So now there are 200 of these! This week I couldn’t help but reflect on what this Mount Everest project has meant to me over the years. It’s a companion. It’s a friend. It’s a burden. It’s my therapist. It’s my alter-ego. It’s so many things to me. This is a very self indulgent song. It is a song about writing two hundred Mount Everest songs. It is a song that I’ve written to Mount Everest as if it has its own subjectivity, independent of my own. I think maybe it might. Writing this song I came to an important insight about my project. I’ve always thought of the Mount Everest metaphor as referencing the climb, the persistent work of putting one of these things out every week. What I realize now is that it’s really about the view as well. The higher I climb, the farther I can see, both into myself, and across the wide world. Sometimes I can’t stand this project. It can get in the way of things, and some days I want to let it go. But then I look at how it has carried me out of the deepest pit of my life, up into my greatest heights so far. Rather than let it slip behind me, I’ll extend my hand to my old friend and we’ll continue the climb together. Of course we will.
200 is a moment to pause and say thanks. Thanks to each of you listening today, yesterday, and any day since I started doing this. Thanks to Nick Mastors for starting this project with me in the first place, and more recently for giving Mount Everest new life through the tremendous gift of his prized Fender Telecaster. Thanks to the many many collaborators who have graced this site with their talent and friendship. Thanks to my Mom and Dad because they’ve been with me on this from the start. Thanks to my beautiful friends who are the faces I imagine singing to when I record these. Thanks to my wonderful fiancée, Rebecca, who has been the inspiration for more of these songs than I’ve admitted to her (including parts of this one). Thanks to each one of you who joins me next week for number 201.
lyrics
Where you goin' to?
I've seen the place you've been
I've sen the traces you worked up
And left as you went
Was it a mighty thing?
At least that's how it felt
Looked at your pain like strings
You plucked to shake it all out
At least that's how it felt
And I would be like you
I'd have the love you bring
I'd have your dream of truth
I'd have the bells that you ring
I can hear them ringing now
So I will pull you up
You've done the same for me
My friend we're climbing up right now
To see what we can see
And I can see it now
I see you I see you I see
I see you I see you you see me
Are you still burning up?
And can you still believe
That when you started out
You had to learn to release
Those little burning kinds of things
And somewhere down down deep
I'm sure I'll always be
Stuck there at 25
And working penance to my grief
What kind of man that made of me...
So I will pull you up
You've done the same for me
My friend we're climbing up right now
To see what we can see
And I can see it now
I see you I see you I see
I see you I see you you see me