Photo by Shervin Lainez
By Ellen Johnson for Paste –
Mountain Man’s manager had a dream. Martin Anderson saw in this sleep-induced sequence the folk trio’s members—Amelia Meath, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Molly Sarlé—in a bar packed with, not blubbering beer-drinkers, but alpacas, the South American camelid baring a close resemblance to its cousin the llama. You only have to look at the album art for Magic Ship, their second LP and first release in eight years, or even just the above press photo, to know Anderson’s dream came true. There, on Magic Ship’s cover, are Meath, Sauser-Monnig and Sarlé, clumped in a Durham, N.C. bar, bookended by a pair of alpacas.
“He sent us a really sweet email being like, ‘Tell me if I’m overstepping boundaries here, but I had this dream you guys were with alpacas, you were in a bar, wondering if you have any interest in making it a reality?’ And we were all like ‘Hell yes, Martin,’” Sarlé says.
It’s that kind of yes-man ideology that organized Magic Ship’s Sept. 21 release via Nonesuch. Not since their 2010 debut Made The Harbor have Mountain Man released a record and toured, but, after each member found herself living in North Carolina following years of pursuing separate hustles, the three women reignited their friendships, followed by their music.
In the years after Made The Harbor and a 2011 tour with Feist, Sarlé fulfilled a stint in a California zen center, Sauser-Monnig bounced from goat dairy worker to vegetable farmer to blanket weaver and Meath eventually went on to start electro-pop duo Sylvan Esso. They officially rebooted the band at Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires music festival in Wisconsin last summer, on a tiny stage in the middle of the forest, a perfect location for exhibiting Mountain Man’s campfire harmonies and gentle folk ballads. “Basically we just got an offer and we were like ‘Why not play a show in the woods at a festival that a bunch of our friends are also playing at in the summer in beautiful Wisconsin?’” says Sarlé, who’s also been working on a solo record out next year.
