The Mountains Win Again

This is the saddest song on Four. It sits on the same album as “Run-Around” and “Hook,” two of the most deliberately cheerful songs of the ’90s, and most people never found it.

Four came out in 1994 and sold six million copies. It did that on the singles MTV couldn’t stop playing, the ones built to be infectious and inescapable. “The Mountains Win Again” was built the other way. It was built to hurt. The harmonica John Popper runs through the mix is doing the work words won’t do, saying the thing the lyric can’t get to.

The title is plain almost to the point of being obvious. Life puts obstacles in front of you. You try to climb them. Sometimes you make it. Most times, if you’re honest, you don’t. The mountains were there before you and they’ll be there after. Your struggle doesn’t wear them down. It doesn’t even register with them.

“Didn’t I tell you that I love you, baby?”

Popper’s voice breaks on that line. Not for effect. Just a small crack that lets you hear the size of what’s underneath it. He’s asking a question he already knows the answer to. He told her. It wasn’t enough. The mountains won.

The band came out of the jam scene, more interested in improvisation and feel than in radio hooks. They knew they were more than the two singles, and they were right. “The Mountains Win Again” is where the two halves of them meet — a real pop song that still leaves the music room to breathe. It’s the song on Four that describes a life instead of selling one.

Some battles you don’t win. Some mountains you don’t climb. The song doesn’t pretend otherwise, and it doesn’t dress the loss up as anything but loss.

You climb anyway. That’s the whole of it. The mountains win and you go back the next morning and start again.