mount everest

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In the last few years I’ve had a lot of friends who have gone through the process of losing people very close them. It has been heartbreaking to watch people go through this type of ordeal, and I always wonder about where they will come out on the other end of it. I spent a lot of my weekend deep in conversation with a dear friend who suffered a great loss and then went out into the world to try and figure out what it all meant. Compared to the person who left, the person who came back had an amazing depth of understanding. It’s not necessarily the type of understanding that is easily put into words, and it’s so personal to her that I dare not draw her conclusions for her. But I was struck by the contrast. Anger had become perspective in such a fundamental way. I just had to reflect on it with this song.

I’m away from my usual command center, and I didn’t have access to some of the bells and whistles that I might normally employ on a song like this, so I decided to keep it really simple and focus on the chord progression. This is about as stripped down as Mount Everest gets. A dude and a mandolin.

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

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This is a little song about missing people. The idea here is that you could get in the river and it would take you to somebody you feel like you need to see. But it doesn’t take you there. You tried to let the river do all the work for you. You tried to be passive about it and just go for the ride, but the river spits you out wherever it wants to. It spits you out and maybe you’re even more removed from whoever it was you were trying to get to. You have to do the work yourself. You have to admit that it’s not just that somebody is far away from you, but that you are far away from them too. It’s a simple little song, and its a continuation of my recent love affair with simple little guitar songs.

By the way, the title that I chose for this song is sort of a joke. If you happen to get the joke, that means that you are a huge nerd. But I’m okay with that, because I’m the nerd who cracked the joke.

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

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Featuring Rebecca Horton
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Notes
Spending time with long absent friends this weekend, I noticed a prevailing theme in our conversation. Everyone I know is exhausted and disgusted with social media and constant connectivity. It was supposed to be a revolution in communication, but instead we feel voyeuristic and exploited, and relationships have been cheapened and made superficial. The word “friend” has become ostensibly meaningless in the culture at large. I have hundreds of them. Yet we religiously update our status and poke our friends as if we’ve been defeated. I use promoting this website as my excuse for doing it. Everyone’s got their own excuse. The truth is we like it, and we’re worse people for it. Mark Zuckerberg says you are worth a hundred dollars to him. That makes me want to take a shower. This is a song about real friendship. The list of facts that you read about your friends on their timelines are not the truth. They might be true, but you can’t learn the truth in somebody unless you do it the old fashioned way. You talk. You listen. You write a letter and you take the time to make it mean something. You share a meal. You share a drink. You think hard about somebody. You tell them they matter to you. You poke them – with your actual finger – and you know they’re real.

Thanks to Rebecca Horton for existing and inviting me on an adventure this weekend. Also thanks to Rebecca for talking to Rob’s cat in a sweet voice within range of the microphone that I was using to write this song. It’s my favorite part of the song.

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

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In celebration of 75 weeks of new music I made you a gift: Three Totally Free E.P.s for you and your loved ones to enjoy. These E.P.s include some of my favorite Mount Everest songs, and each reflects a particular mood, sentiment, or aspect of the music that I write week after week. They will be free for a limited time only, so jump on this opportunity.

Click here to download them from Sendspace, or click on the artwork below to download them from Bandcamp.

This week’s song is about suffering through the worst party ever. It’s the kind of party filled with the worst people you can think of. They are the kind of people who make you question the goodness of humanity. They are pretentious, self absorbed, obnoxious, fake, or whatever makes your blood boil in a social scenario. You are stuck there, and you’ve probably had a few too many drinks to try and make the situation bearable. It didn’t work. It’s a rock and roll song and it’s awesome. It’s the first track on “Cut and Run” (the red E.P. down below). Please download it and share it, and scroll way down to the bottom and hit “like” so all of your friends will know all about crazy old Mount Everest giving all his stuff away for free!

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

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Notes
I don’t write so many pretty songs. I think this is a pretty song. My first goal with this one was to push the fingerpicked guitar line to a place where the verses wouldn’t need any other instrumental accompaniment. I think I got it so that any other instrumentation in the verses would have sounded like an intrusion. This allows those sections plenty of space to breathe, and makes the more dense sections pop out even more.

The song is about a quiet evening segueing into a restless night’s sleep. It is about tossing and turning with visions in one’s head: Visions of love and loneliness, light and darkness, idealized pasts and uncertain futures. It is about visions of contrast that dissipate and are gone in the morning, but linger as feelings.

Please be sure to stop by next week to help me celebrate 75 weeks of new music!

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

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Notes
This song isn’t about anything recent or current in my life. I thought of the hook, and it seemed right for the song, so I dredged up old feelings of rejection and loss from previous times in my life to get into the right headspace for this tune. This song is about aimlessly fumbling through being rejected. It is about the way that it doesn’t make sense when acceptance seemed like a foregone conclusion. It is about owning up to the reasons for incompatibility and being alright with them. It is about things being so much better in retrospect.

I made a picture of stars to accompany this song because I wanted to make a picture of stars, not because it has anything to do with the song.

This song was a very smooth writing experience. I wrote it on a guitar with five strings tuned all wacky because that’s how James left it. It is his guitar and it is very nice. I fiddled with the guitar part all week, and it never gave me any trouble. So thank you to this song for cooperating and making my life pretty easy.

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

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Notes
Hi folks. After pretty much mailing it in last week, I really tried to bring it with this one. This is a tune about the wonder of gratitude. It is about how the people who act as your support system can radically alter your perspective in really simple ways. In so doing they can keep you afloat. It might be sort of hard to glean this theme from the words, but I swear, it’s in there.

I’m continuing my acoustic kick that I’ve been on for the past few weeks, but I’m trying to bring some elements back in without getting too crowded. This song feels like two separate songs spliced into one another, and it is a dynamic that I like. Even the voices in the two distinct sections sound different. Also, I’m really into the huge tambourine hits. I hope you like it.

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

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So it turns out that by moving to Western Massachusetts last fall, I have returned to my ancestral homeland. My father grew up as a Southerner, but in actually his lineage can be traced to New England on his mother’s side, and the countryside out here is dotted with cemeteries filled with people that I am related to. They’ve been resting in these places for centuries now, and I recently decided to pay some of them a visit. Cemeteries are peaceful and reflective places, and this is a song about them. I looked at these old grave markers, chipping away over the years due to the relentless assault of time and nature, and I pondered who the people underneath them might have been. I pondered what –if anything beyond genetics– these people had to do with me, or with my family as I know it. It turns out you can’t glean too much information from a gravestone. You’ve got a name, you’ve got a date or two, and if you are really lucky you might have a profession. The rest is up to imagination. As I stood there, I had a vision of some future descendant some hundreds of years from now standing over my grave and asking the same questions. I should be so lucky. I’m glad that I paid my family a visit, even if I don’t know them very well.

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

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Ever since I was little I’ve always kept sketchbooks and notebooks. I have a lot of them. I know it is wasteful, but until recently I never really filled them up all the way. I would skip pages and pages in order to give my ideas space from each other. When my ideas seemed to be on a totally different track, I would just start a new notebook. Looking through my old notebooks is sort of a treasure hunt. Pages will go by and by, and then down there in the corner on the back of a page there will be a sentence fragment underlined seven times as if it were the most important thought I could ever have. More pages will pass and suddenly there is a deluge of unfinished drawings and old song lyrics crammed together using both sides of every sheet until finally the sketches lose structure, the words trickle to a stop, the blank pages resume, and inevitably the notebook is abandoned for another one.

I love these old notebooks and have wanted to try to write about them for a long time. One thing that strikes me when I look through one of them is the difficulty that I have reconciling the author of the notebooks with the person that I am today. Sometimes he is so much more vital and creative than I feel. Other times he is enraged yet full of urgency. On occasion he is sensitive and vulnerable. Sometimes he is pretty impressive. Other times he is a hack. This song is about trying to figure out how this author relates to me. It is about trying to figure out if I’m still the person who left all of these artifacts behind. Incidentally, I never began to fill my notebooks up all of the way until I started this website. Week 70 appears about two thirds of the way through my second notebook since this project began. In both of these notebooks there is a tragic absence of drawings. Alas.

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

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This song is about a specific feeling that I’ve had that can only be described by attempting to imagine an impossibly strange scenario. This is the scenario and the feeling: You are so wrapped up in your unfulfilled goals that the only option seems to be to run away and become one of those crazy religious zealots outside of the baseball stadium who hands out apocalyptic literature about revelations and assures people that they are going to hell. The hope is that somehow by doing this you will unlock the potential hidden within you to accept the life you have, rather than pining for one you haven’t made yet. Once you have done this you can then meet and fall in love with an equally lost and narcissistic soul who has also taken a chance on an insane lifestyle and thus found the hidden potential within to accept the world the way it is. Are you still with me? It is a song about restlessness and it is my favorite song that I’ve written since the fall.

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

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