A (Brief) Utah Playlist - by Adam Stevenson
There have been many a song sung about Utah—the wide variety reflecting the fact that the state is or encompasses (among many other things, and to different people) a Zion, a high desert, a chain of mountains, an idea, an increasingly suburbanized landscape, an outdoors destination, a culture, a livestock range, or an indigenous homeland.
In this list of songs about Utah, some are written from a home-grown perspective, while others describe an outsider’s encounter (brief or otherwise) with the place and its people.
My relationship with Utah is a mixture of both. Growing up, my family moved from New York to Montana to Virginia to Wisconsin to California before finally settling back down in Virginia, where I lived from age 7 to 18. I consider Purcellville, Virginia to be my home, but I feel lucky to count Utah as my spiritual homeland. My love affair with Utah began in earnest at 18, but the seeds of that love were planted much earlier.
Growing up, Utah was a land of perpetual summer—because that was when we would take long car trips from San Diego, or long flights (or car trips) from Virginia, that yielded time with a boisterously loving extended family, the smell of evergreen bushes at my grandparents’ home in Cottonwood Heights, hikes into nearby canyons, and trips to Lagoon. Utah seemed almost supernatural. You could never quite get used to the mountains—there was always something about them that seemed too good to be true.
Then, at 18, I moved to Provo to go to college. Thoreau wrote that “it would be no small advantage if every college were . . . located at the base of a mountain.” By that measure BYU, if we could ask him today, should qualify as one of the nation’s most appropriately located schools. If Mormonism is henotheistic (which isn’t an accurate description, but works for the structure of this argument, so please bear with me) then Utah County residents' almost-idolatrous mountain reverence is also hierarchical. There are a whole list of deities—Cascade, Provo Peak, Spanish Fork Peak, etc.—but Timp unquestionably occupies the summit. I spent many a winter sunset staring at Timp with its ramparts blanketed with a shimmering white snow that pooled blue in the shadows of couloirs and the folds of the mountain. A BYU (or, to be fair, UVU) student doesn’t only study an academic discipline, they study the mountains—some almost constantly. And there’s not much of a choice, the mountains are impossible to avoid.
But, it wasn’t just the mountains. It was the culture and religion fitted to the landscape, admittedly imperfectly. Or a culture that yearned to make itself worthy of the landscape. Yet, regardless of what the exact roots of my infatuation with this place were, I think often of Utah, even as I have returned to Virginia. I keep maps of Utah up on my wall and I read about the state’s history and geography to keep myself grounded in my spiritual homeland. If that seems overly dramatic, it’s because it is. Utah will compel you to perform your love. And it will also make you write wonderful songs. Here are some of my favorites.
Oh, also, I need to add a caveat that the Deseret News published a similar article that covered 80% of the song selections here. This is just to say that I honestly didn’t simply copy their songs. I (mostly) independently arrived at similar conclusions.
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The Beach Boys: “Salt Lake City”— This is a fun one. This Beach Boys’ effort was released in 1965, and was written to highlight their fan base in Salt Lake City. It sounds like it could have been written for the local radio question by special request (“and the number one radio station makes the town really swing, yeah”). It isn’t necessarily their strongest, or catchiest, song and it isn’t groundbreaking like their famed 1968 album Pet Sounds, but it’s about Salt Lake City (“we’ll be coming soon”) and that’s enough.
The Singles Ward soundtrack version (please comment below if you know the artist): “In Our Lovely Deseret” — I wish I could have found a more serious version of the song, although this is an entertaining interpretation. This hymn may be a variant of what Jared Farmer calls “mountain hymns.” Ostensibly written as an extremely didactic song for youth, maybe it’s more accurately called a mountain hymn for children. If you end up singing this hymn in sacrament meeting (unfortunately a pretty rare occurrence) after you’ve reached a more cynical age, you may smile slyly at your neighbor when you reach the part about eating a very little meat—especially if you know that a delicious pot roast awaits your return from church—but maybe this is the most uncomfortable, and redeeming, part of the hymn, its unrelenting striving for right action, for a life built on virtuous principles.
The Mountain Goats: “The Mess Inside” — The Mountain Goats are a lo-fi band that has attained cult status in some circles. Most of their songs are recorded in an unpolished way that lends their thoughtful lyrics even more authenticity. In the song they sing that they “took the weekend, drove to Provo / The snow was white and fluffy / The weekend in Utah won’t fix what’s wrong with us / The gray sky was vast and real cryptic above me / I wanted you to love me like the way that you used to do.” Although arguably a passing mention, the overall theme of the song makes this brief reference feel more important. Unlike the ‘children’s mountain hymn’ of “In Our Lovely Deseret,” this presents Utah from the outside, as one in a long chain of places to which a struggling couple travels, in hopes of resolving their unspecified relationship issues (though ultimately unsuccessfully). The end of the song offers a melancholy resolution: “I wanted you / To love me like you used to do / But I cannot run / And I can’t hide / From the wreck we’ve made of our house / From the mess inside.” Though there’s much more to this song than identifying that perpetual tourism looks an awful lot like escapism, the song can arguably be understood as an implicit critique of Park City, Moab, and similar Utah tourist exclaves—which is just another reason to like it.
Ben and Tom Abbott: “O Ye Mountains High” — This is probably my favorite ‘mountain hymn,’ and this version recently recorded by two brothers—Ben Abbott and Tom Abbott—is one of my favorite. Ben Abbott (also recently interviewed by the Utah Monthly) happens to be a professor in BYU’s Plant and Wildlife Sciences department and has done tremendous work in defending Utah Lake and advocating for increased water flow to the Great Salt Lake to prevent its disappearance. The fact that Ben Abbott sings this love song to Utah makes it even more profound. And although some of its more martial references are a bit dissonant now (a result of the 1857–58 Utah War), it preaches a comprehensive theology of place. “O Zion! dear Zion! land of the free, Now my own mountain home, unto thee I have come—All my fond hopes are centered in thee.” Interestingly, the lyrics were written by former LDS Apostle Charles W. Penrose before he had ever seen Utah. Of his inspiration he wrote that “of course I had read about Zion and heard about the streets of Salt Lake City, with the clear streams of water on each side of the street, with shade trees, and so on. I could see it in my mind’s eye, and so I composed that song as I was walking along the road [in Essex, England].”
Mumford & Sons: “Friend of the Devil” — I’m not really a fan of the Grateful Dead, but I can appreciate Mumford & Son’s wonderful cover of their song “Friend of the Devil.” This haunting, pulsating version seethes with brooding energy as it recounts the trials of a man on the lam. He starts “out from Reno, [where he is] trailed by twenty hounds,” before continuing on to Utah where he spends a night “in a cave up in the hills.” In this song, the Utah of an imagined past becomes a wild and forsaken place that offers refuge to outlaws and vagabonds.
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This brief sampling of songs about, or alluding to, Utah demonstrate the shifting and kaleidoscopic nature of the place’s identity. That such flexibility and variety exist—that the place can be, as described by these songs, a suburban oasis, a Zion, a tourist mecca, or a wilderness—makes Utah even more compelling. But don’t take my word for it, listen to the music.
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