All Eternals Deck

455. Brisbane Hotel Sutra

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“Brisbane Hotel Sutra” is a look backwards during a period of loneliness far from home.

Track: “Brisbane Hotel Sutra”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

I place arguably too much importance on a single comment John Darnielle made once many years ago about the process of how the import-only or B-side tracks become what they become. In speaking of “Attention All Pickpockets” he said that he loves to put great songs on hard-to-find releases, somewhat out of self-sabotage but also as a nod to diligent collectors. As digital media has grown in significance over the years that answer needs some updating, but I really do love it. “Brisbane Hotel Sutra” is titled that because John Darnielle wrote it in a hotel in Brisbane, but it is not on All Eternals Deck proper because it doesn’t fit with the rest of the album. Darnielle said once it’s a matter of sequencing, but you can also just assume that the song with an Australian city in the title is on the Australia release because of course it is.

It’s a song about Darnielle’s childhood that he says he wrote during a period of depression on tour. The farthest I have ever been from home was a trip to India for a week for work and I remember feeling a lighter version of what Darnielle describes, where I became acutely focused on the distance and that became existential to me. Darnielle’s childhood was more complicated than mine and leaves him with scars he describes in detail, which is why he’s writing the songs and I’m writing about the songs. The biblical formatting of the verses is an interesting device here, but it’s really about the rawness of the descriptions. A lot of times you come at these things sideways, but this one stares directly at the trauma.

454. Outer Scorpion Squadron

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“Outer Scorpion Squadron” strongly embraces the darkness, even considered among other Mountain Goats songs.

Track: “Outer Scorpion Squadron”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

Many years ago, one of the richest people I’ve ever met in person saw that I was wearing the classic original Mountain Goats shirt that says “I only listen to the Mountain Goats.” The line is tongue-in-cheek, sorta, but it’s also not. This incredibly rich, powerful person said “you only listen to the Mountain Goats? You must want to kill yourself!” The glibness and the horror of it stuck with me as a reminder of how divorced from the real world you can become, as I did not really know this man, but it only occurred to me later that he had to have some familiarity with John Darnielle’s music to even know that it was appropriate to judge his music as “sad,” even though the way he expressed it was appalling.

“Outer Scorpion Squadron” is the kind of song that would make you wonder, at first, why anyone would want to spend time in this space. I’m not defending that guy’s position, but I can understand someone hearing a song about embracing the horrors of your childhood and staying with the ghosts of those moments forever and finding that stressful and upsetting. The Mountain Goats are not a band for everyone and a song like this one may not be the one you want on a sunny afternoon. This is a heavy song on a list of mostly heavy songs. Use it sparingly, but I think most people will find they do need to use it every now and again.

453. Prowl Great Cain

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“Prowl Great Cain” explodes over and over, but the music clouds the story of someone haunted by their actions.

Track: “Prowl Great Cain”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

The energy in “Prowl Great Cain” is what makes it for me. If you love the Mountain Goats you have to love John Darnielle’s voice, but I think this performance is deserving of special mention. Whether you’re talking about live performances or just the studio cut, Darnielle hits a dozen specific moments of snarl and punches the pucker you have to make with your mouth on “prowl” every time. I’ve leaned on the term “explosion” too hard when describing any song that’s uptempo and has drums, but I think you’ve really got to use it here. I just love the way he sings this one and I love the driving rhythm that somewhat plays against it. If you don’t tense up, in a good way, when you hear “feel the prickings of my conscience in my chest” then I cannot get you there.

You have to take a little bit of a walk for the meaning. The title references Cain, the first murderer in the Bible who is cursed with a life of barren fields and the space to let his conscience work on him, but the narrator here is not Cain. Darnielle has introduced the song as happening in Cambodia in 1976, which will lead you to understand the lyrics as a narrator that has sold out someone, a neighbor or a friend, and how they deal with the knowledge that in this place, at this time, the consequences there are dire. It’s a layered set of references, complex even for the Mountain Goats, but the connection is clear and it rewards listening to it with both layers in your mind.

450. Never Quite Free

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Some might say “Never Quite Free” is misunderstood, but it serves a greater purpose when read a different way.

Track: “Never Quite Free”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011) and All Survivors Pack (2011)

I have a set list from a show I saw a few years ago where “Never Quite Free” was the final song before the mid-show solo break that John Darnielle does. It’s listed as “NQF” with a full-page line after it to show the delineation. I remember that performance, with John Darnielle smiling and beaming as he belted the lyrics. He’s spoken about it a lot, often saying that fans think it’s a liberating, positive experience, but it’s about not being able to ever escape something. It’s right in the title, right there, clearly, that you will never get free. The contrast between the message and how people seem to receive it is something we’ve talked about a lot in this series, but this is an interesting one because I don’t think it’s as purely opposite as the others.

You can’t get free of your past, but the freedom comes from acknowledging that. Watching John Darnielle close his eyes and tell a few hundred people in a dark club that they are not going to escape whatever they hope will eventually fade away should be a kind of terrifying experience, but it’s liberating to own whatever you cannot cast off. “Wish me well where I go,” Darnielle says, “but when you see me, you’ll know.” He’s not literally talking about himself, but that’s often how I hear it in this context. The Mountain Goats are a different thing to everyone, but if you really love songs like “Never Quite Free,” part of it is that even the infinite fear in yourself can be contextualized. What a gift that is.

449. The Autopsy Garland

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The meaning behind “The Autopsy Garland” is in the text, but the personal nature of it adds another layer.

Track: “The Autopsy Garland”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011) and All Survivors Pack (2011)

You don’t need to dig to find this, so I’ll spot you the explanation of “The Autopsy Garland.” It’s about Judy Garland and how she “never had a chance” given the sort of people in her life. John Darnielle once called it “intensely personal” and said that the version of it you hear on the album was complex and irregular for their style and it did not lend itself to live performance. It has, very possibly, only been played live one time, six days ago as of this writing, in Kentucky.

The song itself is a purposefully grotesque look at the people who harmed Judy Garland, but I am especially interested in that one live performance. It was either not recorded or isn’t uploaded yet, but I rather like that. I am obviously an obsessive, which I don’t need to admit to here in the 400+ range of this series, but I still do like the unknowable. John Darnielle has said before that he likes that some things get destroyed and that you can’t ever collect everything. That, plus the fact that he once said he didn’t want to try to place this live, makes it special to know that it did happen, but you can’t hear it. Some people did, which is great, but that hidden element has a wonder to it. It’s even better that it was played first, a spot John Darnielle has said he sometimes reserves for songs the crowd won’t know. Five years ago I saw the band open with an Ani DiFranco cover that had what I imagine to be a similar effect. Some things may never happen again.

448. Beautiful Gas Mask

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“Beautiful Gas Mask” has some painful, difficult imagery, but it’s also something you can dance along with as you worry.

Track: “Beautiful Gas Mask”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011) and All Survivors Pack (2011)

All Eternals Deck is a hard album for me to get my head around. It came out at the busiest time of my life, during a time of extreme transition where I felt overwhelmed all the time. When I think of it I remember how many times I listened to “Damn These Vampires” and how great the ending of the album is, leading several clearly thematically connected songs into each other to leave the listener with a sense that the whole thing was about one idea. It’s not correct to say I don’t love All Eternals Deck, but it does share, to my mind, something with Transcendental Youth in that I love both albums but I find some of the material difficult to connect with directly. This is entirely a personal opinion and not a statement on either album, but it’s something I’ve tried to analyze for myself as to why I left a few of these songs for the very end.

“Beautiful Gas Mask” is one such song. It’s about paranoia, which I find less relatable than many of the other problems Mountain Goats narrators experience. It’s a great song with a catchy chorus and I’ve always been fond of the drums, but the personal connection relies on your ability to feel this peril. Leave it to the Mountain Goats to have you tapping your toes as you hear about being caught in jaws and crushed like fleas.

304. Birth of Serpents

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“Birth of Serpents” finds John Darnielle in several places but having one single experience.

Track: “Birth of Serpents”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

John Darnielle has said a lot of things that stick with me, but I think a lot about a comment he made many years ago that “Waving at You” was a song he felt really close to. He said that the quiet ones were the close ones, even though most people thought it was when he was screaming. That answer probably has changed somewhat, especially as he’s written more about his own life in recent times. The last handful of albums have more songs about the real-deal John Darnielle than the first ten.

“Birth of Serpents” is only nominally about snakes. The chorus tells us to picture snakes under heat lamps, but really we’re in Oregon with John Darnielle. He never sings like this, with the last verse almost entirely pitched as high as he can go. So much of what makes the Mountain Goats great is the poetry and narrative, but the performance is central to “Birth of Serpents.” John Darnielle is feeling this one, which he probably always is, but he’s letting it show more here than usual.

He says that it’s about an experience in Portland where a friend told him another person they both used to know was working down the way. John Darnielle went to say hi, but found that they died a year earlier in a car accident. To understand the Mountain Goats is to understand this journey through Oregon and Iowa and California, but it’s also to picture this moment where you almost get to have an experience you thought impossible only to realize that actually, yeah, it’s as done as you feared it might be.

291. For Charles Bronson

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John Darnielle talks about longevity and surviving in “For Charles Bronson.”

Track: “For Charles Bronson”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

The folks that created Charles Bronson’s Wikipedia page did something I’ve never seen before: They added a “genre” column to the filmography section. It draws a distinction between “war drama” and “war” as different genres somehow, but I mention it because it shows that Charles Bronson basically did one thing for fifty years. He was a guy with a gun in a truly staggering number of films, from westerns to whatever a “comedy drama” is.

John Darnielle says he was watching a Bronson movie and looked up his story. That’s the really basic explanation for how we got “For Charles Bronson.” This is his story, more or less, and there’s not much that needs to be said about the text itself. John Darnielle really stretches his voice for the delivery, from contemplative in “try to hold the gun straight // and true // and steady” to the extended, thunderous “pull back the hammer” with his signature scream in the middle of the word. It’s not necessarily a love letter, but it is the right degree of awe for someone who did so much.

That’s what makes it memorable, for me. It’s straightforward and if you took out the specific city mention and the title it would be defensible as a song about a dozen Hollywood guys from the era. But it’s interesting because it does just what it should and makes you wonder why it exists. Charles Bronson led a remarkable life and stands for a remarkable thing that most Mountain Goats characters can only dream of. “Be grateful for the attention,” John Darnielle tells us in this story about finding what you do and doing it.

165. Used to Haunt

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The sorrowful “Used to Haunt” reflects on someone long gone and how we remember each other.

Track: “Used to Haunt”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

“…People who get what we do feel passionately about it and want others to hear what they hear, but people who don’t groove to it really don’t dig it.” – John Darnielle

“Used to Haunt” plays over the credits of the movie Paper Towns, adapted from the John Green novel of the same name. John Green’s Twitter icon features him wearing the “I only listen to the Mountain Goats” shirt. He has 5.31 million followers and Paper Towns made 85 million dollars. On the day of this writing, Lin-Manuel Miranda posted a playlist on his Twitter called “Stay Alive” that ends with the Mountain Goats’ “Spent Gladiator 2.”

These two guys are two of the biggest people in American culture today, especially to younger people. In both cases, there’s a very good chance their audience hasn’t heard of the Mountain Goats. That’s why John Darnielle’s quote about “Used to Haunt” being the credits song for a major movie is so interesting. He then elaborates about the risks of using a band not everyone will connect with and how that can be alienating. It may not be strictly true that no one just “likes” the Mountain Goats, but it can definitely feel that way.

“Used to Haunt” is about memory. John Darnielle says it’s about “the sweet and the sad parts together.” You can feel the absence as the narrator says “long while since I felt this way // stand by the window, wait for day.” It reminds me of the (much) earlier “Cao Dai Blowout” as a narrator frets over the memory of their father. In “Used to Haunt” the narrator seems more welcoming of the memory, but in both cases it’s surprising and consuming.

108. High Hawk Season

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“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.