“High Hawk Season” examines the cast of the cult classic The Warriors as Mountain Goats characters.

Track: “High Hawk Season”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

All Eternals Deck is about a fictional set of tarot cards and each song represents a card. The conceit is easy to identify in songs like “Birth of Serpents” and “Damn These Vampires,” but it’s murky in more direct songs like “Sourdoire Valley Song” and “Liza Forever Minnelli.”

John Darnielle says that “High Hawk Season” is about the plot of the cult-classic film The Warriors. In the film, nine Warriors must escape dozens (and potentially hundreds) of other gangs after someone shoots another gang leader in Van Cortlandt Park and pins it on the Warriors. It’s campy as hell, but it holds up as exciting and filled with machismo. The characterization is thin and your mileage may vary for the narrative, but the drama of the chase in the film is infectious.

The song’s parallels with the movie are obvious. The Warriors in “High Hawk Season” are “young supernovas” and they travel all night towards their own version of happiness. In the film it’s Coney Island, but really it’s a sense of home. The characters are lost through the rest of their journey in New York, often literally as much as metaphorically. There are small moments where you remember that these are kids, despite all the fight scenes and big talk, when they have trouble reading the map and get scared.

Darnielle uses that fear to make the characters his own. “Rise if you’re sleeping, stay awake” became a tagline for the All Eternals Deck tour, and the motto is easy to apply to Darnielle’s world. They see these Warriors who run through the night as their people, isolated and in need of consideration. The harmony and vocals may be unique for the Mountain Goats, but the sense that “the heat’s about to break” sure isn’t.