Pitchfork: This record feels both more and less personal than your last two. It’s less harrowing, for sure, maybe a little more abstracted. Was that an intention or a result?

Phil Elverum: It’s definitely a step back into poetry and away from memoir. That’s partially just how it came out. A lot of it also comes from not feeling so comfortable speaking with raw detail and names and dates. I don’t feel like I’m writing in a vacuum of my own grief anymore, talking about things that don’t touch any other people. There’s something about living in Anacortes and having gone through this life of fear of cancer and death. I felt like I was definitely in a bubble and could say whatever I want because we’re all gonna die at any minute. I was able to delude myself into thinking that I didn’t have to be sensitive about what I said, like I could just like spill the beans.

You still allude to your marriage with Michelle directly a couple of times on the album, and you touch on what it was like to live close to someone who was being scrutinized. What did it feel like to pass under the beam of that scrutiny?

Mostly, it didn’t feel like anything, because that wasn’t the lived experience at all. We lived a very human existence, and that [celebrity] world mostly felt like an abstraction.

You address some of that celebrity weirdness. This is a record full of elemental images—embers and blowing winds—but then in the song “Widows” you suddenly sing: “The day the tabloids told the world you separated me/My phone began dinging more than usual.” And then at another point, you reference “This inhumane, delirious, absurd, other world that keeps trying to eat you.” It is very clear who and what that is about.

Yeah, I do allude to that time. Partly, because here I am, making this album and putting it out into the public. So in some ways, I’m participating in that gross world that I want to avoid, and I want to recognize the contradiction in that. I recognize the playing field; I recognize how gnarly it must feel to live with those concerns. It’s a tough one, and I’m still kind of hung up on it.

It would be amazing to write a song that could be sung 100 years from now by a teenage girl and still be relevant to her—that’s a dream of songwriting, maybe. But nonetheless, what I end up doing is writing these hyper-specific things about my own life in these particular months. That song in particular is about being disoriented about what’s real and trying to find some firm ground. I have all these versions of reality that I’ve lived in over the past few years—can they all be real? Can they all coexist? In that same song, I overcompensate in the other direction; I mention going to a bonfire and a garbage dump, getting stinky in the woods. I was just trying to find some middle ground between extremes.