August 3rd - Isaiah 45:23

 I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.

I've gone through a lot of influences that I see prominently in Mountain Gopats songs. Lots of Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen, some They Might Be giants, a lot of hardcore and post-hardcore.

I wasn't expecting Creedence Clearwater Revival. And yet here we are.

That's where we are musically. Lyrically, we're in a place that I've found myself a lot in the discomfort of this current heatwave and more broadly in the discomfort of this current world. Trying to find the distance that can exist between the ordeal of the body and the processes of the mind. or soul, if that's what you want to think of.

One of the areas in which I differ from John, and indeed I think I differ from a goodly percentage of the world, is that I can't draw the distinction this song does with the body on one side and "I" on the other. I am too aware of the ways in which the wet machinery of the body affects the wet computer of the brain. I'm also outside of the thinking of much of the world's population when I say that "my soul", and indeed "me" in any form is an emergent property. My soul, if I can be said to have one, is the sum total of what my body and my brain and my experiences produce when it's all firing at once. I'm a long way from in love with my body, but I know it is part of what I am, not a prison for something else.