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This week’s song is attempting to address the weird way in which our concepts of our lives shift around. One day being alive feels one way, and the next day it feels different. One day you can relate with a perspective, and the next day you can’t. One day you’re afraid of the dark, and suddenly you grow out of it. One day you think you know who you are, then the next you don’t anymore, and then the day after that you know it stronger than ever. Being alive is tumultuous and strange. Sometimes it feels like we’re all just hanging on for dear life as the scenery passes us by at some ludicrous speed. This song is about how weird it is that every day you are a unique and temporary iteration of yourself, and each iteration is just floating away into the past. Strange indeed.

Here’s hoping your Monday doesn’t totally suck.
~M.E.

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Today is my twenty-eighth birthday, and while I’m intellectually aware that I’m not very old at all, I can’t help but wonder if time is catching up with me. I don’t tend to be the type of person who gets all morbid around birthdays, but given the world we live in and the things that have been happening lately, I have a bit of a heightened awareness of the fact that we might meet our maker any day of the week. The last thing that I want to do is die (which I suppose is convenient, since it is the last thing that I will do), but thinking ever so briefly about the inevitability of death sometimes helps me to frame my life and the way I’m living it. If in some crisis I were to be snuffed away, what am I leaving here?

But when I get to thinking on this track, I always circle around to the same place: people who think about dying aren’t thinking about living, so I do my best to cut it out. But then I get to thinking about the institutional ways that we think about death. I think about the way death is dangled in front of people like a carrot. Heaven is a big reward. Whoever scores the most points gets the biggest carrot. I’m not here to refute the existence of heaven. It isn’t really my business, and to be honest I don’t think it matters if it is there. No matter what you believe happens when you die, it doesn’t mean that you have to live your life obsessing over it. It only serves to suppress a persons will to live to concern ones self with dying. That might seem hypocritical of me to say given the deadly hymn that I just concocted, but the point of the song was to come to that conclusion. That’s why the song is less than two minutes long; that’s about as long as anybody should think about death before getting back to the business of living.

Here’s hoping your Monday doesn’t totally suck.
~M.E.

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Notes
It is a commonly held truism that paramount among the things on which we can rely are the daily rising and setting of the sun. We can certainly count on this to happen each day, and those who don’t necessarily believe that it will happen are usually considered to be fatalistic or morbid. But to me, the verb to rely means a lot more than just to be sure that something will happen. To rely holds a connotation of trust and security. There is a way of understanding this word that excludes even the sun from fitting the definition of reliability. I rely on my friends and family. I rely on them for emotional support. I rely on them for encouragement. I rely on them for love. I rely on them for honesty. Even the stranger who spray-painted “don’t give up” on a wall in Amherst represents proof that human beings are reliable sources of affirmation. The sun is reliable for warmth, and life and light, but when it comes to certain human needs it is decidedly cold. I’ll take my fellow humans any day of the week.

This song is slow and lilting like a hangover. I’ve got no voice left for singing after three days of campfire sing-alongs that lasted way into the night. Very few Mount Everest tunes sound so accurately the way that I feel. It was well worth every wobbly note and missed falsetto.

Here’s hoping your Monday doesn’t totally suck.
~M.E.

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This week I’m continuing with this weird sythed-out 80’s vibe that I’ve been tinkering with lately. This time I brought in the big-tom-drum-fills… uh oh! Once again, this tune came out of a moment related to the tragedy in Boston, but this time it was a much quieter and more personal moment. The night of the big manhunt, after all was said and done, I went out for a run to clear my head. While I was out, these huge rain clouds swept in and released the pent up frustrations of that entire week down upon me. It was truly cathartic, and I started thinking of the ways that I looked at the world before, and the ways that I now look at the world in light of everything that has happened. My friends in big cities came to mind, and I realized that I have never truly worried about their safety. The harsh realization of my past-naiveté came up against my stubborn will to stay the same, and I didn’t really like it. I took heart, however, in the notion that we never stay the same, and that all the times that I’ve had to change in the past didn’t hurt so much that I couldn’t keep on enjoying life. Even with calamity and uncertainty abound, this is the life we have.

Here’s hoping your Monday doesn’t totally suck.
~M.E.

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Every cent will benefit victims of the tragedies in Boston, MA and and West, TX.
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Notes
What is there left to be said about last week? I can’t say nothing. I was born in Boston, and when I was a kid my Dad ran the Boston Marathon each year. The Marathon route thundered through my home town at the bottom of my street, one hundred yards from my house. It was always a thrilling and wonderful day, and it lives in my memory as some of the brightest moments of my youth. So I can’t say nothing about it, even though it is hard for me to gather my thoughts on this subject. This whole thing is etched into my heart the way it is for so many others, and I’d have to ignore my heart to write about anything else this week.

Last week was one of the strangest in memory. Boston burst into violence on Monday and Friday, bookending a week that also witnessed a catastrophe beyond comprehension in Texas. What is left to say about the human drama that boiled over in America? About the heartbreaking loss? About the heroism and outpouring of human decency? About the baffling choices made by promising young men who could have embraced the opportunity of their adoptive home? About the mettle of responders to do what must be done? About the sacrifices made and lives forever altered? I’m not sure what I have to add to this narrative, so I just wrote a song about how I feel.

I usually sell these songs for whatever meager profit I can manage each week. I abhor the idea that I could write a song about this tragedy and gain any personal profit from it, so originally I was going to offer it as a free download. I changed my mind late in the game. It strikes me that Mount Everest listeners must be a caring bunch, so I decided to sell this song after all, but I won’t be keeping any of the money. Name your price for the MP3 of this song on Bandcamp, and every cent will go to charities supporting victims of the tragedies in Boston, Massachusetts and West, Texas. Thank you so much for your generosity!

Here’s hoping your Monday doesn’t totally suck.
~M.E.

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Notes
This is a song about the heart and its struggle to open itself up. I don’t write a lot of songs about love. I tend to feel like it is territory that has been plenty covered in the history of music. But every now and then I have a song that just sounds like it should address it, or a lyric that just doesn’t fit into a song that isn’t unselfconsciously about it. Perhaps I don’t write a lot of love songs because I’m not in love, and truthfully while this song is about love it isn’t a love song. It is a longing song. It is about trying not to decide to give up on the entire institution. But it is also a hopeful song. It acknowledges that finding one’s self in a place where one can love requires adopting a new optimism. Not loving at all is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It sends you around in circles. Perhaps if one acknowledges that one could potentially love anybody, one could love somebody in particular. This song is also full of awesome robots and love-lazers, and some grooves that I haven’t returned to in a little while. If I’m being honest, I really love this one.

Here’s hoping your Monday doesn’t totally suck.
~M.E.

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I’ve been traveling for the past couple of weeks, and during that period of time I have been attempting to get a glimpse of my future. As I’ve done every two or so years since I graduated from college, I am once again planning a move. Visiting a place with a move in mind is so much different than visiting a place just to visit it. Strangers on the street might actually be future friends, lovers, or rivals. A block you walk down on your way to lunch might be your future home. A park you pause at to take in the scenery might one day be a familiar respite. The potential future familiarity of such things puts me on edge. Everything around seems so much more important than it is in that moment. This is a song about spending a couple of weeks feeling on edge in that way. It is about standing at the precipice of the future and not really knowing what to do with yourself. It is about a weeks long period of near panicked excitement that forces a person to evaluate who they are and who they want to be.

~M.E.

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Pictures of Airplanes, as some of you know, was once the name of a band that I played in with some of my best friends ever (it was better known by its later names Go Mordecai, and Lightning Bug). It wasn’t my plan to name the song this way, but as I was working on the illustration, which is a picture of an airplane, I just couldn’t resist.

This song is about being on an airplane. The low, dull roar of the engines always puts my brain into quiet reflection. The impossible setting, tens of thousands of feet in the air, always provides fuel for that reflection. Looking down on civilization and wilderness is a poetic activity. Being in the sky might as well be the closest we can get to “God” here on Earth, so when we come back down again, it is no wonder that the Earth seems transformed. It isn’t just the safety of solid ground we are feeling, but an altered perception of scale and context. Airplanes are crazy.

~M.E.

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I’ve got a busy couple of weeks coming up, filled with travel, friends, family and all sorts of things to do, so this past week I worked up a backlog of music to last Mount Everest a few Mondays while I’m off doing other stuff. This is the first of three songs that were written pretty much simultaneously. It is about talking and feeling like nobody is listening. It is about having ideas, and feeling like not much of anybody notices, and the toll that sort of thing can take on a person. It is about running your mouth off and wondering if your really said aloud what you think you might have just said. It is also about putting this music out week after week and wondering who is going to hear it. It isn’t much of a happy song, but it is a pretty song, so I hope you like it enough to come back next week for a new song about airplanes!

~M.E.

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I’ve written again and again about my tendency toward insomnia, and my habit of being up late at night, night after night. This week, I’ve got another song to add to that category, but it feels different from the other ones. This one is about a transition in thought processes. When I’m up late at night, I’m usually lying in bed trying to sleep, but my head is buzzing with activity. It has traditionally been a time when I process some panicked feeling, and alternate between emotional volatility and rational soothing calm. Lately though, the panic has been replaced with a similarly edgy excitement, except it is all positive. It is equally as inhibitive to sleep, but I’m thinking really good thoughts. This song is about making that transition. It just makes me feel better than my other insomnia songs.

~M.E.