Pic: Izzie Austin

Mountains Mountains Mountains began with these notes hurried into my workbook after a long drive:

Highway Hypnosis

Perhaps we drive to be driven, and are floored to be flawed. Take an imperfect body. Or an imperfect body of water.

It was about three years ago … surely … no not quite … but doesn’t everything feel so long ago? Even age feels an indeterminate measure for a state in which I feel myself further away from the instant I arrive.

That time and those memories came back to me in circles. In shallow afterthoughts. I cooee! in loops and the original sounds like an echo. As though the present is so fleeting it must be reminded of its actions.

I am happy because I hear my laugh.

It was busy on the long-weekend roads and I chose not to drive for that reason. Instead I lay on the back seat listening to my friends up front, watching clouds move further away out the window. Upside-down till I was dizzy and sick.

A mishmash picnic with my friends whose folks live overseas, or first overstrait then overseas. We walked for a while. The weather behaved. Then I read and dozed as the frisbee was thrown overhead. It made me think.

Perhaps we drive to be driven, and are flawed to be floored. Take an imperfect body. Or an imperfect body of water.

That time and the car ride came back to me when I sat down to play guitar and write (hopefully a song). I had been stuck on the Japanese proverb, 'The reverse side has a reverse side.' Nothing is ever just one thing. Beneath every surface there is something else waiting to be seen; it reminds us to look deeper, to question first impressions.

Mountains Mountains Mountains is about this beauty and this rot, about pleasure and grief, and how even the most pristine places carry traces of what came before. We live in the layers. In what is visible, what is hidden, and the quiet charge in between.

Abandoned dams
Pristine scenes
Homes overgrown
Seas of trees

This song came out of moments that felt both intimate and expansive. A parked car. A sweeping view. A private undoing. It’s about renewal, about sexuality, about finding awe in the aftermath. The original and its dear friend the reverse side. The echo.

It’s early on you don’t gotta wait long
You make me come undone
We parked on the path
Mountains mountains mountains

There’s tension in it. Between what’s pristine and what’s overgrown.

Abandoned dams
Pristine screams
Homes overgrown
Seas of bees

The beauty lives not in the separation, but in the merging of the two, to become something new.