Pitchfork

You couldn't pick a better and more apt cover for Levon Helm's first studio album in 25 years. "The Mountain", originally penned and recorded by Steve Earle for his 1999 bluegrass album with the Del McCoury Band, recounts a life spent living on and working in a mountain, portraying mining as a noble undertaking that puts men in direct communion with the earth. Helm could be singing it as Ted Webb, the role he played in Coal Miner's Daughter, or just as himself: a veteran of the Hawks and the Band, a session musician and actor, a survivor of illness, bankruptcy, tragedy. The track begins with a swarm of mandolin strums and a piercing fiddle, as Helm enters singing confidently. Over the past ten years he has been gradually recovering from throat cancer, and his voice sounds weathered instead of weakened. With Buddy and Julie Miller singing behind him, Helm delivers a more forceful reading than the original, as if his continued presence on the Mountain is an act of hard survival as well as of defiance.