Come down from the mountain

A chance meeting in a college dorm led to the formation of Mountain Man, a magical blend of three-part harmonies, lonesome folk and campfire intensity – just don't call them 'old timey', they tell JIM CARROLL

LIKE ALL the best musical dramas, it began with a song. Amelia Meath was sitting in her room in Bennington College in Vermont when she heard a song wafting up the stairs. It was Dog Song, the singer was Molly Sarle, and Meath had to find out more.

“I was a little tipsy and I was upstairs in my room feeling sorry for myself when I heard this amazing song coming from somewhere in the building. So I ran down to investigate what was going on.

"I decided I needed to learn it, so I dragged Molly up to my room and made her teach it to me. Then, I then taught it to Alex [Sauser-Monnig] and that was the start of Mountain Man." It also meant that Meath and Sauser-Monnig's plan to cover Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusualalbum would have to be put on hold. In fact, it's still on hold.

Hearing Mountain Man for the first time is a bit of a trip. Their debut album Made the Harboris all lonesome folk, campfire intensity, devastating three-part harmonies, solemn musical rubs, delicate acoustic strums and pure untarnished atmospherics. You may well think you've stumbled on some dusty tape of old Appalachian folk recordings, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The roots may be old-fashioned, but the singers most certainly are not.

“What usually puzzles me is when we’re tagged as Appalachian folk, because we’re not from the Appalachians,” points out Meath. “Molly is from California, Alex is from Minnesota and I’m from Massachusetts. People talk about our music as sounding like some old field recordings and I can sometimes get that, but our lyrics are very contemporary.

“We’re not ‘old-timey’ in that way, we don’t sing about old-timey themes. We all have different tastes in music too. We love Michael Hurley and Bonnie Raitt and others who might be categorised as old-timey, but we also love Crystal Castles and new poppy music too.”

They’re still apprentices at their trade as performers, but they’re fast learners. Case in point, their appearance at the South By Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas in March. They played their first show of the week in a loud, bland sports bar, where the bartenders refused to turn down the volume on the televisions and the soundman didn’t seem to give a hoot.

Instead of throwing a strop and heading for the door, Mountain Man simply held hands, took a deep collective breath, strummed a guitar and sang their hearts out. It was, they said, their first ever gig where they had a microphone to sing into so they also had that to deal with. It was the start of an impressive run of gigs for the trio and, by festival end, Mountain Man were one of the acts everyone seemed to be talking about.

While it’s been a whirlwind since SXSW – “we’re literally learning about the music business as we go along,” says Meath – singing appears to be what all three of them wanted to do since they first sang in church choirs in their respective hometowns.

They moved to Vermont to study at Bennington’s liberal arts college (Performance and Gender; Theatre and Performance; and Literature and Visual Arts, in case you’re wondering), yet it’s abundantly clear that there were always other creative irons in the fire.

“I’ve been singing since I was very little,” says Sarle. “My favourite thing to do was jump on my bed and sing along to Mariah Carey. When I met up with Alex and Amelia, it just felt so refreshing and so right to join up with them. It’s amazing to be able to mix my voice with theirs and come up with this sound.”

“I can still remember the first time we all sang together,” recalls Sauser-Monnig. “It was a house just off-campus and it felt so magical and that, luckily, is still how it feels when we perform together today.”

WHAT’S ALSO NOTICABLE IS how they’ve successfully combined their identities as songwriters. “Each of us writes songs mostly about the same things, like our experiences as young women,” says Sauser-Monnig. “Molly’s songwriting can be really intense, and Amelia’s songs are about nature or weird stuff and my songs are quite nostalgic. At the start, we would just get together and sing and work out our ideas together. Now, we tend to write songs separately and then come together and figure out harmony parts as a group.”

“I like the idea of music that we have put so much of ourselves into going out in the world,” says Sarle. “I really hope the people who will be listening to the album will get that out of it too and will come along to the shows.”

“We’re soulmates in a lot of ways,” says Meath. “When we get together and sing, something exciting happens, which is often really hard to explain to people or for us sometimes to fully understand. What we want to do and what we hope we’re doing is radiating that feeling of excitement to our audience.”

Made the Harbor

is out now on Bella Union. Mountain Man play Crawdaddy, Dublin on July 2