B-Side Guys

“The top of the ladder is a lonely place,” opens the song like a conclusion someone already arrived at before you walked in the room. Lincoln Mendell, the LA-based songwriter behind Molto Non Troppo, doesn’t ease you into the thesis. He just states it, then spends the next five-plus minutes complicating it.

What makes “The Top of the Ladder” work is that it never turns into a sermon. Mendell is after something more ambivalent than a simple “opt out of hustle culture” message. The girl who “lived to climb / just to find she’d gone and climbed her life away” isn’t mocked or pitied. She’s a cautionary figure delivered with genuine tenderness, and the alternative Mendell offers — drag your bed into the yard, fall asleep under the stars, shoot a breeze with the canopy — sounds less like wisdom than a preference. His. Not necessarily yours.

The production earns that ambivalence. Built out over a full band at Savannah Studios in Los Angeles, the track moves like a slow tide: bass and drums settle into something unhurried while Matt Cohen’s guitar traces the melody with the patience of someone who knows the song isn’t going anywhere fast. Preston Mendell’s modular synths add texture around the edges without crowding the center. It’s bedroom pop that got a full night’s sleep.

The sharpest line arrives almost as an afterthought: “birthday cake and sterling silver spoons / and all you ever wanted wrapped in one neat little box.” Mendell doesn’t deny the appeal. “Who am I to try to stop you from gettin’ what you want?” he asks, and he sounds like he means it. By the time he concedes “anyway, you’re almost to the top,” the song has quietly stopped being about ladders entirely.