High on the Mountain

Album: Like the River Loves the Sea (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • I am high on the mountain
    Looking over the fields
    At the vines and the flowers
    So entwines, just as you and I used to be


    Joan Shelley's deep attachment to all things ecological shines through on Like the River Loves the Sea. Shady trees, flowers and fields all feature in the string-laden "High On the Mountain. "You can go into the woods and be relieved of some of your awful humanness," explained Shelley to Q Magazine. "That's kind of what I'm trying to do with music. Remind us that we like to be in green."
  • Joan Shelley recorded Like the River Loves the Sea in Iceland's Greenhouse Studios. For an album that is so deeply attached to the fields, farms and flowing water of Kentucky, it seems counterintuitive to run away from the very place that inspired her to make it, but Shelley disagrees. "I think most people experience this thing, when you leave and see what you've taken for granted," she explained to Q magazine. "You see the shape of your life and your home by not having that thing around."

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