always missing deadlines

I can’t begin to explain to how happy I am that there is Mountain Man, and while I’d love to write an essay about why I think the music they make is the stuff of gods and how each of them is as talented as is probably allowed by law, I don’t want to get into a rut of doing that sort of thing. So I’ll try to be as objective as possible when I say that when I first heard “Dog Song”, like many, I was convinced I was hearing a recording through time, lost undiscovered for so long, scratched out on a wax cylinder deep in the heart of Appalachia. I was surprised (and maybe, too, disappointed) when I learned that none of the girls that make up the band are from that region of the country. But what does it say about their music that a listener with little to no knowledge of old time or traditional American musics can suddenly feel connected to it? Why is the image of the summer-dressed, barefoot girl by the creek the first one to come to mind upon hearing the recording?

It’s voices. People aren’t used to hearing them anymore, not the way Mountain Man presents them, at least. As the pop music machine has chugged along, making stars out of questionably talented singers since its inception, the masses so heavily marketed to slowly forgot how to listen to the human voice. Production processes became better, allowing for mistakes to be covered up or redone until performed correctly. More time could be spent as technology made the products cheaper to produce. In conjunction, the vocal part of music also became less important or focused on. Either the singer was pushed into the middle of the mix so as to be indiscernible from any other part of the composition, or the sound of the voice was changed in any number of ways to make it otherworldly, unquestionably inhuman. I think of John Lennon, David Bowie and the The Flaming Lips specifically, but there are an untold number of examples of a desire to see how strange and interesting the studio could make the sound of singing. It is interesting, and I don’t want to take away from what fiddling with effects can bring to the table of music, but in all that time when sonic trails were being laid out on tape and downloaded by the track, something very serious had gone missing.

Maybe Mountain Man consciously wanted to take on the mainstream music industry by going back into the American landscape and writing songs that evoke hard living and agrarian sentiment. That would be nice, but I think it has more to do with the fact that its members started off singing for one another as a form of entertainment and out of enjoyment. Perhaps it’s by accident that they’ve received so much attention for their pastime, however well deserved. While the idea that Mountain Man was designed as an answer to the over-produced superpop albums is enticing to the insecure music consumer, it just doesn’t seem to satisfy in the way it should. Instead, the reality of Mountain Man tells us something much more interesting about ourselves and about where music may end up in the future. While television shows like American Idol and The Voice may give audiences the illusion of witnessing singing at its best, back on the ground there is a thirst for the human sounding human voice that still needs slaking.

The recordings of Mountain Man may not be perfect. You may hear a slightly off pitch, you might hear the sound of creaking floors. And that might be a problem if Mountain Man were worried about that sort of thing. Instead, they’ve done what many recording artists have neglected: carefully crafted songs, perform live, and do a hell of a job at it. The perks of studio play are great, but at the core of musical creation is the idea of sharing through performance. Whether the performance is on a stage or in a living room is unimportant. The community feeling of music is on its way back in. The once gone culture of producing entertainment at home has awoken again. So brew some coffee or tea because while not everyone can sing like Mountain Man, after hearing them you’ll want to gather a couple of friends, hang out and try.

PS: If you want to hear the human voice explore it’s possibilities, try this (try to ignore the sudden crowd outbursts if you can):