The Landslide will bring you down
A love letter and honest reflection of my favorite song because life is rough right now.
“I took my love and I took it down…
I climbed a mountain
then I turned around”
Landslide by the Dixie Chicks1 is one of my favorite songs of all time. The first time I heard it, I was in 6th grade. I had just joined the school chorus because I was bored and I liked singing. All the girls we’re super alternative. We had one emo girl of every race, it was perfect. Our music teacher, Mrs. Muse, was iconic. She used to play cello or something for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She was so impressive. Anyways, shout out to her for putting me on because I fucking love this song so much.
“And I SAW my reflection
in a
SNOW covered hills
Well, the landslide
brought
me
down.”
For some reason, we had to learn this song for something. It could have been for the 8th grade graduation ceremony, but I genuinely don’t remember if we even ever performed it. Regardless, the song struck me. I mean come on, THESE LYRICS?!
“OH MIRROR IN THE SKY,
WHAT IS LOVE?
CAN THE CHILD WITHIN MY HEART,
RISE ABOVE?!
CAN I SAIL THROUGH THE CHANGING
OCEAN TIDES?!
CAN I HANDLE THE SEASONS
OF
MY
LIFE!”
I had NO reason to be belting this shit out from my chest as if my little 12-year-old ass knew what any of it meant but it stuck with me! Truly, how can you listen to this song and not feel literally every emotion? It’s so raw! How do you not cry!?
“WELL I’VE BEEN AFRAID OF CHANGING!
Cause I
BUILT MY LIFE
around you.”
I’ve let this song carry me through so many moments. Every time I hear it, I relate to it in so many different ways. It’s aged so well and continues to age with me.
“But time makes you BOLDER,
CHILDREN GET OLDER!
I’M GETTING OLDER,
too.”
I honest to God didn’t even know that this wasn’t the original. I didn’t discover the Fleetwood Mac or Stevie Nicks version until much later in life. Something about the Dixie Chicks version just hits different. The others feel too sad. There’s something hopeful and communal about the Dixie Chicks version. Maybe because it’s being sung by a group of women, maybe it’s the tempo or the instrumentation, there’s just something fuller about their version. It feels holistic like how the song is supposed to feel, you know?
“Sooooo
take this love and take it down
Yeah, and if you climb a mountain and ya
TURN AROUND!!!”
On some real shit though, what even is “the landslide”?
By definition “a landslide” is the sliding down of a mass of earth or rock from a mountain or cliff.
Is “the landslide” supposed to represent something unexpected and out of your control that changes the course of your life? Something that takes you out or brings you down without your choice or surprisingly?
They talk about climbing a mountain and turning around. I interpreted that as being on this journey that is life, going through the challenges that come with living and taking a moment to look back and see how far you’ve come. Climbing a mountain isn’t easy, life isn’t easy and it all takes time.
They also say how they took their love and took it down. They kept love with them the entire time. It was there on the way up the mountain and when they went back down, you know?! This is important because it’s so easy to move through life as a miserable, hopeless person, but they made it a point to acknowledge they had love with them the entire time.
“and if you see my reflection
in the
SNOW covered hills
Well, the landslide brought me down”
I also think it’s interesting in that moment of reflection where they saw themselves in nature, as part of this world, something bigger than themselves and their life, they were also taken and humbled and reminded that sometimes there’s nothing we can do about what happens to us even if we do all this work to build a certain life for ourselves. Just as they worked so hard to get up there with everything they had, “the landslide” as it would, took them down.
The landslide could be anything. It could be death, it could be a breakup, it could be job loss, it could be God, etc. At the end of the day “the landslide” is a shifting moment. It’s a piece of the mountain that can no longer stand itself, detaching and departing to become just another piece of earth like all of us. As time goes on, life changes and we are part of life, therefore we change too. As we go through life, as we climb our mountains, we stop and see ourselves in our journeys and it can be scary! We wonder are we capable of handling change? Do we have the strength to continue growing?
“and if you see my reflection in the
SNOW covered hills
well, maybeeeeeeeeeee
well, maybeeeeeeeeeee
well, maybeeeeeeeeeee
the landslide
will bring you
down.”
What they did with the last verse is also interesting because now it’s no longer about my landslide. It’s about yours too. If you see my life in yours, maybe this will also happen to you. That could be a blessing or a threat lol No matter what, there is a landslide and it could bring you down. We are not special and we are not untouchable, life will happen and we just have to accept that, but also we are all connected and life is happening to us all. We’re just in different stages but at some point it’s all going to be over and that’s okay.2
Yes, I know they go by the Chicks now but I can’t help it. Good for them for acknowledging the historic connotations behind “Dixie.”
Sorry this got dark and sad, but it’s just the truth. Life is hard, but it can also be beautiful especially when we stop and see ourselves in each other and how far we’ve come. It’s inevitable that something is going to happen to us and the sooner we accept that fact the easier it should be to cope with it. Regardless, we all have the same destiny, one day the landslide will bring you down and there’s nothing you can do about it.