You Become the Mountain, the new album by Portland resident Jeffrey Silverstein on Arrowhawk Records, may be the perfect album for these uncertain times. The follow-up to his 2018 debut solo EP How on Earth, it’s a record built on patience and restraint, drawing on both the unpretentious emotion of traditional folk and the mind-wandering spiritualism of something altogether more experimental. So if you’re at home and feeling stuck, or feeling hemmed in by worry and anxiety, press play and let yourself be taken by You Become the Mountain‘s soothing currents.
The songs of Jeffrey Silverstein weave together the threads of his life. He is inspired by his work as a special education teacher, his interest in long-distance running and the blue-green colour palette of the Pacific Northwest. Each of these threads carries its own mindful, unhurried dimension, and You Become the Mountain is a tapestry that simultaneously focuses the mind and lets it wander.
The album opens with ambient sounds of kids playing, naturalistic percussion heralding the first taste of Silverstein’s serene cirrostratus guitar. The result is subtly rousing, like warm and hazy images of a summer afternoon film-grained by nostalgia. There are no conventional vocals, a theme across an album that seamlessly blends instrumental and lyric-based compositions, but the track closes with a clip from a Jon Kabat-Zinn meditation tape (which is also where the album gets it’s title) that somehow captures Silverstein’s intentions better than his actual voice. Because if there’s one word that describes You Become the Mountain, it’s meditative.
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Silverstein is joined by Barry Walker Jr. on pedal steel and Alex Chapman on bass who, along with the production skills of Ryan Oxford, add to the dreaminess with painterly strokes and subtle melodies. Listening back to the original mixes of the songs, Silverstein found himself simultaneously laughing in delight and overcome by emotion. “I have immense gratitude for Ryan, Barry, and Alex for helping actualize this record,” he writes in the album’s notes. “It was the closest I had come in years to being able to translate ideas and emotion into sound.”
‘Easy Rider’, which we first featured in its live form last year, is a great example of how this small team came together to create something that sounds almost celestial. Guitar and pedal steel streak across vast negative space in slow arcs, all dusted in the powdery light of a sunset, before gentle beats and Chapman’s bass add a little more dynamism. Thematically, the song has a sense of mellow abandon that is captured in the simple repeated lyric “ride on, easy rider / it’s what you do.” Silverstein previously elaborated on these themes, saying the song is “about making sure you’re finding joy in your work for yourself first and worrying less about what others make of it […] just trying to stay present and let not let future or past thoughts get in the way.”
This is another feeling that runs across the album. The idea of not being afraid of doing things your own way, of celebrating differences, of accepting and embracing yourself and your circumstances. “Perhaps your mountain has snow at the top, and trees on the lower slopes,” As Kabat-Zinn puts it in his monologue. “Perhaps it has one prominent peak, perhaps a series of peaks or a high plateau.”
This concept of self-peace is intertwined with the idea of harmony with our landscape. Long, verbose verses are not the Jeffrey Silverstein way, but even so the presence of the natural world is ever-present. Like on the slow-bloom folk song ‘Return to Roses’, one of the record’s most minimalist moments, as Silverstein sings “The distant drone of a hummingbird, and enough light for everyone.” Of course, natural imagery is conjured as much by the instrumentation as language. There’s something meteorological about ‘Antelope Canyon’; the slightly fuzzed-out guitar, the pattering percussion, the rounded pulse of bass, while the easy sway of ‘Bernard’ takes you to the breezy mountainside before any lyrics appear.
The most impressive thing about You Become the Mountain is its clarity of vision, the way it comes together holistically. It is a record that captures boundless spaces that could be out there in the physical world or right here within ourselves. Perhaps to achieve true peace one must find it both inwardly and outwardly, an equilibrium that removes the illusion of a barrier between us and our environment. To return one last time to Kabat-Zinn:
and when you feel ready to
seeing if you can bring the mountain into your own body
so that your body sitting here and the mountain in your mind’s eye become one
so that as you sit here you share in the massiveness and the stillness and the majesty of the mountain
you become the mountain
You Become the Mountain is out now via Arrowhawk Records and you can get it from the Jeffrey Silverstein Bandcamp page.
Photo credit Shade Standard