. And Phil is the opposite in that regard.”

As for whether his students can carve out their own little ecosystem today, like Elverum did in the 90s? He is optimistic, if a little doubtful. In the end, he says, it comes down to momentum — and control. “All they need to do is harness it and build an efficient little world,” he says. “Don't have so many agents and managers. Fire everyone and do it yourself.”

“I'm in this really nice balance where I feel like I can do whatever weird thing I want to do, and enough people will be reliably weird about it that I can just go on,” he adds. “I probably won't get huge. But this is great. It's nice not to be huge. I love that I'm still doing this.”