Our Mother the Mountain
| Our Mother the Mountain | ||||
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| Studio album by Townes Van Zandt | ||||
| Released | April 1969 | |||
| Recorded | January, 1969, Nashville | |||
| Genre | Country, Folk | |||
| Length | 40:01 | |||
| Label | Tomato | |||
| Producer | Kevin Eggers, Jim Malloy, Jack Clement | |||
| Townes Van Zandt chronology | ||||
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| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
Our Mother the Mountain is the second album by country singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt, released in 1969. It is considered to be one of his greatest recordings and features some of his best known works, including "Be Here To Love Me", "Snake Mountain Blues" and "Our Mother The Mountain".
The basic tracks for Our Mother the Mountain were recorded in Los Angeles with overdubs recorded in Nashville. The album was produced by Jack Clement and Jim Malloy, who produced Van Zandt's first album For the Sake of The Song, and Kevin Eggers, who ran Poppy Records and also managed Van Zandt. Several big name musicians played on the album, including James Burton (famed for playing behind Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley) and renowned session player Charlie McCoy. "Tecumseh Valley", which had appeared on the singer's debut album, was rerecorded for Our Mother the Mountain as a result of Van Zandt's dissatisfaction with the garish production employed on For the Sake of the Song. Although the tracks on Our Mother the Mountain were sweetened in Nashville, there was a somewhat simpler, light-handed approach taken production-wise on his follow-up LP.
Like most albums released during his lifetime, Our Mother the Mountain did not sell in great numbers but reinforced his reputation as a "songwriter's songwriter". In the 2004 biopic Be Here To Love Me (its title taken from the opening track on Our Mother the Mountain), musician Joe Ely recalls first hearing the album after Van Zandt had given him a copy when they first crossed paths in Lubbock, Texas when Ely picked the singer up hitchhiking back to Houston from San Francisco in 1971. Van Zandt was carrying only his guitar and a backpack stuffed with records and, as a means of thanking Ely, gave him a brand-new copy of Our Mother the Mountain. "I'd never met anybody who'd actually recorded an album before," Ely remembered, "and I take the record back to Jimmie Gilmore. We put the record on and we're just mesmerized by it. Ends up we played that record over and over for weeks. It made us rethink what we were doing and what a song was all about." In the book To Live's To Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt, John Kruth describes the title track as "otherworldly. Like the best of Van Zandt's dark sagas, this tale of a bewitched lover is a minor-key waltz that limps along like foreboding footsteps approaching in the hall, coming closer, closer, closer, as the song slowly envelops you." AllMusic writes that, "'St. John the Gambler' is the kind of hopeless, poetic love ballad Van Zandt does so well, with an aching melody that would have sounded better without the sappy strings," and notes that the best tracks "are bunched up at the end of the album and only add minimal touches to Van Zandt's moaning delivery and sparse picking."
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