13. Let's Climb a Mossy Hill
Let's climb up a mossy hill. Let's cast our young eyes upward
to the azure filtered soft through spruces, then look down at needles dry
in summer's gentle Western heat beneath our short and racing limbs.
Let's bound out of the family car and race towards summer's blue sky
at the roadside park with water sounds, then pant and smile and yodel
on a cloudless mossy hilltop in our endless youth and sun and now
Let's climb, let's climb, let's climb, let's climb!
Come on, come on, come on, come on!
Let's think about the day when we climbed up the mossy hill
in some unnamed generic roadside park - the shorts that we were wearing,
and the insect bites upon our legs, and how the water smelled and rushed.
Let's think about our memory of the sun and how it shone down,
if in fact it shone through conifers, when we were in deciduous
glacial plains where hills were flat and low and water slow and earthen-smelling.
Let's write a song about the half-remembered shining times
that dart between our tired neurons that are dying every day
and forming new conflated pasts that speak sincerely but in error.
Let's write a song and christen it "Let's Climb a Mossy Hill"
and put our fingers in our ears and stop the water flowing oceanward
and set that day in amber, like insects lost on sunny days.
Whew, a lot of words! This one has been a live staple at the occasional shows I have played, and it's always amazed me that I've been able to remember them all. But they're all so true. I wrote these words up in Skypad after a long and thrilling phone conversation with someone, heart all aflutter.
The lyrics are about something that definitely happened, but I'm not sure where or when or how or why. Were they in Oregon? Iowa? Wyoming? California? My family took a lot of road trips when I was young, and this particular peak experience (ha ha) could have taken place in any number of them. Or all of them. I was young and hyper and looking for any excuse to run around.
Anyway, we recorded this one during a break in the recording of the Minor Thirds' Saskatchewan in the basement of Chris and Charlotte's house in Ladd's Addition (back when regular young rockers could afford to split a house in Portland's tonier neighborhoods). I played guitar and so did Goat-Boy and Chris is obviously on the piano and the other Chris is clearly playing the drums, but who played the bass? I asked everyone who could have been involved, and no-one confessed to playing bass, so I guess I must have overdubbed it myself. So many layers of mystery in this one!
