Quickly, Quickly on Portland, Phil Elverum, and Breaking Into Botanical Gardens

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it. Subscriptions currently run $3/month or $30/year, hit one of those little pink buttons on the right side of your screen to tap in, you won't regret it.

Today's newsletter: I recently spent some time with Graham Jonson's most recent album as Quickly, Quickly—last year's Ghostly-released I Heard That Noise—and was extremely impressed by the producer-cum-songwriter's approach to rustic indie rock, which so explicitly reminded me of Phil Elverum's work that it drove me right back to The Glow, Pt. 2 like it was freshman year of high school all over again. I hopped on a call with Graham last month to talk about the contours of his career so far as well as his aesthetic approach, and I found it quite fascinating given the current sound he's arrived at. Check it out:

One thing I found really fascinating about your latest record is that it reminded me of the Microphones. I know you've mentioned the influence of Phil Elverum before, and he's somebody who a lot of people feel very inspired by but you don't always hear it come out in the music. With you, I absolutely do.
Yeah, something that's really special about his music is the amount of different sounds he uses. He'll have some sounds where, you're pretty sure it's a guitar, but it's really hard to tell because there's 30 layers of reverb or distortion. I've always been drawn to his soundscapes, and the way he writes lyrics is so beautiful. He's, in my opinion, one of the great songwriters of all time. He has these moments where he'll rip the song out from under you and create this crazy left turn that feels really natural but takes you somewhere completely new. That was something that I tried to think about a lot on this record: How can I take this song and crank it up to 11? Phil does that stuff really well, and he's an endless creative well. We need more more people like him.

He's also one of those people where, the first time you hear his music, it makes an immediate impression on you. What was that moment for you?
The first time I heard his music was A Crow Looked at Me, which was an odd one to hear first. I don't know if this is exactly true, because I was very young when he was making a lot of his early output, but it seemed like he had a career revival with that album, just because of how intense and raw it is. It was an interesting first thing to hear from him, and it's also a record that I don't go back to ever, because it's such a difficult listen for me and anybody listening to it. But I resonate with him a lot because he has this very boyish quality in his voice. He's not the best singer, and I feel that, because I'm similar—which I tried to lean into on the album.

After that record, I went digging around. I'm sure I listened to The Glow Part 2. The one that really stuck with me the most is No Flashlight, which I don't really hear people talking about as much.I remember listening to it on a 14 hour drive and it just blew me away with how creative it was.

Let's talk more about how Quickly, Quickly has evolved, sonically. You've straddled a few different lanes at this point.
For the longest time, I was just a beatmaker. My introduction to music production was largely through "Harlem Shake," of all things. I was finding out about EDM and trap, and that made me want to learn about producing music. I've always played music my whole life—I've been playing piano since I was really young, and I was in a band for a while in middle and high school. But I was largely beat-focused for a while.

I think it's important for artists to evolve. That's how you stay relevant, and not to say that you have to keep up with trends, but I think it's important to understand how things are moving—and at some point, I decided that I didn't want to make my career off of making beats anymore and go back into songwriting. Over my last couple albums, it's definitely been a process refining that and figuring out my lane within that sound. This album is definitely the closest I've gotten to a marriage between my more recent obsession with songwriting and folk music and my original discipline of crazy Ableton production stuff.

Talk to me about your earliest experiences using the computer.
We had a desktop computer in the basement pre-everyone having a laptop. My earliest memories of being on the computer were playing [Elf Bowling] and jthe little Flash games that were built into the computer—there was a restaurant simulator. My mom got a Macbook in 2007, and I was obsessed with YouTube. Once I found out about Garageband, I'd stack loops to make these these weird little songs, export them to iTunes, change the album name and title, and pretend I was on iTunes. What a simple time.

What was your flavor of YouTube?
A lot of skit videos. There was this dude Ryan Higa that I was obsessed with—Smosh, whatever the the funny stuff was for a middle schooler in 2010. I'm sure "Charlie Bit My Finger" was in there.

That was a classic. I remember when his family sold that video as an NFT!
Oh yeah. I was actually talking with my girlfriend about how crazy that whole NFT thing was for a little bit. I wonder how those ape pictures are holding up.

That feels like forever ago at this point—and it was only a few years ago. We kind of fast-forwarded through a few cycles of grift between now and then, which is really fascinating. As someone who works on the production end of things, what would you say your level of skepticism is when it comes to new forms of technology? What's your own smell test like when it comes to the fake versus the real?
I try to stay pretty tapped in. I'm probably on my phone too much. I periodically have to delete Twitter to maintain my sanity. As far as technology as a whole is going, I think we're in some pretty pretty dangerous waters with AI in general. For a lot of musicians, it's a very confusing time, because this is our livelihood—and it's one of the oldest things in the world, a cornerstone of community and culture. It's really strange to see AI artists being in Billboard Top 100. That type of thing is horrible to me, to be honest.

At the same time, with any new tech that comes out specifically to music, it's important to understand why it exists before you let it go. I personally am super against AI music, of course, and AI art—just AI in general. But it's important to understand why it's happening, and I hope that ureal music and real feelings will prevail.

Yeah, I'm very much with you in terms of AI not being good. I've had other musicians say all of this too to me—that it is also worth having an actual educated opinion on this stuff, which a lot of people don't do.
Totally. In the trend of everything becoming easier, we seem to be on an endless quest to streamline everything in our lives—and I think there's aspects of that which are really helpful. Specifically with AI, I keep hearing the argument how we could automate surgeries and do these really complicated things. Which, I'm thinking, "Yeah, okay, cool, then why are we using all of our AI resources to make, Suno and YouTube Shorts AI slop?" I'm sure that, somewhere, they're using AI for actual things that are useful. But the fact that it's available to everybody, and that it's exponentially gotten more powerful over the last two years...it's scary. I really do hope that that the real can prevail, because people, at their cores, whether or not they know it, appreciate a human's touch.

Honestly, I see a lot of this AI shit as really underestimating the intelligence of people. It's very cynical, and I just feel like people are smarter than these companies think they are. People know when they're being had.
It's true. Also, you have to understand that, specifically with music, there's a large group of people who don't really care where their music is from. They don't really care if it's if it's AI or not. That's maybe the scariest part: You could tell somebody that their favorite musician is an AI artist, and they might be like, "I don't care, it's still good." I don't know, we'll see. It's all moving so fast. I'm sure if we have this conversation again in a year, we'll be in some crazy different place.

You've mentioned "Portland music" as something of a concept in prior interviews. I'm interested in hearing you unpack that.
That term started because I just didn't know what to call the music I was making. I'm sure there's somebody out there who has a perfect genre name for it. I was making lo-fi hip-hop beats for a while, and then they were saying I was making, psychedelic pop, and then it was bedroom pop and folktronica. So initially I was like, "Well, it's kind of funny to just say, 'It's Portland music' and have the person on the other side wonder what that is."

But being in Portland definitely impacts my music. I grew up here, I still live here, this is my home. There's a biome that's very specific to the Pacific Northwest. I've been in sessions and played my music for people who aren't familiar with it, and I've heard them say, "Damn, I can hear the rain, it sounds cold. It's cold over there, right?"

How would you describe Portland, personally?
Portland's a beautiful place. I feel so lucky to have grown up here and still live here. Growing up, I didn't have a lot of friends who moved away, and that's because people come from other places to Portland because the climate never gets too cold or too hot. It's just a really beautiful city. There's so much greenery everywhere. I have a love-hate relationship with it, as anybody probably does with their hometown, just because i've been here for so long. There's nothing new here that I see, but I feel very comfortable here. I really like the pace of the city. I briefly lived in L.A. right after high school for a year, and I found myself missing Portland so much—missing the seasons and appreciating stuff about it that I hadn't appreciated before I moved away. It just feels really comfortable to me. All my friends are here. We live in Kenton, which is very small and tight-knit. The people here are really nice.

I think Portland gets a bad rap, specifically from the conservative types. They love to shit on Portland and talk about how everybody here just wants to burn everything down—which, honestly, I'm proud of that. That's awesome. As we have that reputation, they won't come here, so I'm fine with that.

Talk to me more about your time in L.A.
In recent years, I've thought more about it, and I've decided that I didn't give it a fair chance. It was a lot of things happening at once: I was just starting to do music, all my friends went to college, my mom was pressuring me to to go to college or go on a gap year, so I decided that the most logical thing to do would be to move to L.A. I love being there, and I feel really inspired when I'm there, because it's a mecca of what I do. People from, like, Europe—they're not going to Portland to make music. They're going to go to L.A. or New York.

But I felt pretty isolated there, and part of that was because I'd never lived on my own. I just turned 18 a month before I moved, so I was very fresh. I didn't really know how to take care of myself, so I found myself feeling more isolated and anxious than I expected. I were to go back now, I'd probably have a totally different experience, just because I'm way more self-sufficient. But I have nothing against L.A. I love going there for two weeks at a time and working. It's a cool place. I also lived in the Valley, though, so I was really far away from everything, which I don't think helped.

I very briefly flirted with the notion of living in Los Angeles when I was much younger, and a few things just didn't work out in terms of having to move there. I gotta say, I didn't mind! The social aspects of being over there are not really for me.
Yeah, it's definitely weird. I'm not one for small talk at like a café—I kind of hate talking to people—but in L.A., there seems to be this need for everyone to compliment you. They'll be like, "Oh, I love your shirt," and I'm like, "I know you don't love my shirt, let's be real here. We don't have to do this right now." That's definitely different in New York. I've never had anybody say anything to me if I'm not creating the conversation, which I actually love.

Your Wikipedia page says you shot the video for "Enything" in the Portland airport.
So, I actually recently found out that I have a Wikipedia—which, I was like, "Fuck yeah, that's sick." But I definitely did not film it at the airport. I don't know where they got that one from. I actually filmed it at Berry Botanic Garden, which is a weirdly special place to me. It's in the neighborhood that I went to school in, which is a weird forest-y area. I went on a school field trip in first grade, and at some point in the early 2010s, it closed down and has been sitting there abandoned ever since. I think it's owned by the Portland State University Horticulture Department, but they don't do anything with it. It's a really wealthy neighborhood. There's this juxtaposition where all these houses are big fucking mansions, and right in the middle, hidden away by a fence, is this crazy abandoned garden area. There's also a huge house that's abandoned that we were trying to get to shoot the video in, but they boarded it up. I've been going there since I was in high school—probably to, like, smoke weed.

You had to cancel your tour back in 2021 due to financial concerns. Talk to me about that.
I've had varying experiences with tours, mostly just financial problems. The issue is that when I signed my record deal—and this is absolutely no shade to my label—we signed it so that when I go on tour, I can make the full amount of money from ticket sales. They were like, "If we fund this tour, we're going to take a cut of the sales and merch." I was 20 or 21, and I'd never been on tour before, so in my brain I was like, "Yeah, that makes sense. I'll just fund it."

I have friends who are not signed to labels and they'll tour, and I just don't know how it's financially viable unless you have some sort of backing. Every tour I've done, I've come out in the red, unfortunately. There was a tour where I basically lost $10,000, which is crazy. We're working on a Europe tour for the first time, and against my best interest I'm trying to make it work. Ii still feel like a novice in the world of touring, just because I don't have that much experience doing it.

Beyond that, I'm not a natural performer. I'm definitely more of a studio guy. But I love playing music. I love being in the van with my friends and going to all these places, and the act of touring is super fun and engaging to me. It's just that, at the end, I look at the amount of money that I've made, what I have to pay my bandmates, and the amount of money I spent, And every time I'm just like, what the fuck? How did I mess this up?

I feel bad some artists, whose management or booking agents will book them these crazy-ass stadium tours when the artist doesn't really have that pull. Not everyone can play Madison Square Garden. They're just trying to book because live music is kind of hot right now. I mean, it always is, but it seems like a lot of people are going to shows. And then it's like, "Well, fuck, we're not even going to sell like half of these tickets." There's a demand right now that's very clear, and yet you have musicians not making really any money off of the demand and consumers increasingly being like, "Is this how much it costs to go to shows?"

Talk to me about your production work. You've done stuff for Moses Sumney and Zelooperz recently.
I work best by myself. That's when I feel most comfortable. I have a basement studio that I spent a lot of time, money, and effort building out, and I love being down here. My girlfriend's always like, "You've been working all month—you don't want to just take a break?" And I'm like, "Yeah but I'm not working on somebody else's project—this is my stuff that I do when I'm bored."

I also love collaborating with people. Most, if not all, of the rap placement stuff that I've gotten usually comes from me making 15 little one-minute synth samples and sending them to some producer friends who are really in the rap scene. Then randomly I'll get a text that's like, "Hey, I made a beat out of that loop that you sent me and so-and-so got on it." I love trap music and rap music, and being a part of that is awesome.

With Moses, it's funny—he's in town right now and is allegedly going to be at my house in, like, two hours. It's been a totally new experience, because I've never had an artist on his level really cut me into the project. I've worked in sessions for some album or whatever, but the sessions usually end there. With Moses, for whatever reason, I keep getting a call, which is amazing. We've been working together long enough that where we know how we work together. We love to make new stuff, but today we have to work on something old, and we have the rhythm down.

Moses is such a great bandleader. He keeps things really tight and gives really good input, and he'll let me just sit there and work on some stupid idea that I have for an hour, because he's very curious about where things will go, and I really appreciate that. I've been in a lot of sessions where the goal is to just make 15 ideas as fast as possible so they can get fleshed out later—but I've never really worked that way. With Moses, we'll just lock into one thing for six hours, and I love that.

To bring it back full-circle when it comes to Elverum's influence on you—something that's perhaps a bit underrated with his work is the fact that the sound of those records, even at their most lo-fi, is very distinct. I'm curious to hear you talk about using production skills when it comes to giving your own music a distinctive sound.
Because my foundation is Ableton in terms of making my own stuff, production isn't even a thing I do after the fact. It's very rare that I'll write a full song first and then record it. Oftentimes, most if not all of the songs come together as I'm writing them, which is a beautiful luxury of having a home studio, because I don't have to come into the studio with anything. I'm not paying for studio time—I can just go into the basement whenever I want to, which feels really good and comfortable for me. At the end of making my last album, there wasn't even a mixing phase, because I mix as I go. I have a hard time coming up with a song idea first and then figuring out how I want to record it. It usually all happens at the same time.

Making music is more accessible than it ever has been, which is amazing. People are making incredible compositions just in FL Studio with no hardware, gear, anything. Maybe that process is becoming more common. But a lot of times, if I don't finish a song, I'll never go back to it, just because there's so many ideas to make so many songs from.