How School of Song got Phil Elverum to teach a songwriting course

Phil Elverum felt blocked. Not necessarily, just in the way artists sometimes feel when they’re particularly busy. He had to deal with Covid, and also with the house he’d built in idyllic Anacortes, Washington. He’s also a single dad and has a full-time job. The well hadn’t dried up yet, but he definitely needed some rainwater to refill it.

Those first drops started falling when School of Song co-founders Blue Sheffer and Steven van Betten contacted his merch email in 2022 and asked him to teach a songwriting class. Elverum is a staunch indie singer and doesn’t have a staff member handling his inbox, but the guys were still shocked when the Mount Eerie frontman wrote back to them shortly after to say he was in. “Phil is legendary in the DIY world and he’s the only person behind that email,” Sheffer says. “I couldn’t believe that worked,” van Betten adds with a laugh.

At first, Elverum was a little confused by the offer. “I thought to myself, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not a teacher,'” he says. But he decided to give it a try, and that first class opened the floodgates. He now has a whole album of Mount Eerie songs due out later this year, and he liked his first experience with School of Song so much that he taught another class for them this month, this time on the art of publishing. “That class made me think more deeply about this whole different aspect of the creative life,” he says. “The timing was perfect.”

Sheffer and van Betten came up with the idea for School of Song in 2020 when their friend Buck Meek of Big Thief asked them for advice on teaching online. Sheffer and van Betten are old friends from high school, where they formed a lifelong friendship through music and rock climbing. Sheffer went on to study computer science at Stanford, while van Betten became a musician/teacher. Inspired by Meek’s request, they combined their expertise to create an online school where musicians have taught tens of thousands of students about songwriting and the music business over the past three years. Van Betten taught the first class in 2021, and artists such as Adrianne Lenker, Robin Pecknold, Merrill Garbus, David Longstreth, and Bartees Strange have taken over as instructors for subsequent classes.

Elverum taught his first songwriting class in 2022 before recently sharing his knowledge as part of a multi-week course on the publishing process. Taja Cheek (who makes music under the name L’Rain), Miya Folick and Scott McMicken (Dr. Dog) also gave lectures, with Cheek sharing on June 9, Folick on June 16 and McMicken on June 23. Classes will be held at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. PT on Zoom and will be available online on a case-by-case basis afterward. (Elverum’s class is now online.)

Sheffer and van Betten originally approached Elverum because he is a legendary and prolific songwriter whose discography stretches back to the ’90s and includes projects like The Microphones, Mount Eerie, his own name and D+. “His songwriting comes across as very fearless,” says van Betten. “Every album feels like he’s really surrendering to the muse of that moment in his life.” Elverum brought that approach to the four-week course in 2022, instructing his students to meditate and—surprise!—stop listening to music for a while.

“I looked at it as a subtractive thing because I think we’re all inundated with a lot of stuff to pay attention to,” Elverum says. “Creativity comes in the in-between times when you’re not talking or busy or listening; it comes from that kind of blank slate.” So each week, the students sat down at their special writing station to write and record a new song. (Elverum’s desk in his recording studio is messy; he writes everything by hand.) They then uploaded their pieces to a special website. “I was completely blown away,” Elverum says of the finished products. “It was so inspiring, not just the songs themselves, but the breadth, the variety. Seeing the ideas I was pitching and then hearing the variety of people’s reactions… There are so many different ways to be inspired and talented. I never would have thought of that.”

At the same time, Elverum began writing again. His last publication was Microphones 2019his first album under this project since 2003. This album followed the 2017 album A crow looked at mea musical eulogy for his late wife, the artist and musician Geneviève Castrée, and in 2018 Now onlywhich covered similar themes. Although he can’t reveal the title or release date of his next project, he says it will include 26 songs.

“That’s something I’m working on at the moment: how to tell this story,” he says. “It’s quite long and has different chapters, so I’m trying to explain how it all fits together.”

Luckily, he can draw inspiration from his last class at the School of Song. He began by asking students: Why release music at all? “Maybe it’s a habit of my mind – I zoom way back in time,” he says, adding that the class was more about the philosophy of music release than specific steps – although he did address those in a Q&A. “I didn’t want to take for granted that everyone thought they should release their music. I suppose some people signed up for a music release class because they were unsure or hesitant, and I wanted to respect that hesitation and actually ask the question: ‘What’s good about releasing music? What’s the problem with making music and keeping it to yourself?'”

It was this last question that Elverum focused on, asking the students to be less cocky and less concerned about what the audience might think. “And I also tried to say, ‘Don’t be too confident,'” he admits. “Because young men in our world in particular feel quite entitled. I’m generalizing a lot here, but I’ve seen that happen a lot. We all have those young men who just assume that whatever they put out into the world is worth its weight in gold. They just haven’t been discouraged enough.”

Elverum admits he was once one of those young men. Still, he’s tried to keep the rose-tinted glasses on and keep a working man’s perspective. While he’s had a long career, he’s stuck to a certain thread: releasing his own albums on his own label and working his merchandise booth. “I love it,” he says. “I mean, it’s exhausting and weird. I’m still surprised when a teenager comes up to me and is all embarrassed and sheepish and excited. I’m at my job. Are you also taking that photo of the salesman changing the oil or whatever? I feel very, like delusional, a working man about it.”

But that’s a mindset that School of Song supports. “It’s about organic growth as opposed to over-growth,” says van Betten. “The way the music industry is set up right now, there’s a lot of energy towards over-growth. The flip side of that is that it’s such a flash in the pan. That’s usually the start of that kind of notoriety. And Phil is the opposite in that respect.”

And can his students today build their own little ecosystem, like Elverum did in the 1990s? He is confident, if a little skeptical. Ultimately, he says, it comes down to dynamism – and control. “You just have to rein it in somehow and build an efficient little world,” he says. “Don’t have so many agents and managers. Fire everyone and just do it yourself.”

“I’m in this really nice balance where I feel like I can do anything I want and reliably enough people will be curious about it that I can just keep going,” he adds. “I probably won’t be huge. But that’s great. It’s nice not to be huge. I love that I can keep doing this.”