Full Force Galesburg

418. Evening in Stalingrad

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , ,

The world constantly invades an otherwise simple love story in “Evening in Stalingrad.”

Track: “Evening in Stalingrad”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

“Evening in Stalingrad” is in many ways one of the most straightforward songs on Full Force Galesburg. You don’t really need to know that Stolypin cars are a kind of prisoner railway car designed to transport farm animals. You don’t need to have any real understanding of the Soviet Union or Russian history. You just need to picture someone who says they can feel something in their “boiling brain” who is willing to say that people need to tear them to pieces to keep them from someone they feel this way about.

It’s a love song told in great detail. So many Mountain Goats songs are about giving you just enough detail that you can make out the big picture but not enough that it can be so specific as to not describe whatever you need it to describe. That’s the power of many songs, but John Darnielle went hyperspecific with “Evening in Stalingrad,” giving you a basic life story for this couple. At nineteen they meet, at twenty-four they drink and dance, and then they hide in a room and hope their love is enough.

Given the name of the song tells us the city was still called Stalingrad, this happens somewhere between 1925 and 1961. The last verse tells us the couple is hiding, though there are so many reasons they could be hiding that doesn’t narrow it down much. It doesn’t matter. “Evening in Stalingrad” shows us love and the larger context that makes love difficult, but still worth pursing.

417. Song for the Julian Calendar

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , ,

A peculiar title and a curious meaning lie behind some powerful vocals in “Song for Julian Calendar.”

Track: “Song for the Julian Calendar”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

John Darnielle once said “Song for the Julian Calendar” was “as overtly Christian” as he once was willing to be in a song. I find that such an interesting statement given that the album that preceded Full Force Galesburg had a song on it with a series of Bible verses for a title, but that doesn’t mean that’s an incorrect statement. Just as many of the wrestling songs aren’t really about wrestling, a song’s title isn’t always as direct as it seems. The Julian calendar was the calendar the Romans forced on people before the world switched to the one we have now. Does that title go further than just being an oddity?

If I had to pull meaning out of the title, I would tell you that it refers to the phenomenon of something going away that you would assume could never leave. Picture something that feels truly beyond change to you, like the concept of how we measure temperature or time. Once upon a time, those were not as they are and presumably will remain. I choose to see it as an ode to something gone that seemed like it might never leave.

The song itself has all of these great pockets of language. It’s one person talking to another, as so many of them are, but it’s someone grounding their surprise in words that John Darnielle hits hard unexpectedly. He slams on the last word in “and I felt the shock” but also stretches the end of “wondered what it was I’d bargained for” with some unique flair. There’s a lot to love here, though you may have to dig in to start finding a deeper meaning.

415. Ontario

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

A narrator feels uncomfortable but open in the very vulnerable “Ontario.”

Track: “Ontario”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

The vocals for “Ontario” on Full Force Galesburg are what will get you. It’s a good song, played well, but it’s John Darnielle front and center in a way that really cannot be ignored. The album is a treasured one for a lot of fans, and I think a lot of that is owed to the fact that the median here is so high. There are a few songs that I don’t think hold up to the rest, but on average, I think the sixteen songs all average out higher than many of the other albums from this era of the Mountain Goats. That said, if there’s a standout, it’s probably “Weekend in Western Illinois” for the rock and the emotion, “Twin Human Highway Flares” as a genuine love song, or “Ontario” as a classic Mountain Goats song that’s a little bit of everything.

The Mountain Goats don’t do “one thing” but there’s certainly a similar feel to a lot of their work. The average Mountain Goats narrator is lonely if not outright alone, and they often are stressed about their situation rather than triumphant. “I know what can hurt me real bad // and what can’t hurt me anymore” is a powerful statement read one way, but it’s more realistically someone not really being honest with themselves. By the end of the song, they’ve devolved into rapidly shouting things like “day breaking // river rolling” with some hey-heys thrown in. This is a vulnerable song, clearly, and rather than digging into the meaning you need to engage with how this person feels.

414. West Country Dream

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , ,

The tension is real in “West Country Dream” and we get to see just the first moments of the explosion by the end.

Track: “West Country Dream”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

I tend to speak in grandiose terms here and I’m sure I’ve contradicted myself many times, but I don’t think there’s a song that benefits more from the live treatment than “West Country Dream.” When you find people talking about this one, they often say you’ve just gotta hear a specific live version. I’m fond of this one from 1998. The studio version is good, but the subtle shifts in language and the not-at-all subtle shift in emotion really change the song. The final line changing from “Why’d you tell me this” to “Why did you tell me this” doesn’t seem like much when it’s written out, but say both out loud right now and you’ll see what I mean. The line may be borrowed from a Carly Simon song in the first place, but it does very different work here.

Two people are in love but they shouldn’t be, that’s the story of dozens of Mountain Goats songs and it’s the story of “West Country Dream.” The narrator even says they know who their lover is, but they couch it by saying “or who you were just an hour ago.” That shift of an hour changes their entire life, which you can hear in their voice both on the studio version’s wavering fear and the live version’s rising anger. People are in this situation often in Mountain Goats songs, but this is a very slightly different moment on the timeline. This is a moment you never want to find yourself in, especially because we know the narrator already knows the answer to their question.

413. Snow Owl

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

An early reviewer hated “Snow Owl,” but there’s a lot to learn about John Darnielle’s approach to lyrics in it.

Track: “Snow Owl”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

John Darnielle played “Snow Owl” as part of the Jordan Lake sessions recently, which is potentially only the third version of the song that exists. There’s the released version on Full Force Galesburg and exactly, probably, only one live version. In 2017 a fan asked for it at this live show in Virginia and this is absolutely the definitive version. You should listen to it to hear the full story, but John Darnielle explains that he never played it live because right after the album came out he walked into a music store in Pittsburgh and read a review that singled out the song as bad. Two years earlier he told the same story on Twitter.

That reviewer thought it was overly sweet. “Snow Owl” is a risk in that regard, with lyrics like “In your eyes were all the colors that the rainbow forgot.” It works, though, for the same reason John Darnielle was able to put the refrain from the theme from Cheers in a song a decade later. John Darnielle is unafraid to sound corny, which means it’s very hard for anything he makes to sound corny. It’s real, and you can tell that it’s real because of who is selling it to you. He was once very hard on “Going to Bridlington” for similar reasons, but I love that one, too. There are several physical descriptions of a snow owl in “Snow Owl,” but it all works because it’s so damned earnest.

368. Maize Stalk Drinking Blood

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

“Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” eventually got a horn section and some intense drums, but it was always great.

Track: “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

There is enough time between 1997 and when I’m writing this that people have had time to come up with thoughts about “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood.” One such person seems to have tweeted something and deleted it, but we still have John Darnielle’s reply to them. In case that, too, sometime is gone, he said “MSDB is not about a romantic relationship, I hate to say, but that’s all right.” So there you go, not a love song. That only leaves all other things.

This is one of the songs that has had a resurgence recently as the Mountain Goats now have a drummer and a horn player. The full band revisits some of the older songs and really blows them out. The best version of these I’ve seen is this one, with a rocking, long outro that goes on and on, blessedly. The studio version on Full Force Galesburg takes a similar path, but the sax really adds something that just wasn’t what John Darnielle and company were doing in 1997.

1997 was just before the “modern era,” which isn’t really the right way to put it, but I guess it’ll have to do. The songs were getting more complicated, to the point where no one seems to agree what “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” even means, at least as a title if not as a whole song. The music was changing, too, but it’s only now that you can see how much more room there was in songs like these. It doesn’t diminish the originals, it just makes them hum even more.

321. Twin Human Highway Flares

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

An actual love song told with Mountain Goats lyrics is a powerful thing in “Twin Human Highway Flares.”

Track: “Twin Human Highway Flares”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

It is easy to make a mistake with the Mountain Goats and assume every song is about John Darnielle. Most of it, especially the early stuff, is written in first person. It’s easy to imagine a lot of it coming from the same person. It’s really tidy to say that it’s all one person and that person is John Darnielle and to build a mythos from there. Most of it isn’t, though, and most of it isn’t even gendered. With very rare exceptions, most Mountain Goats songs are deliberate in their ambiguity. Most of them find one person telling one other person something, but you can’t quite tell what.

“Twin Human Highway Flares” is a love song John Darnielle wrote for the woman that would become his wife. It’s extreme in the way that a lot of Mountain Goats songs are, with “I hope my heart explodes” as a finisher and a declaration of love. That violence is what makes it stick in your mind. “I will burn all the calendars that counted the years down to such a worthless day” is pure Darnielle, in a way that you know exactly what I mean if you’ve heard a single other Mountain Goats song. You need the quotes around “love song” for most Mountain Goats “love songs,” but this one is brutal and honest and straightforward. The guitar leads you to expect something sad and distant and the language is destructive, but this is John Darnielle at his clearest and most hopeful. This is a song about telling someone that this moment signifies a future with both of you in it, which very few Mountain Goats narrators would recognize.

300. Down Here

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

“Down Here” starts with a reference to Venus and only gets weirder from there.

Track: “Down Here”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

There are six annotations on “Down Here” on Kyle Barbour’s excellent site The Annotated Mountain Goats. They detail what the atmosphere of Venus is like, what a red-crowned crane is, and even what Lithuania is. Barbour’s site is instrumental to the more arcane details of Mountain Goats songs, but it’s also funny when it explains what Illinois is or what window blinds are. You get in the game to figure out what “The Monkey Song” is talking about but then you have to take that to the logical conclusion.

I am just going to say it: I have no idea what “Down Here” is talking about. I love the delivery of lines like “A telegram from Lithuania // and the news is not good” where you can hear John Darnielle snarl over the cranked-up guitar. It’s a great song and one I’ve heard dozens and dozens of times. Barbour’s annotations can unlock secrets for songs, especially the ones about myths, but sometimes there’s not enough on the page. I’ve said before that this whole exercise is an experience rather than an attempt to “solve” these songs, and I legitimately do not believe it is possible to draw a universal meaning from this one.

And that’s fine! The final verse is a construction you may have heard before, and Barbour links to this truly fascinating post where people spiral into discussions of this style through history. This may just be another story of a narrator facing doom of their own creation, but they’re talking about their end in a way that many before them did for generations. I’m not going to throw up my hands completely, but I do love that this one is just a little too weird to put a finger on entirely.

158. It’s All Here in Brownsville

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

Two people travel to the end of the road in “It’s All Here in Brownsville,” but no farther than that.

Track: “It’s All Here in Brownsville”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Brownsville, Texas is home to 183,000 people and is the 131st largest city in the United States. It is directly on the United States-Mexico border. More than a third of its citizens live below the poverty line.

Full Force Galesburg is an album obsessed with location. One wonders if the extreme poverty in Brownsville informs the choice to use it for “It’s All Here in Brownsville” at all, or if that’s just a sad detail that changes the way the song comes across. It’s certainly relevant that it’s a border town as our couple wanders around in the heat and ponders the significance of the town in their lives.

“Why do we come down to Brownsville, year after year after year?” The couple from Galesburg wonders this out loud and seemingly finds no answer. This is the last track on the album, but the Mountain Goats often exit albums with their characters pondering rather than finding answers. Songs like “Pale Green Things” and “Alpha Rats Nest” are examples of this, where you would expect people to have figured everything out and yet, it ends up being more complex than that.

“It’s All Here in Brownsville” ends with a repetition of “it’s all coming apart again.” Destruction and destructive thought is rampant on Galesburg, so this ending is only fitting. It’s also a compelling place to leave the couple that’s wandered around the United States all over the album. It’s possible to read this as a love song despite the dark ending, but it seems more likely that they’re going to keep avoiding their doomed state. Warm scenery and extreme gestures like traveling to “where nothing starts” every year will keep you going even when you shouldn’t.

132. New Britain

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , ,

“New Britain” opens Full Force Galesburg with a furious panic and a look at someone desperate.

Track: “New Britain”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

“New Britain” has only been played live a few times. It’s a very typical Mountain Goats song: two lovers have a discussion about their shared reality and tenuous connection to sanity. Honestly, that might sum up the whole damn album Full Force Galesburg. At a live show in New York in 2008, John Darnielle explained the absence through a story about a music video.

Some people got in touch with him and asked if they could make a music video for “New Britain.” He was flattered, so he told them to go ahead with it and it make whatever they wanted to make. He says that he liked the final product, but he thought the lead actor’s haircut was terrible. Now many years removed, he says he still thinks about that and hopes they didn’t take it too hard, but it seems to have damaged the song for him. At that show in 2008 he mentioned that he didn’t think he’d ever played it live again, and it’s only come up one more time after that. It’s a fun song, and what a weird way to have it become more than it is.

On the album version, John Darnielle’s voice cracks and he imbues the character with some desperation. Most of Full Force Galesburg feels erratic on purpose, so it’s fitting that the opening track contains lines like “you’re about to leave again // I’ve learned to read your movements // and I’m learning how to read your mind.” These people are going through something together, as many Mountain Goats characters are, but they’re doing worse than most of them. “New Britain” sets us up to realize that maybe we don’t need to try to sympathize with them.