Getting Into Knives

544. Getting Into Knives

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The title track “Getting Into Knives” looks into what happens when you do just that.

Track: “Getting Into Knives”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

“Getting Into Knives” is the best song on Getting Into Knives by a really significant margin. You may disagree and I welcome that, but I really am just blown away by it even after a few years. When I think about the album Getting Into Knives and how I think it’s one of the less complete ones, I picture myself many years ago at a party where a guy told me he “didn’t prefer” the Mountain Goats. It’s such a specific thing to say and I remember it still. At the time that was sacrilege and unthinkable to me. I’m less ardent these days and I accept that people’s tastes are what they are, but when I sit with the title track here I really go back to that mode.

“You can’t give me back what you’ve taken // but you can give me something that’s almost as good” is as close to perfect as you can get. There is room to imagine the world of what getting into knives could mean for a person, enough that some people hear the main character from John Darnielle’s book Wolf in White Van in this one, but the vibe is undeniable. The more you listen to it the more each line supports the others but also works alone. It’s such a dense song for such a simple instrumentation, but that combination really forces you to focus on what is being said.

After revisiting the whole album I do feel it’s much better than I initially thought, but it requires more effort for me personally to connect with than the others. That’s not true of the title track. This one works right away.

543. As Many Candles As Possible

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The single “As Many Candles As Possible” offers a huge sound and some real power.

Track: “As Many Candles As Possible”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

I am approaching the end of Getting Into Knives and I still struggle with the fact that it seems to be my least favorite album from the Mountain Goats. Before it came out, I’m not sure I could have even picked one. I’m glad to have some distance now because some people seem to “fall off” with the band but for me it’s really just that this one doesn’t hit me the way the others do. I love both albums that came after this one and after revisiting it, I think I had the wrong impression from this one from my initial listens. All that preface said, the morning the band released “As Many Candles As Possible” I was absolutely stoked.

I haven’t gone back to it very often and I put it in a category with “Rain in Soho.” In both cases, they’re “singles” (whatever that means these days) and they’re both a little bit harder than most of the fare on their respective albums. Both have some great lyrics and both are undeniably among the most complete tracks the band has ever released. But part of the joy of the Goats for me is that it feels like it’s coming through a frequency that most other music isn’t. There’s a reason the meme about the band is that it’s the only band you listen to if you’re a fan. This is a truly great song and the opening two lines are all-timers, even for John Darnielle, but for whatever reason I listen to it, I like it, and I don’t find myself going back to it as often as the title track. I think that’s probably OK.

542. Wolf Count

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“Wolf Count” revisits the concept of a grander end than just one death.

Track: “Wolf Count”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

The history of wolves in England is not one I know, but “Wolf Count” pictures the final days. Edward I ordered the extermination of wolves in England, apparently, and much later it seems he got his wish. There are other Mountain Goats songs about creatures facing the end, even entire species facing the end, so “Wolf Count” is among friends. It’s not even that uncommon that we hear from the animals directly. “Deuteronomy 2:10” is the obvious choice, with three creatures narrating their end in the context of a Biblical tribe that faced the same fate.

We catch a few other details in “Wolf Count.” The wolves score some victories against their enemies, but they also accept the futility of their situation. “Soon it’ll be my time to go” is exactly the same sentiment found in the other song I referenced, but the addition of “I know” is possibly a step further. It’s personal, here, for this wolf. It’s different to confront the loss of the tribe versus your own role in that overall loss. I think I struggle with Getting Into Knives because so much of it feels like territory the band has covered in other places, but I will say the closing verse has some very strong lyrics: “sleep on the road and dream // the only dream worth dreaming // the thronging plain // the bloodbath.” Everyone involves here knows how this story ends, sure, but they haven’t really reckoned with the cost of getting to that ending.

541. The Great Gold Sheep

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The Mountain Goats offer up a lesson about idolatry in “The Great Gold Sheep.”

Track: “The Great Gold Sheep”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

What really is the appeal of an idol? “The Great Gold Sheep” continues in the trend of direct songs from Getting Into Knives, but it goes a little deeper than some of the others in that the titular sheep is not really what’s important. Our narrator here commits idolatry rather literally and calls the sheep “splendid and fine” and views themselves as above the masses because they understand the importance of it. However, they don’t explicitly call it divine.

I may be getting hung up on the wrong thing here, but part of what makes “The Great Gold Sheep” interesting to me is that this narrator is really focused on their own place in the world. They clearly revere this statue, but they live in our world (the Curtis Institute is a modern institution) and talk constantly about legacy. We think of idolatry as either a literal concept from the ancient world or an abstract concept of the modern one, but what if it’s both at the same time? This person piles up what John Darnielle has elsewhere called “temporal things” and talks about writing their name on things to “leave a lasting legacy,” but they have their priorities all wrong.

Darnielle sings this one in a sort of ghostly wail, which really drives home the whole memento mori of the thing. This person really cares about physical riches but also about the future remembering their name. You cannot really have both of them and they seem to know that, deep down, but they push forward and persist on chasing something that they can’t ever really have.

540. Rat Queen

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“Rat Queen” finds a moment perpetually about to happen and the people who dream of it being real.

Track: “Rat Queen”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

John Darnielle used to joke about wanting to troll his management by posting stuff like “new tour lol” to announce a tour and I feel a similar urge to just say that “Rat Queen” is about the rat queen and move on to the next one. We must be stronger than that, but it is, in fact, about worshiping the queen of the rats. It largely speaks for itself. If we really do want to go deeper, we should probably discuss that it technically focuses on the cult around the queen rather than the queen herself.

There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs that function as anthems for the kind of people who don’t normally have anthems. This is not unfamiliar territory, but it isn’t always this direct. “I am a faceless, nameless acolyte // here tonight at your service” tells us specifically, again, directly, who this person is and what they want. They want the subject of their worship to reward their faith. They want the world they see within their head to be realized in the above-ground world that so often does not work for them. We have to make some assumptions here, but they seem like safe assumptions to make. “Rat Queen” has become a fan favorite and it’s easy to see why. “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” shows us the perversion of this same impulse, but here we see a purer form of isolation. If you don’t see this as a triumph waiting to happen, you haven’t considered what this could do for you.

539. The Last Place I Saw You Alive

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Death robs you of something but everything else keeps going in “The Last Place I Saw You Alive.”

Track: “The Last Place I Saw You Alive”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

There are a million choices, but every time I listen to “The Last Place I Saw You Alive” I think about two songs with the same theme: Christian Lee Hutson’s “Northsiders” and Pinegrove’s “Old Friends.” Specifically, “Old Friends” has two lines that I permanently connect: “I saw Leah on the bus a few months ago // saw some old friends at her funeral.”

It’s not difficult to find Mountain Goats songs that connect with this one. A lot of fans tie it back to Transcendental Youth and specifically to “Steal Smoked Fish,” which similarly looks back on people you once knew and the place you knew them. What I love about this take on the theme is the insistence that this is both extreme (someone has died and you are looking at the last place you saw them) and mundane (the lyrics enforce this is “just the way the math works out”). Your experience may vary, but I find it easiest to process loss as both of those things at the same time. It’s very important, to you, but it’s also something that happens to everyone. That robs it of some of the power to destroy you.

I want to pull out one more lyric before we leave this one. “It’s changed since you were here, or else it hasn’t” will mean something different to everyone. One of the hardest parts of personal loss is the continuation of everything else. You have to get up and go to work. Other people go to that bank or that bar. The world moves, often unchanged, despite what feels to you like a seismic event. It often feels like you should see that all in the landscape, just to reflect back what you’re going through.

538. Bell Swamp Connection

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Just like the road the song is named for, what exists in “Bell Swamp Connection” is more than what you see.

Track: “Bell Swamp Connection”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

Years ago now, I put on some Mountain Goats as I drove through Mississippi with my mom. We were driving back from a funeral home with the remains of her husband and my dad. We had a long drive and we traded off music. Her primary commentary on the Mountain Goats was to ask why John Darnielle doesn’t sing. This was a decade before “Bell Swamp Connection” was written, but she may as well have been talking about this one. It’s closer to prose than lyrics at times and the performance may be what’s fueling that opinion.

Bell Swamp Connection is a real road in North Carolina. If you go on Google Street View you can “drive” down it. At the time of this writing, the captured footage is from the last ten years or so, all jumbled together but as a result creating a feeling that not much has changed on Bell Swamp Connection in the last decade. This part of North Carolina looks a lot like that part of Mississippi. Despite the lyric “see what there is to see before it’s gone,” some parts of both seem like they’re going to look more or less like this for some time to come.

The story of what happens in “Bell Swamp Connection” is what you hear, but for me it’s about what happened before. What series of actions leads you to wander through the clearing and find a mysterious (or not mysterious) slab? What are the messages people tried to tell us, even if they boil down to the shouts of “get out” that we hear? There’s (usually) nothing out there in the woods, but we are out there. We bring all that stuff with us.

537. Harbor Me

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Our narrator in “Harbor Me” is in a delicate place and needs help to navigate it.

Track: “Harbor Me”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

You cannot speak in absolutes for the Mountain Goats (though I know I tend to; sorry) but as much as one can find easily, it seems like “Harbor Me” has never been played live. There aren’t many other songs you can say that about that aren’t already obscure for other reasons. The only commentary the usual sources make about “Harbor Me” is John Darnielle saying he doesn’t expect it to be something people yell for and that the vocal performance “never really rises above a conversational tone.” I tend to flipflop on if things like that matter for a band like this, but I find it interesting that a song like that makes the cut.

I like “Harbor Me” but it bounced off me the first few times I listened to it. It feels in conversation with a lot of early Mountain Goats narrators who were scared, worried, paranoid, or some combination thereof and sought comfort. What seems different to me is this person shows signs of trying. This person is beset by anxiety or some form of it by another name but still out there at the Exxon riffling through racks looking for something to help. So many people we met in songs decades before were lashing out or resisting help. It’s not the kind of thing that jumps off the page, but it is a difference in how we treat people we’re asking for help. It’s a gentler song as a result, but it’s a person more likely (we hope) to make it out.

536. Pez Dorado

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“Pez Dorado” reminds us that little things make up big things, but it also zooms way, way out from there.

Track: “Pez Dorado”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

Both of these are oversimplifications, but the “early” Mountain Goats songs are often about two people in a challenging personal situation (that one or both of them seemingly created) and the “recent” ones are about grander things. Any band with hundreds and hundreds of songs inherently resists such statements, but songs like “Pez Dorado” speak to my point. This is a song about big things. This is about things bigger than you.

It’s, in fact, specifically about how things bigger than you can dwarf what seems important at the time. “We were here before the flood,” these tiny fish say, and despite reminders that tiny fish are vulnerable individually there are reminders in the song about how that only matters if you consider it from that perspective. It’s inherent to the individual experience that this is a tough lens to apply, but it’s an important one. You, the person you have always been and always will be, are having a difficult time or a great time or something in between. You, the part of something larger that resists the shorebirds and grows stronger because of the need to persist, are the sum of parts that you’ll never feel like are part of you.

It feels very similar to “Tidal Wave” to me, but the grander version zoomed out from how you receive that stacking, marching element of time. Maybe this feels grandiose for a song about goldfish, but I think that’s the point. It’s a juxtaposition between what we think of as a small, insubstantial thing and the reality that there’s a difference between one in the bowl and the big idea. Depending on where you’re at, maybe that’s helpful for you today.

535. Tidal Wave

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“Tidal Wave” finds the large things made up of small increments and prepares you for the flood.

Track: “Tidal Wave”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

I don’t know that this matters for a band like the Mountain Goats, but “Tidal Wave” is the point where people stop listening to Getting Into Knives on Spotify. John Darnielle has talked about album construction before and I’ve referenced it a lot in this series, but there’s an idea that people only listen to the first four songs on the record and you should frontload your material accordingly. The two “singles” are in the first four on this album and “Tidal Wave” marks a descent into more jammy, less approachable stuff. Even years in, there are songs with about 200,000 plays in the middle of Getting Into Knives, which may as well be a billion for the early Mountain Goats but is not true of the two albums that followed this one.

“Tidal Wave” clicked for me when I saw it live. I used to write a post a day here but I fell off because I really struggled to find things to say about Getting Into Knives. When I saw this song live, though, it floored me. It’s a song about how small moments become one big one, clearly, but I couldn’t, for whatever reason, tie that to my own moments. Matt Douglas is at his best on “Tidal Wave” and I encourage you to see him do his thing live. The bass groove is also a small, backing reminder that things continue and the bricks will pile up whether you’re ready for them or not. You should try to be ready.