For MPR Music you're connected to all songs considered by Bob Boylin with the most striking song I've heard in 2022.

It's from Regina Specter. The New York singer has been a favorite of mine since I first heard her song Samson back in 2002.

This song, Up the Mountain, produced with John Congleton, is not only thought-provoking, but a sonic thrill.

The mountain was kind of one of those songs that even as I was writing it, I knew that it would fall under this small category of my songs that I can't really play by myself in a room.

Most of my songs I can sort of go to a corner of a room and sit at a piano and play.

And then I have these few songs that they need so much to sort of be themselves in the world and to really explain who they are in the world that they're not really piano songs.

They just, they might have a little bit of piano in them, but they're just these other beings and playing it just on solo piano sort of almost destroys something in them.

So when we worked on this song recording it, even though all the songs on the record were completed before COVID, we were due to start recording right as COVID hit, actually.

But they took on this kind of a penpal thing with John Congleton who was on the one coast, he was in California, and I was in New York on the other coast.

And so we were sort of penpal sending things to each other and kind of getting influenced by each other.

And the things that John would send me for this song were just amazing.

And they would really inspire me and then I would layer certain little harmonies or do different passes on it.

And that's kind of how it got built up. But then when this really cool arrangement that was really just samples that John built for it, when it got transferred to the orchestra and that was done by Jarek Bishoff, who did the arrangements, it took on this very James Bond quality, which I really loved.

And so this orchestra with the dynamics that they were using and the instrumentation of going really strings and horns became very sort of, you know, noiree, thrillery, which I really loved.

The only other thing I could mention about the song is that for a long time before I wrote it, it really came to me as a tiny little rhythm that would just haunt my daily life.

I would walk around the city, I would just have, you know, and I'd be cooking eggs or something and it would just be like, you know, and I would just move to that rhythm.

And this tiny little rhythm just basically possessed my life for a little bit. And no other words or chords except a little bit of that piano part would just kind of be in there.

And kind of, yeah, I guess yeah, I like haunting or possession. It's a good way of describing it, but a friendly haunting.

So I was just really, really happy that I got to turn that little rhythmic possession into a little song.

In the ocean, there's a mountain. On the mountain, there's a forest in the forest.

In the forest, there's a garden. In the forest, there's a garden.

Gotta get in there. Gotta get in there.

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