The allure of the West has captured the hearts and minds of Americans for close to a century. Mountain men heading deep into unmapped Rocky Mountain wilderness in search of beaver hides; homesteaders rolling over the prairies in search of a better life in Oregon; and cowboys and gold prospectors, pilfering little flakes of gold from the West’s rivers and streams, simply to become wealthy.
We are spoon-fed these tales in countless books, songs, and films, and come to worship these frontier men and women as deities who lived much more meaningful lives than we do now. Like everything we romanticize, we typically focus only on the good and rarely on the bad or the ugly, when in reality, the West as we now know it, was rampant with grief and darkness.
In my fourth album, A Miner’s Guide to Hills and Depression, I’m yet again heading back in time to tell the stories of Idaho’s first miners, their highs, and more importantly, their lows.
I’ll be the first to admit that it’s easy to fall in love with the West. People back then had a much closer relationship with the natural world, mostly because it would quite honestly kill them if they messed up. That’s a spiritual lifeline I think a lot of people, myself included, seek to reconnect these days. There is something rewarding about being at the mercy of nature, getting your food from the land, and living in utter solitude up in the mountains. But, that ain’t the whole story. A lot of it’s just fantasy.
And nowhere is this fantasy more distorted than in the West’s first mining camps.
When we think about 19th century miners and the towns that sprang up around them, the first thoughts are of some grizzled old man, hunched over a creek with a pan full of gold, or at worst, gold dust. He lopes into a bustling town on his mule or horse, then trades his daily wages for a shot of whiskey or a romp with a prostitute. Or, if he’s lucky, both.
But that’s the PG film version. The true stories that flowed from those mining camps were typically much more sorrowful.
I just hit 31 years. The older I get, the more I find myself struggling with the darkness in the world. And for some weird reason, learning about — and to some extent, romanticizing — the West answers a lot of these questions I have. Men and women back then were lucky if they lived to be 50. A lot of the stories I read in Idaho’s earliest newspapers told countless stories of men and women experiencing tragic deaths much sooner than that.
A Miner’s Guide to Hills and Depression is my attempt at trying to understand my own problems with mental health and depression. The older I get, the more I find myself battling it. And I know some people that struggle with it that choose to not address it. It’s an important topic these days, and it ain’t hard to find cause.
In the 1860s through the 1890s, anyone who struggled with their mental health, or godforbid escaped it through suicide, did so in a fit of what many papers called “momentary insanity.” Very few understood it. And anyone who denies its importance now is just as ignorant of the issue.
I’m not brave or clever enough to write about depression and mental health as well as most people, so I chose to weave it into a narrative that resonates with me. My goal is not to lay down a blanket statement that everything will be alright, because there’s times where it’s not.
What I am saying is this: Our personal stories are just as glamorized as some of the stories we get from the West. We cast the most attractive versions of ourselves, highlight the successes, bury the failures, and rarely talk about loneliness. It’s unfair to tell an apocryphal story of ourselves, especially if it’s covering up issues that can be remedied.
I have been sitting on this album for a very long time. I’d like it to be dedicated to my dad, without whom I never would have experienced the West.
My dad gave me the greatest gift anyone ever could—he took me to old mining towns, taught me about Western traditions, and showed me a world that would ultimately become a sort of sanctuary from our modern world and its issues.
Western mining history, specifically, runs in my blood as it does his. Seeing remnants of mining operations from the 19th century and the mounds of ore tailings burped from the mouth of an extinct mineshaft are still my favorite places on Earth to see just as they were when I was an annoying little kid. They have always bewildered me—cool yet haunting. Necessary, yet destructive. Fleeting, yet permanent. Exciting, yet sad.
Folks, I’m so excited to release this album into the world. It’ll be my proudest achievement as an artist, and represents the album I have always sought to produce with my intermediate skills as a music engineer. Everything you hear was recorded and engineered right here in my Boise, Idaho home, and features the incredible musicianship of local Boise artists, without whom this album never would be possible.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for supporting me and my music and for putting an ear to A Miner’s Guide to Hills and Depression.
CJL
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