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This week on Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Bart Everson presents “A Mountain of Music,” an expedition through songs that celebrate Earth’s most dramatic landforms. The journey begins with Majel Connery’s “I Am a Mountain,” a composition that has inspired multiple interpretations, before ascending to Japan’s sacred Mount Iizuna through Kokichi Yanagisawa’s meditative guitar improvisations. Sarina Partridge invites us to a sunny “Meadow on the Mountain” in Oregon, while Stephen Lake’s theatrical “Mountain Song” captures a spiritual awakening amidst nature’s grandeur. Reverend Billy’s gospel-infused testimony of places where imagination thrives leads to Decajoule’s spectral encounter on Ghost Mountain and Sauljaljui’s indigenous celebration of her home on Taiwan’s Tjualayu Mountain. After Jimmy Hunt’s French-language winter meditation dissolves into Bernie Krause’s flowing “Mountain Stream,” we return from a brief pause to witness Lagartijeando’s “Lightning on the Mountain.” (“Cumbia transmutes, shedding its skin in times of antisocial networks and AI.”) We encounter a Mountain Scops Owl through David Farrow’s field recording. The Magic Carpathians Project carries us to “Mountains Above Clouds” (recorded live by WFMU’s Scott Williams) while Yaima’s “Mother” recounts a transformative dawn experience on a summit. As The Invisible Bee offers “Sunshine from a Mountaintop” and we return to Yanagisawa’s sacred practice, the journey concludes with the great Libby Roderick’s “Thinking Like a Mountain”—invoking Aldo Leopold’s famous reflection on ecological perspectives that only mountains have lived long enough to truly possess.

PSA: We wanted to pause and just say a word about mountaintop removal. It’s a coal mining technique, and since the 1970s the coal industry has actually blown up more than 500 of the oldest and most biologically rich mountains in America. Despite the decline in coal, it’s still happening. This information comes straight from Appalachian Voices, an organization committed to righting these wrongs, among others. For more than a decade, they’ve worked closely with partner groups and citizens in the region helping to establish and guide the Alliance for Appalachia and building a national movement of over 100,000 people. You can find out more at ILoveMountains.org