“Hello There Howard” finds a sneering indifference in a narrator who is endlessly throwing dice at a craps table. 

Track: “Hello There Howard”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

Someone asked John Darnielle if any songs from Hot Garden Stomp would ever be played live again. He gave a very thorough response, song by song, about all of them. He says that “Pure Milk” and the title track are the only ones he does play live, but he leaves the door open with regard to many of the others. “Hello There Howard” earns a “probably no” from the man that wrote it.

The world loves to speculate about these songs, so my job is partly done for me for all but the strangest and oldest songs in the catalog. “Hello There Howard,” as far as I can tell, has exactly no other words written about it online aside from “probably no” from John Darnielle. There is one positive YouTube comment, but that’s it. It’s just not a song that people seem interested in breaking down.

The straightforward ones can be the most difficult. The narrator is clearly at a craps table in a casino and is met by a sad character who asks the narrator to throw the dice. A craps table turns immediately on the wrong throw, but the narrator says “the table is hot // and so am I” and things are going well.

Darnielle loves placing his characters in destructive situations, and a casino is a purely destructive place. Casinos are designed to keep you in them perpetually and to keep you focused on the games. Even if you do win, the reasoning goes, eventually you will lose it all back. The narrator in “Hello There Howard” concludes that it doesn’t even matter what the result of the throw is, and in so doing finds the only way to really survive their actions. They don’t care anymore what happens, which is a very Goats-narrator move.