The character in “Damn These Vampires” blames everyone else for their situation, but also adds to their own problems.

Track: “Damn These Vampires”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

Amazingly, vampires don’t show up very often in Mountain Goats songs. Well, literal vampires don’t, and that’s surprising because they seem like the perfect choice for most of the band’s favorite themes. Characters in Goats songs often struggle with engaging the world and they routinely either drain or are drained by the world in some way. The “God damn these vampires // for what they’ve done to me” of “Damn These Vampires” would make sense to hundreds of narrators in the catalog.

The vampires in this song aren’t literal either, of course, but like the vampires of “Alpha Rat’s Nest” who “suck the dying hours dry,” these leave bite marks. “Damn These Vampires” is part of All Eternals Deck, so it has to fit in the very loose framework of a tarot card. The vampire card is one you’re going to see at some point as a character in a Goats song, but it’s up to you to interpret if it means you’re being bitten or if you’re doing the biting. That’s true in the start, but the full circle of “vampirism” is that once you’re bitten, you start biting others.

The narrator of “Damn These Vampires” blames others for their addictions, but they’re certainly complicit in them. They continually insist that something’s been done to them, but once you have the disease it matters more about how you live with it. “Someday we’ll try to walk upright,” they tell themselves and the other vampires, and they offer the most hopeful thought of all with “someday we won’t remember this.” In the meantime, they’ll all just keep adding to their ranks as they “sleep like dead men // wake up like dead men.”