Author: Alex Russell

235. Duke Ellington

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now! , , , ,

A lone character confronts what’s led them to this point as they picture a performance in “Duke Ellington.”

Track: “Duke Ellington”
Album: Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

There is not one theme to the Mountain Goats. It’s tempting to summarize John Darnielle as someone who writes about loss and sadness, but there are so many songs of hope and desperation. It’s more correct, in my mind, to say there is one mood through the Mountain Goats’ catalog. The characters differ and the desires those characters have differ, but they all exist in a world that is realized in one way. It’s a difficult world, to be sure, but it’s one that shows the residents of it great beauty in small things. This is true especially in the early days.

Before the re-release in 1999, “Duke Ellington” was originally part of a compilation, The Long Secret, released in 1995 by Harriet Records. Both the company and the compilation draw names from Harriet the Spy, which is interesting but neither here nor there. John Darnielle said he left it off Sweden deliberately and that it has a “mystical sadness” regarding the namesake musician Duke Ellington.

The narrator is in Sweden and pictures (or sees) Duke Ellington playing piano. “It utterly wasted me // in Sweden,” they say of the image. We know what they mean and we draw on our own memories of powerful music. John Darnielle speaks of the “aftermath,” a strong term for the moments after a song. It all builds to our character watching this performance and saying “I’d had just about enough of losing things” and telling us they are alone, away from the person to whom they hope to convey this message. This song is solitary, alone from the other albums, but the character is, as well, though they fit right in with so many other people we meet in John Darnielle’s world.

234. Alphabetizing

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now! , , , , , , , , , ,

The Alpha Couple is caught in a memorable, beautiful moment in the days before in “Alphabetizing.”

Track: “Alphabetizing”
Album: Chile de Árbol (1993) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

John Darnielle has played “Alphabetizing” live more often than he has most songs from 1993. “I will defend this song, from the earlier ones, I think it’s alright,” he said at a show at Pitzer College, his alma mater, in 2006. During several performances, he has commented about how it ends abruptly on Chile de Árbol and he thus makes an effort to end it that way even now at live shows. It shines in these performances in ways the early songs don’t always work. They’re working seeking out.

The title hints at it, but the man himself has confirmed at live shows that this is a song about the Alpha Couple. We start with one admiring another, in lyrics that foreshadow “Going to Georgia” in a way. “I love you especially // because I saw you // coming through // the screen door // up on the second floor // out on the balcony” is a mundane string of details, but it tells us this character is overcome. When you love someone above all else and, when pressed, say it’s because they came through a screen door, you aren’t in a place to behave rationally. That’s either pure love or the blinding hope that comes before what comes after that.

We’re in familiar territory in the second verse. “The air was thick with alcohol,” our narrator now says, and pleads for time to make them forget the good moments. “Let the years come and take away my memory // I will not forget the shock that ran though me,” they say, and tell us again about this beautiful moment they witnessed. This is still the good times, but a mist of booze and an understanding that good times don’t last are all we need to know where we’re headed.

 

233. Billy the Kid’s Dream of the Magic Shoes

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now! , , , , , , , ,

“Billy the Kid’s Dream of the Magic Shoes” is about Billy the Kid and some special shoes.

Track: “Billy the Kid’s Dream of the Magic Shoes”
Album: Chile de Árbol (1993) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

At a show in Baltimore in 1996, John Darnielle told the audience “the old ones hurt my hands more.” He also called “Billy the Kid’s Dream of the Magic Shoes” very old. It was three years old at the time and is much, much older now.

The song details Billy the Kid, famous American Old West murderer, as he tells the audience that he does not care that he is going to be killed because he has special shoes. He has special shoes, you see, and he has them on. This repeats. It’s important to Billy the Kid that you know he has special shoes and that he does not fear what comes next.

For a song from 1993 about magic shoes, this has gotten a lot of play at live shows over the years. Most of the live performances follow one person asking for it, as one does, by yelling the absurd title from the crowd. In recent years, John Darnielle has commented and called it “sloppy.” He’s also commented on the fact that people yell for it, but it’s often only one person and it’s their fault if he plays it. It’s not productive to follow that thread too far, because he’s playing it because he wants to, but it’s interesting to think about the person that yells for the song about Billy the Kid’s magic shoes.

I don’t know why someone would love this song and call for it, specifically. Someone at a benefit show once paid a ton of money for “Pure Honey.” There is something about Mountain Goats fans that draws them to these strange tracks, so if you’re one of those people, here’s your song about special shoes.

232. Going to Alaska

Alex Russell Taboo VI: The Homecoming , , , , , , ,

The best song on the first album, “Going to Alaska” calls a harsh environment “perfect” and opens up some grim questions.

Track: “Going to Alaska”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

The most enduring song from the first album is “Going to Alaska.” It’s also the first in the collection of 40+ “Going to…” songs that discuss the experience of going to places that include a small city in England, the southernmost city in Texas, and Maine.

The studio recording is rough, but that’s par for the course on the first album. “Going to Alaska” has bookends of samples from an episode of Hawaii Five-O, but it also sounds the most like the things that came after it. John Darnielle’s delivery is intense. That’s an easy word to use for him at any stage of his career, but it’s really the only word for a song that ends with a narrator insisting they are going to Alaska because it is “perfect for my purposes.”

It was a poem first. Bits like “up, yes” to start the second verse and the extended metaphor of heat as paint still carry a poetic quality. What makes it a Mountain Goats song is the delivery, with a building sense of nervousness. “You can go blind just by looking at the ground,” our narrator tells us, and we wonder why this person would say such a thing. These details about Alaska are true, such as I know, but it’s all akin to someone talking about how easy it would be to push someone off a building when they are both on top of it. It may be true, but why are you looking at me like that?

231. One Winter at Point Alpha Privative

Alex Russell Taboo VI: The Homecoming , , , , , , ,

The first Alpha Couple song, “One Winter at Point Alpha Privative,” introduces us to two people experiencing new feelings for each other.

Track: “One Winter at Point Alpha Privative”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

John Darnielle has written dozens of songs about “The Alpha Couple,” a married-and-divorced couple that travel to Florida in Tallahassee, ultimately, and experience a particularly destructive relationship. There’s a lot of connective mythology through Mountain Goats songs, but nothing is more critical than these two. Many songs are explicitly Alpha songs given their title, but even songs with standard titles often appear to be about these two.

John Darnielle started writing poems before he wrote songs. “Going to Alaska” from Taboo VI: The Homecoming was one of the first, but the first Alpha song was “One Winter at Point Alpha Privative.” He has said that no one wanted to read his poems, so he put them to music and made them rhyme. Each verse of this one rhymes internally, which makes for a droning effect when sung aloud. The guitar builds on that and it will make you nervous to listen to, like an argument you aren’t involved in and shouldn’t be hearing.

Much of the band’s best work builds on these characters and it’s impossible to not add some mystique to the song as “the first Alpha song.” The lyrics are intense, with the narrator asking “is there something eating you // will it leave a single trace” of their partner. John Darnielle has said that he started the Alpha idea to explore his own feelings about divorce. While the characters have become more solidified and seemingly grown beyond his personal experience, this first look lets us see how John Darnielle began thinking about the end of love between two people and what they felt about each other after that gave way to something new.

230. Don’t Take the Dogs Away

Alex Russell Taboo VI: The Homecoming , , , , , , ,

One character pleads with another, but you’ll never guess about what, in “Don’t Take the Dogs Away.”

Track: “Don’t Take the Dogs Away”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

There is a temptation to say something like “Don’t Take the Dogs Away” is about a person not wanting someone to take the dogs away. There really isn’t much to say about a song like this, but I am fascinated by the live performance that I’ve referenced before where John Darnielle played the entire first album live in 2014. Peter Hughes provides backing vocals on what may be the only performance of “Don’t Take the Dogs Away” in the thirty years since it was written. I love the image of Peter Hughes listening to that first tape to learn the lyrics and preparing to play it in front of a crowd.

The lyrics are simple, though not as simple as “Move (Chicago 196X)” before it. A narrator yells “you do this every time” at someone else, presumably in reference to said dogs. “Just look around the house,” they say, “what should I say to you // where do you want me to begin?” It’s an early look into the situations future Goats characters will find themselves in. It’s not really about dogs, probably, but it’s a fight about something that seems to have happened before.

John Darnielle has said that it’s not worth digging up Taboo VI: The Homecoming and he’s mostly right. When you listen to the two minutes of “Don’t Take the Dogs Away” you don’t walk away with much, but you do see the early signs of Darnielle as a songwriter. A narrator screaming “you do this every time” over and over isn’t very interesting in this moment, but it really is part of the start of everything else.

229. Move (Chicago 196X)

Alex Russell Taboo VI: The Homecoming , , , , , , ,

You could get lost in trying to figure out the meaning of “Move (Chicago 196X),” but that won’t do you any good.

Track: “Move (Chicago 196X)”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

When John Darnielle played the entirety of his first album at a live show in 2014, he joked about “Move (Chicago 196X).” He said it was one of two songs that he knew had never been played live. He called the instrumental middle a “dream pop interlude” and explained that you can hear his mother talk to him and squeeze a toy pig into the microphone while he was playing piano.

It is difficult to imagine needing more information than that about a song that is, in total, a person saying “if you leave you’re gonna get athlete’s foot” in various formations for a few minutes. John Darnielle said at that same show “if my dream of ever turning us into a jam band is ever realized, you will hear this song again.” It’s all a joke, because it has to be.

I don’t know what the title refers to and I don’t know if there’s a deeper meaning to this one. I suspect the answer to both is “it doesn’t matter.” Thirty years ago, John Darnielle was not imagining people trying to figure “Move (Chicago 196X)” out. It probably would have delighted him. If there’s anything to draw out here, it’s the mindset of John Darnielle in the early nineties, not planting mysteries but taking what might be an odd phrase he imagined and exploring the space it creates.

228. Ice Cream, Cobra Man

Alex Russell Taboo VI: The Homecoming , , , , , , ,

The first album is a strange journey, but “Ice Cream, Cobra Man” displays some of the intensity that comes after it.

Track: “Ice Cream, Cobra Man”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

I do not own a copy of the first Mountain Goats album, Taboo VI: The Homecoming. John Darnielle is consistent in his description that it isn’t really something you should track down. As far as I can tell, it will cost you a few hundred bucks if you want your own.

It is interesting primarily as a historical document. John Darnielle was very young and wanted to put his poems to music, and thus this collection of covers and original songs was born. There are some real choices here, with one song in Spanish translation tracked almost directly on top of the English, dialogue from television shows, and sound effects from John Darnielle’s mother playing with a toy pig into the microphone. It’s not quite outsider art, but it has a similar effect.

“Ice Cream, Cobra Man,” on the original tape, opens and closes with explicit, first person, discussion of a sex act. The versions online cut most of it out, which is a source of some controversy. John Darnielle played the entire tape live in 2014, but he also played this one song in Urbana, Illinois in April of 2009. At that show, he made no comment about what may be the only other extant performance of a seventeen-year-old song but did say later that he was talking less because his throat hurt.

It is very difficult to talk about the first album. John Darnielle hasn’t fully disowned it, but he does say it isn’t like what comes after it. “Ice Cream, Cobra Man” is an exception, and “I feel no pain as I float across your ceiling // I feel no shame // I am in a thousand rooms all at the same time” is, if nothing else, something another Darnielle narrator would like to shout at someone.

 

227. Butter Teeth

Alex Russell Palmcorder Yajna , , , , , ,

“Butter Teeth” spends some time with the folks in Portland as they steal things they don’t need.

Track: “Butter Teeth”
Album: Palmcorder Yajna (2003)

“Butter Teeth” is part of the larger universe of We Shall All Be Healed. It’s straightforward in subject matter, as John Darnielle’s narrator tells us they and their compatriots are going to steal random items and look for next steps in a world without next steps. The characters on the album and the two singles that accompany it, Palmcorder Yajna and Letter from Belgium, are not going to make it out of this okay. We might check in on this bunch during a momentary high or during times long after those highs, but we always know the trajectory they’re on no matter what point in the timeline that song happens.

“Butter Teeth” finds the group wandering around and stealing things. “Artlessly shoplifting random things” is a fun turn of phrase, and John Darnielle sells it with a beat before “random” that makes the line almost seem fun. It’s possible in these moments to forget the grander arc of these people’s experience. Much like “Counterfeit Florida Plates,” the mundane elements of someone’s experience can be viewed outside the whole and seem not so bad for a moment, until we’re forced to consider what counting cars or stealing cough syrup actually means for that person’s life.

John Darnielle’s comments about “Butter Teeth” focus on that stealing and on how people outside that group view it. When you see someone in a CVS put some sunscreen in their jacket or someone taking shower curtain rings, what goes through your head? You can try to fill in the details, but John Darnielle wants us to really wonder for more than that brief moment.

226. Yoga

Alex Russell Devil in the Shortwave , , , , , , ,

Two characters debate next steps and outcomes while changing their passports in “Yoga.”

Track: “Yoga”
Album: Devil in the Shortwave (2002)

There are two things to take note of in “Yoga.” The first is obvious from the first line, when we learn that these two are doctoring passports in an attempt to escape Bombay. We know we’re in a time before 1995, likely, as Bombay became Mumbai then. We know we’re dealing with unscrupulous characters, again likely, because most aboveboard people don’t have kits to adjust passports. The second thing is revealed in the last verse, as one characters tells the other that one of them “will be all alone someday.”

It all depends on what you believe. The narrator calls the other character’s statement that there is nothing in their way a lie and calls the statement about one, but only one, of them making it out the truth. All we know about this person is that they’re adjusting a passport illicitly. Why would we take their statements after that as truth? Even zoomed out from that, why would we assume they know what’s going to happen next?

“Yoga” unfolds the more time you spend with it in that way. The narrator may be lying, the other character may be lying, neither may be lying, and they may both be wrong or right and not know yet. There are many stories like this over the catalog and John Darnielle loves to create narrators that appear to be omniscient but really only know what they believe is true. On the surface, it’s a song about two people doing what is surely just another crime on a longer list. Below that, it’s people who aren’t sure what’s real anymore and probably ran out of good ideas a long time ago.