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For the past couple of weeks I have been housesitting for my folks, and in their living room there is a magnificent baby grand piano. It has made its way onto a couple of Mount Everest tracks in the past, but I have long wanted to do something that would really feature it. I wanted to make a song with just the piano and my voice. The piano is seldom played, and therefore it is seldom tuned which gives it a slightly off-key honky-tonk sound, which when coupled with the full body of its baby-grand stature brings to mind a splendid sense of imperfection. It is a beautiful imperfection that I recognize in all of us as human beings. Not very far below the surface we are flawed, and those flaws make us unique, and inspire us to strive for more. When I look at a friend or a stranger, I wonder about their hidden struggles, and their depth of experience that is sacred and often private. People are walking stories, and each story is different. That is what I wrote about in this week’s song on my parents’ wonderful old baby-grand.

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

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I don’t spend a whole lot of time in relationships. Perhaps one of the reasons behind that is my tendency to allow my will to be walked over. I don’t know if the root is a lack of self confidence, but I’ve always tried for the path of least resistance rather than speaking my peace, like I’m lucky to have somebody’s attention and I’m desperate not to do or say anything to lose it. As a result of this I just feel like a stronger version of myself when I’m on my own. This song is a fictional reversal of my usual persona. The narrator of this song is confident that his point of view is sound and he shouldn’t have to change who he fundamentally is for another person. He is able to assign blame when necessary instead of always shouldering it. He is able to righteously walk out when the situation is clearly hopeless, rather than hanging on for the sake of convenience. I like this narrator, despite the fact that he isn’t necessarily reliable. Certainly all the blame doesn’t belong in one place, and his surety of his correctness should be questioned. But he is decisive nonetheless, and that is a trait that I’ve struggled to attain.

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

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I am going to be brutally honest about this week’s song. I mailed it in. Some combination of lack of inspiration and procrastination lead me to write a song that I was barely interested in finishing. I won’t speak to whether or not it is a good song. That is up to the listener to decide. As this is a songwriting blog, and it is meant to shed light on the songwriting process, I’ll take this opportunity to elucidate a piece of the process that I usually hope to hide from my audience. Some songs are simply creative non-starters. Usually I’m able to push through it, or scrap it and write something different. Today I wasn’t so lucky. If I’m being totally candid, I’m not even sure what this song is about. I pretty much just wrote down some nonsense that sounded like Mount Everest lyrics. I wanted to write a simple and subtle followup to last week’s simple and subtle success, but instead I wrote whatever this is. I’m a little disappointed that things didn’t go better this week, but mostly I’m just relieved that this song is behind me. When I talk about songwriting, I frequently note that unsuccessful writing experiences are merely stepping stones to the next song that I’ll fall in love with writing.

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

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Notes
Despite being raised with the quintessential suburban experience, over the last decade I have done my damnedest to recast myself as some sort of new-fangled country bumpkin. When most of my friends were moving into big cities to seek their fortunes, I fled for the woods for better or for worse. I understand why most people try to get their kicks under big city lights, but to me it always seemed like a sort of obvious brand of excitement. I have always preferred to get up to no good in the middle of nowhere. Now as I prepare to drag myself kicking and screaming (in a good way) to some kind of new life in New York City, I find myself reflecting on all the country mischief that I have made over the years. This song is a kind of premature and temporary wistful farewell to the forrest. It is about the friendships that I have forged there, the songs we have sung there, and the meaning that one can only divine from an uncorrupted environment.

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

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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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Notes
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.