Track by Track: Exit Salida, Glow Mountain
Recently, Luke Anderson and Conner Shultz of Exit Salida sat down to give us a rundown of their debut EP, Glow Mountain. Check out their notes and stories below and be sure to download your free copy of Glow Mountain on the band’s Bandcamp!
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“Glow Mountain”
Luke: From the day I brought the skeleton of this song to band practice to this very day I get confused looks and questions about how to remember and follow that beat at the beginning. It was inspired by the likes of Anathallo and As Tall As Lions and it opens up all of our shows perfectly. And accompanied by the chants that take place this song (the first lyrics written for any of our material) I think this song serves to, at least to some degree set us apart as we open up the album and any of our shows.
Conner: Lyrically, this is the only song I didn’t write. Luke wrote the lyrics and the melody for it, and I sort of helped conform them to my style of singing. I remember hearing the melody for the first time and thinking “hmm…I don’t really like the whole ascending scale style”, but it dawned on me after we recorded it, that it sort of represented the climb up the mountain. Much of this song, lyrically and musically, is based round the idea of ascension. There is a lot of imagery there that feels very uplifting. So, kudos to Luke for this one!
“Prtatr”
Luke: This song is our meat and potatoes. When the band was just Conner, Kristian, and I we would practice this song for hours, at just the verse of it at that. This is the song where odd meters finally came together for me and started to make sense. When this song finally came together it was an incredible relief. After working so long and so hard to put this band together and get off the ground, this song, our first song, was finally done and it was like I could exhale for the first time in months.
Conner: I had the chorus riff for this one stored away, and I had been messing with it for a while, but it never went anywhere until I brought it up with Luke and Kristian. It really took flight, and I started thinking about lyrics. This one had a name before it had lyrics, so I took the imagery of a potato (since the title is a phonetic southerner way to say “potato”) and applied it to my own life. I’ve always had a problem in relationships where I self-sabotage through inaction. I thought, “like a potato stuck in the ground.” It made sense at the time… I’m not really sure what I was thinking.
“Quarter Pyramid”
Conner: Fun fact, this song was supposed to be in 9. We played it as a sort of slower jam piece, but it never really had a good vibe to it. I t was always really depressing to play, so we shelved it. At the time I was listening to a lot of Minus the Bear, so I started experimenting with some different rhythms with a delay pedal in it, and it had so much more life in it. So I brought it to the guys and we completely rewrote it. I wrote some lyrics that mirrored that feeling. It’s about just taking the time to look at things in a new light, and realizing it’s all alright.
“Paratrooper”
Luke: We recorded all the instrumentals for this album live and you can kinda hear that in the beginning. It all happened in one night, and none of us went to bed until 3:30 in the morning -- I think Kristian or Dan, our drummer at the time, had class a few hours later. We were getting kinda loopy by the time we got to this one (to say the least), but I still think it sounds solid.
Conner: The lyrics for this song are the first ones that I wrote that I really took personally. The song had a powerfully sad feeling to me, so I did what a lot of musicians do: get sad and write about how sad I was. I really looked at my own flaws as a person, and it was pretty depressing, but it was a cathartic release for me. It’s one of my favorite songs to play, just because I don’t have to act as a character to play it, I’m just letting it all out.
“Bike Ride”
Luke: Conner and I wrote and rewrote this song probably something like four times, and the way it finally ended up on the album is almost a completely different song than the original Bike Ride. As it stands now, I think this is our heaviest song, probably because of all of the frustration that went into writing it.
Conner: Luke is right. A little Fun-Fact is that this final version of the song was written at my family’s annual tractor races. As in like, garden tractors. I thought it was a uniquely backwoods Pennsylvania thing, so I brought Luke to my home and we went out to the event. Something stupid happened and we ended up getting really mad at each other over it. But then we both took time and cooled down and came together and wrote this song. It’s basically what a band-fight sounds like.
“Keelah Se’Lai”
Luke: This song is my favorite song. I think this is all of our favorite. This is the song where we cook… where we play together and every note fits together perfectly, with every part a compliment to the other.
Conner: This song was actually written as a challenge. The phrase “Keelah Se’Lai” comes from the Mass Effect video game series. My roommate challenged me to write a protest song for the one race of aliens in the game. So, I did it. Lyrically, this song tells the story of this race, albeit in a sort of hidden way. The aliens were driven from their home planet by robots they created, and live in a nomadic fleet of ships. So, that’s what this song is about. The title comes from the aliens phrase for “by the home I hope to see”, so I managed to work that phrase into the song, as well.
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Be sure to check out Exit Salida:
Exit Salida on Bandcamp
Exit Salida on Facebook
Exit Salida on Twitter
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