Songfacts®:

• In this song, Melanie dreams of leaving the music business behind to become a farmer, living a simple life without pretense. In a Songfacts interview with Melanie, she explained that she wrote it as a reaction to her fame.
  
  "Here I was working and working and working, and it was nothing," she said. "It's just incredible when you're the biggest thing since sliced bread and all these people are around you, and then when you don't have a hit, they're gone. They're off to the next big thing. At one point, it was really bothering me that people like being your friend when you're the hottest thing, and then you wouldn't hear from them until you got another hit. I thought, if you're looking for love, the music business might not be the place."
• In 1971, she was rising to the peak of her stardom, fresh off two hits with "Ruby Tuesday and "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)." Even then, however, she was beginning to see cracks in the façade of the cutthroat music industry.
  
  The "mountain" she built, only to find it wasn't there, was her music career. So, the lyrics express her yearning to get to a simpler, realer way of existing, living close to the earth and doing honest work with her hands.
• This is the second track on Gather Me, Melanie's most successful album. It also included her signature hit, "Brand New Key."