State of Mines

Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel

And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land

Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken

Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

— John Prine, “Paradise”

Ben Sollee expected to see desolation. He expected to see mound upon mound of rocks and dirt piled where valleys used to be. The side of a mountain blown apart. The heavy machinery that did the deed. No trees or plants. Ancient waterway buried under the rubble.

The scene was expected. But not its size.

“The scale is really just staggering to me,” said Sollee. “You're flying 800 miles per hour above it for minutes and minutes.”

The Louisville-based musician known for infusing the cello into his pop music is a city boy who wears trendy eyewear and tried to beef last year with rap megastar Kanye West, and he's the first to admit it. Sollee's quirky fusion of classical music and pop on his 2007 debut, “Learning to Bend,” earned him nods from music snobs and pop-culture bloggers — not the stuff you associate with the hills and hollers of Eastern Kentucky.

But he has Appalachian roots — his maternal grandfather was a Baptist preacher and a coal miner in Williamsburg, Ky. He was also a fiddler, whose playing helped steer the young Sollee toward studying classical music at the University of Louisville.

In college, Sollee became aware of mountaintop removal — the practice of blasting mountains and harvesting the coal beneath them. Coal companies argue the practice is more cost-efficient and safer than sending workers deep into mines that could collapse or explode. After the coal is stripped out, the newly leveled ground can be developed, another benefit, the industry claims, for the impoverished region.

Critics argue the practice destroys Appalachia's natural beauty and pollutes the supply of drinking water. According to the advocacy group I Love Mountains, the technique has affected about 700,000 acres across Appalachia on more than 450 mountains.

Sollee squared himself in the camp of the authors Wendell Berry and Silas House — mountaintop removal, he determined, is devastating his home state. That led to “Dear Companion,” an 11-song album — slated for release Feb.16 — that culminates a year's worth of recording and a collaboration between one of Kentucky's most prominent musicians and a couple of rising stars.

SubPop Records — the label of Nirvana, Band of Horses, The Shins and other huge indie acts — agreed to release the album, giving it a big dose of prominence and credibility within the music industry. The artists' royalties will benefit the not-for-profit group Appalachian Voices, and SubPop is also making a contribution.

It's a step toward making mountaintop removal a national issue. After all, that was the point. Sollee could've marched on the state capitol in Frankfort or on Washington, D.C. He could have just joined organizations such as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth or I Love Mountains, but he wanted to expose mountaintop removal to the rest of the nation which, to be candid, doesn't pay much attention to Appalachia.

Music was the way to do it.

“It's a seemingly localized issue, like, ‘Man, those people really have it bad there,'” Sollee said. “But it's an issue that's in all of our backyards. I think that's what inspired the project. Music can get where the issue can't get to. All we ever wanted to do is give the issue a place to go. We're all participating in this culture of consumption. We just have to choose where it comes from. I just feel like if people knew about mountaintop removal, they'd say, ‘You know, that ain't worth it. We have to find something else.'”

Sollee first enlisted Daniel Martin Moore, a rising singer-songwriter from Cold Spring, Ky., by way of Elizabethtown. Moore came to indie-rock prominence last year upon the release of his debut record, “Stray Age,” a demure, folksy record that was released on SubPop after Moore had mailed an unsolicited demo to the iconic indie label.

Impressed by Moore's music, Sollee contacted him via MySpace and later broached the idea of collaborating on an EP to benefit the fight against mountaintop removal.

When Moore signed on, the newly forged duo reached out to My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James to produce the project.

It's a departure for James, whose music rarely touches on politics, even in subtle ways. But he has no problem taking sides in the battle against mountaintop removal.

“I try not to get too ‘political' or preachy because I feel that oftentimes divides people when they should really be getting together and discussing,” James said.

“But sometimes you just have to support causes you believe in regardless of how the issue might be controversial — because people need help. Some of these issues… should not be debated. This is a very clear issue — our greed and consumption of energy and power have got to be examined. This particular process of getting to coal is causing so much pain in the world, pain to the Earth and the land and the spirits that deserve to roam those lands undisturbed, and of course the people who live there. There really should be no debate about this. It is once again the greed of a select evil few overshadowing the real needs of the many.”

So this group of “Kentucky boys,” as Sollee says, set forth to create an album to essentially point a giant pickax at this issue in Central Appalachia for the country to see.

“I didn't want it to be one artist's outrage,” Sollee said. “Daniel's music struck me, and I thought he was a beautiful writer. He has a unique, precious voice, and his music really contrasted mine, too.”

The trio recorded the first half of the record in the fall of 2008 at James' Louisville home. Liking what they heard, they decided to regroup in May at Shangri-la Productions studio in Lexington to make the project into a full-length album.

Sollee and Moore's styles are distinct — one flashy and pop, the other demure and rustic — but they have managed to harmoniously merge their styles. With actual two-part harmonies that recall the folk music of the Appalachian Mountains of which they sing. The songs are not necessarily a direct homage to mountain music — they're clearly contemporary, with pop melodies — the influence is obvious with the fiddle tune “Try” and the sorrowful harmonies of the title track, which sets the tone for the record.

“The title ‘Dear Companion' was in a book we were both reading called ‘Uneven Ground: The History of Industrialization in Appalachia,'” Moore said.

“There's a photograph in that book of a letter written by a miner who was trapped in a mine collapse. It's a really powerful thing. This fellow was stuck in a mine and the people around him were dying, suffocating. He knew he didn't have much time, so he scribbled this letter and stuck it in his pocket, to his family. It was just something that really stuck with both of us. That theme is similar to what we wanted the whole project to be. A letter from Central Appalachia to the whole country — we're being detonated here, sort of destroyed, and is anybody paying attention?”

Moore said he's been moved with meeting Appalachians who live near mountaintop removal sites and their stories of property damage and fears of contaminated water, their disgust with the decimation of the scenic landscapes that once surrounded their homes. Though he said he's interested in mountaintop removal as an environmental issue, he mostly wanted to convey angst of Eastern Kentuckians forced to watch the land swallowed up the coal shovels.

Moore and Sollee each wrote songs for the album; the title track is the only true, full-on collaboration. But the record only occasionally references mountaintop removal overtly, the exception being “Fly Rock Blues,” which refers to rocks that are scattered by when mountaintops are blasted. The generally implicit references to mountaintop removal were deliberate, Sollee said.

“I think this issue is a symptom of other things,” he said. “Every song has to do with the culture of consumption that we live in. Some songs deal with mountaintop removal themselves — Daniel's songs like ‘It Won't Be Long' deal very closely with it. Other songs, like ‘Something, Somewhere, Sometime,' have a lot more to do with the industrial revolution than anything else.”

Sollee and Moore will tour to support “Dear Companion,” hitting 15 cities across the country through the spring. The tour will stop Feb.26 at the Brown Theatre; tickets are $25.

And with this record and these shows, the Kentucky boys hope more people — particularly Kentuckians — become more aware of mountaintop removal.

“People need to know the destructive processes behind most of the things they use on a daily basis, so we can become more enlightened and find better and easier ways to live with our Earth and fellow man in a harmonious way, instead of constantly just consuming and consuming regardless of who or what it is hurting,” said James, who wouldn't say if he'd make a walk-on appearance during Sollee and Moore's Louisville show. “One day it will all be gone, and then people will care, but then of course it will be too late.”