Mt. Kili Writes for One Person and Lets the Song Find Everyone Else
Punk Head: Your project began with songs written for your twin daughters, but The Noticer is now reaching listeners around the world. Has that change in audience altered the way you write, or do you still approach a song as though you're making it for someone you know personally?
Mt. Kili: The songs still begin the same way they always have: written for someone specific. The first album was lullabies for my daughters, and the only reason any of this exists is that I promised them I'd put those songs on the radio. The Noticer reaching people I'll never meet hasn't changed how I write, because I don't think a song travels by being made general. It travels by being true about one person, one room, one moment. If I can still imagine singing it to somebody I know, I trust it. The audience got bigger; the songs are still made at the same small scale.
Punk Head: The album's title suggests a particular way of paying attention to the world. What do you find yourself noticing that other people tend to overlook, and how does that instinct find its way into your songs?
Mt. Kili: I notice quiet things: the light changing in a room, the pause before somebody answers, the weather inside a person before they say anything out loud. Most of life happens at that volume, and most of us walk past it because we're filling up with noise and wanting. These songs come from the opposite practice — slowing down until the small thing becomes the whole thing. When your mind is quiet, something can germinate. That's really what a noticer is: not someone who sees more, but someone who stops long enough for what's already there to register.
Punk Head: "Kyle" approaches loss through the memory of a specific person, while "The Weather Report" uses weather as an emotional metaphor. How do you decide when a feeling needs to be expressed directly and when it needs an image or a little distance?
Mt. Kili: "Kyle" had to be direct, because Kyle was a person — charismatic, funny, loving, a light to everybody who knew him — and he died young. A song about a real person owes him his name and his plain facts; putting him inside a metaphor would have felt like looking away. "The Weather Report" is about a feeling I was still in the middle of, and weather gave it distance — everybody has stood under a sky like that. So the rule, if there is one: name what deserves to be named. Use an image when the feeling belongs to everyone and the image lets them bring their own life to it.
Punk Head: Taking these songs from home recordings into a studio with other musicians must have changed your relationship with them. What did you discover through collaboration that you couldn't have found by yourself, and how did you know when the arrangements were serving the songs rather than overshadowing them?
Mt. Kili: At home, I hear a song one way — my way. At Echo Mountain, with Julian Dreyer engineering and Matt on drums and Laney Barnett singing and playing violin, I'd hear somebody find a door in a song I didn't know was there. What I discovered is that these songs were sturdier than I thought; they could hold other people's hearts without breaking. We knew an arrangement was serving the song when you could still feel the lullaby underneath it — if the song worked sung quietly to one person, the band version could grow as big as it wanted. When it stopped working at that scale, we pulled it back.
Punk Head: Your music began in a very personal setting in Asheville, yet you've found a particularly devoted audience in the Philippines. What do you think allows a song rooted in one person's life to become meaningful to someone living somewhere completely different?
Mt. Kili: We were surprised and grateful to learn our songs had found listeners in the Philippines, and I think about it this way: the songs are rooted in very specific things — my daughters, a friend I lost, a quiet house in North Carolina — but nothing in them is really about geography. Love, loss, paying attention, trying to be present for your life — those are the same everywhere. I've come to believe the more honestly personal a song is, the less it belongs to the person who wrote it. Somewhere along the way it stops being my story and becomes the listener's. That seems to be true in Asheville, and apparently it's true in Manila too.
