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Music

Phil Elverum Didn't Get Lil Peep at First, Either

In an interview with Stereogum, the Mount Eerie leader says that he was initially put off by the late emo-rapper sampling his music.
L: Jordi Vidal/Redferns via Getty Images
R: Venturelli/WireImage

The Microphones' lo-fi shoegaze-folk masterpiece The Glow Pt. 2 was sampled twice by the late Lil Peep, its immediately identifiable, earthy acoustics forming the basis of both "White Wine" and "Beamerboy." The brooding sound was probably the most inspired of producer Nedarb's sample choices for his work with Peep. Apparently no one had asked Phil Elverum, the Mount Eerie mastermind who wrote The Glow Pt. 2 almost two decades ago under the Microphones name, what he thought of his music being repurposed before today. In a new interview with Stereogum as part of promo for his upcoming album Now Only, Elverum at last spoke on the confusion and revulsion he felt upon hearing those Peep songs for the first time, though he admits that the generational gap between himself and Peep played a part in that reaction.

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…when I first saw his videos I was like, “Argh! No! Yuck!” I just really didn’t get it, and I think it’s just because I’m old, honestly. It’s a thing for people who are 20 years younger than me, or younger. It’s one of the first times I felt truly alienated from, you know, kids these days.

He then offers a typically sighing addendum to that opinion, saying that "I’m mostly fine with anyone using my music for whatever. Everything’s just compost that gets reused." He also reflects on how the morbid subject matter of Only Now and its predecessor, the devastating A Crow Looked at Me, (both albums detail Elverum mourning the 2016 death of his wife, musician Geneviève Castrée) dovetails with the nature of Peep's death.

When he died, I tweeted, “Lil Peep is on my mind” because death was on my mind. More people dying, young people dying, people dying before their time, Geneviève dying, and people grieving in this sloppy, chaotic, public way, which I was also doing. It just poked at all these issues in a fresh way, surprisingly.

You can read the whole interview here.

Phil is on Twitter.