Author: Alex Russell

435. Trick Mirror

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

“Trick Mirror” finds Seneca recording the violence of Nero but offers little hope for a resolution.

Track: “Trick Mirror”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

It is tempting sometimes to just tell stories about these songs. “Trick Mirror” is sometimes called “Seneca’s Trick Mirror” because Mountain Goats historian and super-fan Jon Nall listed it as such on his website. The distinction isn’t really important, as it’s clearly from the perspective of Seneca, tutor to the Roman emperor Nero. The song details Nero’s anger and madness as they consume him and Seneca fails to intervene. Interesting, Seneca seems to view himself as somewhat complicit, at least through inaction, as he mentions that no one stopped him.

Seneca was ordered to kill himself after he was found to be guilty of being part of a plot to kill Nero. History believes that he wasn’t guilty of it. It’s pretty hard to say, and given the time period and the temperament of Nero, maybe it doesn’t even matter. We don’t get much from Seneca here other than a detailing of events, and this one hasn’t been played live or discussed that I can find record of anywhere. John Darnielle has always been fascinated by true stories and it’s easy to see why this one is interesting. What are we to make of how Seneca leaves this story, detailing the violence but with no way out? Seneca just had to hope that someone after him would fix all this, which is truly a difficult way to leave this world.

434. Elijah

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

The quiet “Elijah” finds someone promising to come home to take their place at the table, but who can say if they will?

Track: “Elijah”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

John Darnielle is willing to go deep on album construction when he’s asked to do so specifically. I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, the podcast series from a few years ago about individual albums, was a great resource for this. You have to assume every song choice and every order is deliberate for every artist, but you don’t need to make that assumption here. There is a reason John Darnielle wanted “Elijah” to follow “Jaipur.” I can’t tell you what that reason is, however. I love The Coroner’s Gambit, which feels raw and personal even on songs that are clearly not actually personal like “Insurance Fraud #2,” but I am always astounded at the change in gear between the furious “Jaipur” and the quiet “Elijah.” The best answer I can give you is that it’s abrupt on purpose, as it tells you the kind of album you’re listening to by grinding your expectations down.

There are many stories about Elijah, notably that you are intended to leave a place empty for him at the table. This is referenced in “Elijah,” though many of the specific references beyond this are deeply obscure or potentially unknowable. Kyle Barbour of The Annotated Mountain Goats threw his hands up at “smear the walls with coconut oil” but I chalk this up to John Darnielle’s love of specific references rather than their purpose. This one isn’t really a puzzle box, I don’t think, or at least it primarily isn’t one. It’s a delivery system for a sentiment and one you need to open your heart to before you dig into the rest of The Coroner’s Gambit.

433. Jaipur

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

The furious “Jaipur” engages with the question of if you can go home again, but also if you really want to or not.

Track: “Jaipur”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

“Jaipur” is the perfect song to open The Coroner’s Gambit. It sets the tone early, as this is a difficult album and the things it forces you to confront are uncomfortable. No disrespect intended to classics like Sweden or Full Force Galesburg, but John Darnielle considers 2000 the year his songwriting changed and when the stories got more complex. This one is about death, it’s right there in the title, but it’s about your relationship to death, as well.

Darnielle says “Jaipur” is about not really being able to go home again. He once introduced the song with a classic line that he recently repurposed for “Rain in Soho” as he said that you cannot cross the same river twice. This refers to the Heraclitus line that the river and the person stepping into it both differ, which we can tell from “Jaipur.” What’s interesting is that this is usually presented in somber tones, with reflection on how the world changes around you as you also change, but here we’re closer to the vibe in “Quito.” This is fury, where you realize you thought you wanted to go home but you’re too angry and everything feels too wrong to call it home.

There are dozens of references here and we don’t have the space to get into all of them. I’ll close by mentioning the delivery here, as this is one of my favorite Darnielle vocal performances from the era. You can hear how mad this person is as they build towards confrontation. They’re mad at everyone else but also themselves and that kind of rage spills out in every direction.

432. Almost Every Door

Alex Russell Hex of Infinite Binding EP , , , , , ,

Through hushed tones and mournful horns, “Almost Every Door” has some bad news for you.

Track: “Almost Every Door”
Album: Hex of Infinite Binding EP (2018)

The Mountain Goats recorded “Almost Every Door” in Chicago in 2018 during a three-night set at the Old Town School of Folk Music. John Darnielle recorded an episode of the podcast I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats live later that week, also in Chicago. I saw the first night of the set and went to the live recording of the podcast. In looking at set lists from those shows, John Darnielle played some very heavy stuff during the solo sets each night and I remember that recording being fairly intense, as it was about “Steal Smoked Fish.” Does it ultimately matter? Maybe not, but when you listen to “Almost Every Door,” it may help to picture those days and that headspace.

The thing that always stands out to me is the delivery. The references to exits and hopes are difficult to listen to, but it’s all even more difficult because Darnielle sounds almost defeated. It’s not unheard of for a song in high, quiet tones to sound this way, but it’s really notable here. “Almost every door’s an exit // just not this one” could sound many ways, but here it sounds like someone is sadly telling someone else that they’ve looked and tried and must confirm, reluctantly, the facts. The horns are powerful here, as well, and you really appreciate Matt Douglas on this one.

431. Song for Ted Sallis

Alex Russell Hex of Infinite Binding EP , , , , , ,

The story of how Man-Thing became Man-Thing, “Song for Ted Sallis” has much more than that for you.

Track: “Song for Ted Sallis”
Album: Hex of Infinite Binding EP (2018)

Ted Sallis is Man-Thing, a Marvel comic book character who is a monster made of plant material that no longer has much of his original humanity. It’s complicated, as it always is, but “Song for Ted Sallis” tells the story of Man-Thing through some very John Darnielle language. “Whether or not it was always going to be this way // it only mattered yesterday” is an all-time sentiment, here referencing the finality of literal transformation but elsewhere a perfect sentiment for a way to move forward in life. “No skin like the skin you woke up in” is an equally powerful refrain for similar reasons.

You can hear this one live, which is true of no other song on Hex of Infinite Binding as far as I know. That show in 2020 is one of the great live shows in Mountain Goats history and worthy of your time even beyond that performance. The live version of “Song for Ted Sallis” is similar to the studio one, though as a solo show that performance is missing the saxophone that really makes it go. I think that alone makes the studio one superior, but why not try both? The overall vibe on the studio version really does reward additional listening, which seems supported by the fact that as of this writing, “Song for Ted Sallis” has as many listens as the other three songs on the EP combined. Maybe that’s because it’s first, but I think it’s because it really calls to you to come back to it.

430. Tucson Fog

Alex Russell Hex of Infinite Binding EP , , , , , ,

A familiar narrator fails to comfort their fellow man in “Tucson Fog.”

Track: “Tucson Fog”
Album: Hex of Infinite Binding EP (2018)

When he released Hex of Infinite Binding as an EP in 2018, John Darnielle said on Bandcamp that he used to release a lot of these and that he planned on doing it again. He did release a few, but nothing like the volume from his older days. That’s not a bad thing, and in fact the period directly following these EPs led to even more full-length albums than anyone could have anticipated. The result has been a ton of music from the Mountain Goats, just not in these short, one-off blasts.

“Tucson Fog” closes the EP on a dark note. Darnielle adds on the liner notes that he recorded it himself in his bedroom in December and that “things can get a little dark in December.” It’s especially dark considering the time that followed it, as it sets up a world where a speaker is locked in their house and hears only from “distant outposts.” This is too far in advance of the lockdowns and the quarantines to draw too much of a connection, but especially placing it in time really makes that stand out.

The song stands as a counterpoint to hope, but in a different way than much of the Get Lonely songs from a similar point of view offer a counterpoint. The narrator still wanders their house and speaks vaguely of dark rituals that leave a stench, but mostly they try to discover what their normal life is trying to tell them. To me this speaks of much older narrators who boiled water or made breakfast and tried to figure out why that moment was speaking to them and what they should draw from it.

429. Love Love Love

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, The Sunset Tree , , , , , , , ,

Through several painful references, “Love Love Love” tells a story about the complex ways we react to loss.

Track: “Love Love Love”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to The Sunset Tree (2005)

You do not get what you’re probably expecting with a song called “Love Love Love.” Love is a very complicated emotion that’s often made simple through artistic expression. John Darnielle is not interested in this approach, thus you have “Love Love Love.” The song is a dozen references, all difficult and painful, tied together as a story about John Darnielle’s own life. He’s said that it’s about feeling good when his abuser passed away. It calls to mind the “you died at last // at last?” question from “Pale Green Things” on the same album. You might want to be a person who can rise above, but it’s, as always, more complicated than that. Is it even wrong to take joy in a moment like that? Your experience may vary.

The Mountain Goats have played “Love Love Love” hundreds of times. I always wonder, when I scroll through a list like this of so many shows in so many cities over so many years, if John Darnielle thinks about the origins of songs like this when he sings them. You can tell when you see a song like “Spent Gladiator 2” that he’s in the moment every time. The Come, Come to The Sunset Tree version of “Lion’s Teeth” opens with Darnielle saying it’s a hard song for him to play. I hope, to some degree, that isn’t the case with this one. I don’t have the life experience Darnielle does, so my connection isn’t the same as his, but “Love Love Love” is a beautiful song all the same. It’s just one best enjoyed with a little distance.

428. Song for Dennis Brown

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, The Sunset Tree , , , , , , , ,

“Song for Dennis Brown” isn’t really about Dennis Brown, but it references him to make a point.

Track: “Song for Dennis Brown”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to The Sunset Tree (2005)

The choice to pitch “Song for Dennis Brown” so high has always been an interesting one to me. I don’t think there’s anything to this, but the longest songs on The Sunset Tree are all ones that John Darnielle sings much higher than the others. You get a chance to sit with a song like “Song for Dennis Brown” in a way you do not sit with “Magpie” or “Dance Music.” There’s a lot of room to breathe here, despite the subject matter of a death from a collapsed lung.

Dennis Brown was a reggae singer who was held in high esteem. Bob Marley loved him. He was a legend, though I’ll admit I’m going on some recent research here and I’m not all that familiar with the genre. It’s easy enough to hear what people love, though. Brown’s voice is incredible. He died of an overdose that collapsed his lung, but you can hear that in the lyrics. There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs about famous people who died tragically and unexpectedly and you might just say this is one more of them. You might say that, though the self-insert asks you to go a little deeper than that. We’re in similar space to “Dilaudid” here or even “This Year,” though we’re asked to draw a slightly different conclusion. “We’ll see just how much it takes” is a threat, read one way, and you realize this isn’t about Dennis Brown as much as it is about what might happen if you lean into your worst impulses.

427. Lion’s Teeth

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, The Sunset Tree , , , , , , , ,

“Lion’s Teeth” serves as a revenge fantasy for people who know that it will have to remain a fantasy.

Track: “Lion’s Teeth”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to The Sunset Tree (2005)

The version on Come, Come to The Sunset Tree opens with John Darnielle saying “this is a hard song for John to play.” You can hear it in his voice when he says it, but you can also hear it in the song. I don’t find myself coming back to “Lion’s Teeth” as much as I do most of the rest of the album. One of my five favorite Mountain Goats songs opens The Sunset Tree, “You or Your Memory,” and it’s largely about the same thing, if through a different lens and at a different time. The song that closes the album, “Pale Green Things,” is even closer to the subject matter, but it looks back at abuse rather than living within it.

I have to assume The Sunset Tree means a lot more to a survivor of abuse. Much of the album feels universal even though it’s written from a specific perspective. The songs of triumph could be about generic triumph even though they stem from one explicit place. The songs of despair, like the revenge fantasy “Lion’s Teeth,” don’t always need to be about what they are actually about. This is why you see couples swaying tenderly to “Woke Up New.” It’s what it is to you, not what it actually is. I find it harder to abstract “Lion’s Teeth” because it’s so explicit. That’s fine, of course, and it makes it stronger for what it is. As with many songs like this I hope that you never need this one, but I am glad it is here if you do.

426. Magpie

Alex Russell The Sunset Tree , , , , , , ,

An intense metaphor consumes “Magpie,” a story about something bad on the horizon.

Track: “Magpie”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

I must thank the people at the Mountain Goats Wiki, who I thank often but should thank even more, for finding this article from Willamette Week. The conceit is that the interview asks questions about every song on The Sunset Tree in haiku form and John Darnielle was asked to respond. The questions find romance in “You or Your Memory” and John Darnielle asks, essentially, how they got that out of that song. In response to a question about if the narrator of “Lion’s Teeth” really pulled the tooth, John Darnielle tells them he learned to drive stick in a parking lot. The responses are genuine, but they are very John Darnielle. They also show how difficult it is to get off of “your” version of a song, which always reminds me of an old friend’s insistence that the cannibalism in “Golden Jackal Song” was literal. Maybe it is!

For “Magpie,” the question asks directly what the meaning of the magpie is, and John Darnielle says “only a traitor // undresses his metaphors // as if they were whores.” This speaks to a few things, but mostly it suggests to me that the point is that you figure it out yourself. Magpies, as far as I’ve ever heard, supposedly like shiny things and are easily distracted into thievery. I doubt that’s true, but it suggests a reference to someone that steals indiscriminately. There are some jumping off points there for The Sunset Tree that make sense to me, but I refer you back to the songwriter on this one.