Author: Alex Russell

275. An Antidote for Strychnine

Alex Russell In League with Dragons , , , , , , ,

Poisons and cures are both possible paths in “An Antidote for Strychnine.”

Track: “An Antidote for Strychnine”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

It is not a new observation to say that In League with Dragons is full of self reference. One of the songs is a sequel and most of the songs reference other songs either directly or indirectly. The entire Mountain Goats experience builds upon itself, with characters like Jenny or the Alpha Couple showing up all over the place. John Darnielle playfully put a line on the front cover of All Hail West Texas that seemingly says the exact number of people contained in the songs, as if he wants you to try to do the math if that’s your thing. It’s fun to find the Easter eggs and it’s rewarding to figure something out, even if it only is a meaning you can find yourself.

“An Antidote for Strychnine” is the longest song on In League with Dragons, but I think it may only have one direct reference to a previous song. “I may not ever get free,” plays with the findings of “Never Quite Free,” especially as the next line starts with a quieter, almost hushed, “but I may.” There’s also a mention of lab rats that people think is a call to “Lab Rat Blues,” so maybe there are two.

Six minutes is a very long time to spend in a Mountain Goats song. It’s long enough that the character makes us wonder what they’re doing. It’s insular, lonely work to deal with poison and cures. It’s what you do when you feel like the world has abandoned you. It’s what you do when you’re not sure if you want to get better or not and you need to prepare for both paths.

274. Going Invisible 2

Alex Russell In League with Dragons , , , , , , ,

Burning everything down isn’t always a bad thing, John Darnielle tells us in “Going Invisible 2.”

Track: “Going Invisible 2”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

You don’t need me to tell you what a two on the end of a song title means, but it is interesting that not all of them have available prequels. “Insurance Fraud #2” doesn’t have a #1, it’s titled that way because it’s the second take and John Darnielle liked the train sounds so much that he used the second take as the official one. That’s mostly trivia and most of the time the two is meant to show you this is part of a series.

The first “Going Invisible” is an unreleased song from Get Lonely, with lines like “but who’d smile back at a face like that.” John Darnielle sings very high on it, giving a distance and a loneliness to what’s already a sad song, and the character feels right at home on Get Lonely even if it didn’t make the final track list. The sequel borrows even more than the sequel songs usually do. The original chorus talks about breaking something and sweeping the pieces away. The sequel is ready to burn it all down, today, and sweep the ashes away.

“I’m gonna break something” is a small threat. It might be a serious one, but it pales when compared to “I’m gonna burn it all down today.” This is the escalation that comes with time, but it also reflects the different tone of the two albums. Get Lonely can be a difficult listen in the wrong headspace. The characters are dealing with real fear and they’re extremely close to the sources. In League with Dragons is John Darnielle revisiting his entire catalog, and, by extension, his entire life. It’s more palatable in this form. Not better or worse, but a moment that builds to triumphant destruction rather than the despondent kind.

273. Fault Lines

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle’s poetry is center stage in “Fault Lines” as luxury and emotional distress mix.

Track: “Fault Lines”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

Many, many better writers than I have said that John Darnielle is a talented lyricist. It’s the primary hook of the Mountain Goats, if it isn’t the emotion behind everything, and it’s on display all the time. “Fault Lines” is familiar territory for a Mountain Goats song: folks get drunk and avoid their emotional problems. What makes it interesting is the language. From the first line, we have “down here where the heat’s so fine.” It’s a simple construction, but it’s not how you often think of “hot” weather. The first verse wanders through descriptions of expense, but my favorite is “we have our strawberries flown in from England.” I don’t even know if that’s worth it or not, but it certainly conveys a lifestyle.

John Darnielle delivers “Fault Lines” like a shanty. You’ll find yourself bobbing your head to it as he strums and sing-songs the descriptions of wasteful luxury and system damage that this couple experiences. “They don’t make us feel better about who we are,” the narrator says, unnecessarily, but they really hit that fact hard. By the end, after several more descriptions, they tell us that all of this won’t “send our love to its reward down in Hell.” It’s about as intense as it comes, even for a song like this, and we have to stand up and listen.

The juxtaposition of fancy, fine things and disastrously failing love is well drawn. The characters are self aware, but that doesn’t stop them. They still keep piling up debts to try to push off the reality of what they feel. It’s certainly a strategy, but the fact that this won’t change the outcome is clear.

272. The Mess Inside

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

The beautiful “The Mess Inside” refuses to let us down easy as it insists on a sad end.

Track: “The Mess Inside”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Mountain Goats songs about specific places. All of these songs seem to suggest that if a person could just get to another place they could be another person. If not happy, they say, at least different. “The Mess Inside” pays off all of these songs to tell you that is not the case. You’re you, wherever you are, and a change of scenery will not fix it.

“Tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things,” is both an all-time lyric and a summation of this idea. “Most of the time I guess I felt all right,” our narrator follows up, and maybe they did. “The Mess Inside” is very clear about the message. This is the story of two people trying four locations to improve their mood and to run from “the mess” of their love. It works until it doesn’t. That’s the story of, conservatively, a hundred Mountain Goats songs.

What makes “The Mess Inside” different is where it falls in the timeline. “I wanted you // to love me like you used to do” is a simple idea, plainly stated. In contrast to “a weekend in Utah won’t fix what’s wrong with us,” however, it becomes a horror story. The die is cast for these two. It’s over, and they know it, and they know this a futile process. That’s not unique for a Mountain Goats couple, but it’s rarely this much of a done deal. This isn’t maybe, this is definite, and you can hear John Darnielle lose hope for his lovers as the story builds to the only conclusion it could ever hope to find.

271. Jeff Davis County Blues

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

“Jeff Davis County Blues” takes a specific route through Texas but offers only a haze of a person’s life.

 

Track: “Jeff Davis County Blues”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

I once drove from El Paso to Fort Stockton, which intersects with the route described in “Jeff Davis County Blues” only briefly, right at the start. A fan made a map of the route here, and it’s interesting to take a look as you listen to the song. It doesn’t really matter where this narrator is driving, but the choice to list it like a map in the song’s lyrics does beg you to view it like one. I was driving this route in 2008 as part of a much larger drive, but I will always remember this part of Texas as even more wide open than Kansas, where we’d just been, and how that surprised me.

Assuming our narrator takes this exact route, they’re driving about five hours and taking a particularly indirect route. “I have no place to go,” they tell us, but they also say they are going to Midland. Over the drive, the narrator seems to decide that home is something they deserve (or at least desire) to come back to, after all. We don’t know why they aren’t there, but we know they spent three days in jail before the song’s events. We don’t know all that much for certain, but we’ve got a lot of clues.

The photographs on the passenger seat are the biggest clue. This is someone who wants what may be lost and they are visualizing it, quite literally. They are going home, but also they say “I hope you won’t mind.” There’s an inkling there, and maybe much more than that, of an idea that this person isn’t welcome in Midland. We don’t know what’s coming next, but we do know that this person’s fears might be justified.

270. Source Decay

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

You can search the postcards in “Source Decay” or you can live in the memory of why they are coming to your house now.

Track: “Source Decay”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

The obvious brother/sister song to “Source Decay” is “Jenny” but it’s at least a cousin to “The Mess Inside.” Both “The Mess Inside” and “Source Decay” wander over geography and use distance and memory to explore what it means to be in one place and think about another one. But we really must leave that there and talk about the Jenny that lives in “Jenny” and a handful of other songs to consider “Source Decay.”

I don’t know if this is a common opinion or not, but I think “Source Decay” is the best song on All Hail West Texas and it’s a personal favorite of mine across the catalog. I love the guitar and I love the delivery, especially how it thuds satisfyingly on lines like “walk the floors a little while.” I strongly recommend the cover by Holy Sons on the official covers album, which gives it a swampy, slower vibe.

The person sending the postcards is Jenny, John Darnielle has said, but also it doesn’t matter. “Source Decay” may be the ultimate example of why this whole exercise is complicated. John Darnielle answered a question on his blog about this song and said that exploring exactly what’s happening and exactly what the narrative tells us is impossible. He says that life doesn’t have one clean line and the exercise of looking through postcards for patterns is the point, not finding what the tapestry says. Jenny’s sending postcards here just like she’s calling or picking someone up on a motorcycle in other songs, but she’s still just part of what’s happening. You can consider the story of “Source Decay” forever, but what you should try to explore is how the events make you feel.

269. Distant Stations

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

We’re asked to consider a rock really, really deeply, but also why we’re considering it, in “Distant Stations.”

Track: “Distant Stations”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

“Distant Stations” opens with seven lines about the narrator finding a rock. “It was a triangle with soft, rounded edges,” they tell us, and add that “it was darker than English moss.” The description goes into extreme detail. You really do not need to know this much about this rock, but you do need to understand why this person feels like this information is critical. This is a certain sort of person, you see, and they need you to hear about this triangle rock they found.

This kind of obsessive behavior could be viewed a few different ways, but it seems like it’s a way into how this person views the world. In the second verse, John Darnielle sings possibly the longest line in any of his songs with “I threw a rock at a crow who was playing in the mulch of some rose bushes by the motel office.” It’s deliberately too long and it’s uncomfortable both to sing and to hear. The result is a small tension that the narrator seems to feel about their situation. They’re wandering around a motel and throwing rocks at birds. It’s anti-social behavior and it’s not something that someone does when they’re deeply in love or satisfied.

Abstracted from “Distant Stations” this sounds like a strange story. Within the song, these are just the choices this person makes as they live a solitary life. John Darnielle says it’s about inaction and about what someone does if they have the mind of a stalker but can’t or won’t act on their fractured way of relating to people. The narrator says “I never told you where I was,” which drives home that they are waiting on someone who won’t, but also can’t, show up.

268. Absolute Lithops Effect

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , , ,

The healing message of “Absolute Lithops Effect” takes on new meaning as we spend time indoors.

Track: “Absolute Lithops Effect”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

I am writing this entry at the end of 2020. I started this process many years ago. I try to leave the personal out of this as much as I can, because I don’t think everyone has my experience and I think the more universal you can make this the better chance it has of connecting. It’s impossible to do that with “Absolute Lithops Effect” in 2020.

Lithops are plants commonly called “living stones” because they look like rocks. They use this as camouflage to survive in harsh climate. John Darnielle uses this as the central image for a song about waiting around and hoping to bloom in emotionally harsh climate. When he wrote this song more than eighteen years ago he could not have imagined how it would sound in 2020. This narrator is recovering from “one long sweltering summer” and their plan is to go to a friend’s house and forget their time inside. Who among us doesn’t feel like that is the key to everything after a year of quarantine and the collapse of so much else?

“I am taking tiny steps forward,” our narrator says, “and I feel sure that my wounds will heal.” In the context of All Hail West Texas, this is a revolutionary statement. The Mountain Goats do not always offer such direct statements of redemption and hope. This person has spent “one blind season alone in here” and now they “are going to find the exit.” It’s striking, both in 2002 and in 2020, to hear someone insist that they are going to get through this. Whatever traps you, be it internal or external, it’s a message that will do you some good to hear.

267. Pink and Blue

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

“Pink and Blue” asks us to consider not just what came before the events of the song, but what came before that.

Track: “Pink and Blue”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

John Darnielle says that he doesn’t play “Pink and Blue” live because the album version is the definitive one. I don’t have the data on this, but that doesn’t seem like a statement he makes very often. “Pink and Blue” is a great song, from a great album, and I don’t know that I ever noticed the lack of live versions until he pointed it out. I can see what he means, though, and I don’t know how you’d improve on this.

Two nine-day-old twins are abandoned and we see a moment of their lives. “Nice new clothes on you and an old carboard produce box for a cradle” is a beautiful image, but a sad statement at the same time. This is as positive a spin on it as you can put, but the circumstances around what led to this moment lingers in the background. John Darnielle adds fun color about crows talking politics and the scenery outside to distract from the central image. Even still, we’re back to the twins in the box and we’re asked to think, however briefly, about what world can abandon the most vulnerable.

A lot of Mountain Goats songs are about this idea. “Pink and Blue” is a pretty little song that doesn’t go very deep, but that’s exactly the point. “Counterfeit Florida Plates” doesn’t directly ask us to consider the mental health aspect of homelessness, but it does if you spend some time under the surface. In the same way, “Pink and Blue” is a sweet-enough way into a much more complicated, desperate reality. We don’t spend any time on what led to this and that’s not the point. It’s about the circumstances that led to that choice that matter.

266. Balance

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

“Balance” finds two characters in the late stages of something we usually don’t want to consider.

Track: “Balance”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

You really should listen to I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, a podcast that didn’t exist when I started doing this but is essential listening now that it exists. John Darnielle talks to Joseph Fink in each episode about a Mountain Goats song and the conversation spirals out into connected (and not connected) topics. I can’t imagine the audience of people who will read about Goats songs but doesn’t listen to this podcast is a big one, but if you’re in that group, you have some homework to do.

In the episode about “Balance,” the pair say it’s song about a moment that doesn’t look at the causes that got you to that moment or what comes next for you after that moment. There are a ton of songs that fit this description, but it’s a great way to approach this one. The content is all miserable topics like “the interest on delinquent loans” but the connective tissue ends both verses on a specific note: “not too far gone to care.”

We almost never find out what happens to people in these songs. It’s simplistic to say that, because that’s true of almost all narrative. You always have to fill in the blanks yourself, whether it’s a great novel or a story song about lovers drinking sweet tea and falling out of love. The cover of All Hail West Texas says the album has seven characters, however, and you can do the work to try to figure out where else we learn about these two. I don’t think you need to do that to appreciate “Balance,” which is what John Darnielle is getting at in that podcast episode. You know what happens next because you know what generally happens next when you look at someone like this.