B I G . S I R . P R O J E C T S .

Mount Everest - Embrace/Defy/Emerge Resolved

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Mount Everest - Top of the Earth

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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.

Buy Now: “Top of the Earth”

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.

- M.E.

Mount Everest - Sunday Night Blown Away

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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.

Buy Now: “Sunday Night Blown Away”

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.

- M.E.

Mount Everest - Letters From The Apocalypse

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Notes:

This song is about a specific feeling that I’ve had that can only be described by attempting to imagine an impossibly strange scenario.

Buy Now: “Letters From The Apocalypse”

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.

- M.E.

Mount Everest - Out of The Dark Dark Dark

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Notes:

The sky outside my window is gray. All weekend long I listened to the wind banging the trees together and shaking little pieces of my house around. It was a blustery cacophony. It was like the world outside was restless. Inside my head something similar was going on.

Buy Now: “Out of The Dark Dark Dark”

We’re nearing the end of one season and the start of another. It is a reflective time. But this isn’t really one of those season songs that I like to write (re: last week among others), although the world is indeed coming out of the dark in quite a literal sense.

This is a song about feeling some darkness inside and pushing away from it. It’s about interpreting your thoughts in many different ways and choosing what your own truth is. It’s about routine and cycle. Every time I say “you” in this song I really mean me unless this song is also about you, in which case “you” means you.

- M.E.

Sound Making Buddies - Call Us Cinders

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Feat. Mount Everest // Nick Mastors // James Atwood // Tamarinda Figueroa // Miguel Williams

Notes:

Humans gathered around a fire with instruments and thoughts. Luckily there were microphones handy and the whole thing was captured in a fleeting moment. Tamarinda sat writing the words to this song and doodling the pictures that would become this week’s artwork and she offered this piece of wisdom about the group around her:

Buy Now: “Call Us Cinders”

“Something about how we sat around the fire all weekend – how there is so much warmth/love between us even though it’s winter… how it’ll last through to spring when we’ll thrive, and how winter sucks without friends.”

I agree with her that we need friends to get through the winter. Sometimes winter seems long. Perhaps it will never end and we’ll endure cold for eternity, and damn the thought is getting me down when I look to my left and Miguel has plastic lizards in his hair. Winter aint so bad!

- M.E.

Mount Everest - Bad Habits/Good Signs

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Notes:

We’ve all got bad habits. Some of them aren’t such a big deal. There’s little consequence to forgetting to floss now and then, or cracking your knuckles when you get stressed out. Some of them are bigger, and less easily recognized in one’s self, like placing undue burdens on people, or taking people for granted.

Buy Now: “Bad Habits/Good Signs”

From big to small, it matters that we attempt to identify our bad habits, and that we work on breaking them. Changing habits can be one way that we make progress as people. It can be an important way that we get better.

This is a song about trying to break the big ones, and it’s hopefully a song about becoming a little bit better little by little.

- M.E.

FICIAL - Mad $kill$

Mount Everest - Is This The Shape of Things To Come?

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Notes:

This week’s song was written in anticipation of an unknown future. The words are a play on the old concept that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Is the shape of things to come the same as the shape of things as they are now?

Buy Now: “Is This The Shape of Things To Come?”

Do people change? Do fortunes change? Does the country change, or are we merely playing out roles in a repeating history on a loop? Can anything or anybody ever change if we are to cynical to believe that it can? I like this song. It feels a little off, but in a way that is appealing to me.

I also like the weird little guy in this week’s artwork, although I find him unsettling. He’s like a creepy little cartoon hipster made of blood. I hope he isn’t the shape of things to come …

- M.E.

Mount Everest - 20th Century Kind of Life ft. Alex Burke

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Notes:

Several years ago I co-wrote a song called The Manhattan Project that was intended to be an emotionally cathartic sigh of relief having left the 20th century and all of its horrors and genocide behind. It was a little bit earlier in the 21st century when I wrote that song, and I’m not sure that I could have anticipated writing the exact opposite song today.

Buy Now: “20th Century Kind of Life”

20th Century Kind Of Life is asking the previous century “where have you gone?… and can you come back!?” I grew up in the 1990s, which were obviously amazing. It was the tail end of the 20th century, and most of the horrors of 20th were well behind us. It was all sunshine and Clintons, and while the grownups were busy setting the stage for the mother of all letdowns come the Oughts, nobody had a clue what was about to happen, and things were pretty nice for a lot of people.

This song longs for blissful ignorance, but ultimately recognizes reality. The past sure looks nice from here, and while it’s nice to fantasize about it from time to time, it’s better to live in the moment so you don’t have to find out that the past wasn’t the paradise you imagined it to be, but just a previous version of reality filled with just as many challenges.

- M.E.

Mount Everest - My Lips Are Sealed

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Notes:

My Lips Are Sealed is not about keeping secrets. It’s about not being able to speak. The fall of 2010 was the weirdest time in my life. It was the culmination of a year long ordeal with a vocal cyst that upended all of my plans and put my life on a decidedly different path. I wrote about this as I reflected on releasing 60 songs in 60 weeks. It was a moment that my timeline hinged on. Without the weirdness of that fall none of these songs would have been written, and the most inconvenient thing to ever happen to me would never have turned into the catalyst for what I’ve begun to view as my life’s work.

Buy Now: “My Lips Are Sealed”

I was horse for over a year, unable to sing, and unable to interact in a conventional fashion. I still have a knee jerk reaction to being in crowded places, because I fear the damage that raising my voice even a little might do. It was a very bad year and it did bad things to my personal state, but the weirdest part by far was the very end of it. Surgery fixed me up good, but after the doc cut me up I had to go on total vocal rest, which meant no speaking of any kind for any reason for a period of weeks.

This song is about feeling trapped in your own skull because you can’t say a word. It’s about some time that I spent isolated in the woods in New Hampshire because being around people was too much for me to cope with. It is also about the immense gratitude that I feel toward my parents for helping me through that period of my life. It’s about being a different person later on.

- M.E.