Ghana

128. The Admonishing Song

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , , ,

 

“The Admonishing Song” exists largely for one weird line, but it offers a glimpse at a very strange argument.

Track: “The Admonishing Song”
Album: Ghana (1999)

“The Admonishing Song” was originally released on a compilation called Corkscrewed by Theme Park Records in 1995. The company either doesn’t exist anymore or has changed their name to be more Google-friendly, as now they are buried under pages of actual records set at or by theme parks. It exists on Ghana as one of the “funny” songs like “Golden Boy” or “The Anglo-Saxons.”

In the liner notes on Ghana, John Darnielle supplies explanatory notes for many of the songs. For “Flight 717: Going to Denmark” and “The Admonishing Song” he says that he was tricked by a “tongueless horde” of unspeakable beasts and that both songs are actually hiding a delicious salad dressing recipe in their digital code. Darnielle often distances himself from the early “funny” songs, but his sense of humor still shines through more than two decades after “The Admonishing Song.” There is more going on in “Foreign Object,” but John Darnielle still loves a joke.

In 1995 he was willing to go a much longer way for a joke. The chorus of “The Admonishing Song” sees the narrator wailing versions of “tell me why // you lied” again and again. They literally admonish the person they’re speaking to by telling them over and over that it was “not a nice thing to do.” The payoff is the bitter “tell me why you made threats against the life of the Prime Minister of Canada.” It’s a weird song, even in an era with the occasional weird song, but the line is memorable. You can choose to imagine the conversation these characters had before that line or you can just enjoy the strangeness. For me, that line is enough to make me wonder about these characters even though “The Admonishing Song” offers nothing else to go on.

123. Leaving Home

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , ,

For John Darnielle, “Leaving Home” is a way to process the sad feeling of moving away from somewhere you love.

Track: “Leaving Home”
Album: Ghana (1999)

“Leaving Home” was originally released in 1996 as part of a compilation called Cyanide Guilt Trip. It was re-released on Ghana three years later with several other oddities and early tracks. Ghana is an essential album because it covers so much ground, but it’s odd to listen to in one sitting. It has some funny, light songs like “Anti Music Song” and “The Anglo-Saxons” and some emotional, quiet songs like “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” and “Raja Vocative.” It’s not that one type of song is better than the other, it’s just that they don’t necessarily flow into one another. You thus need to listen to Ghana the way you’d read a history textbook. It has all the details, though the story may not always feel linear.

“Leaving Home” belongs in the second group. In the liner notes on Ghana, John Darnielle says that he wrote it while he lived in Chicago for six months in 1995 and that he missed his home in California. It’s rare for John Darnielle to be this forthcoming: “It seems maudlin to say things out loud, so I made up a whole different set of circumstances with which to surround the feeling.” Everyone can remember a time they moved and felt like they were in the wrong place, even briefly.

John Darnielle replaces his situation with a couple with a young child. They’re in love. The speaker remarks on China, their home, as it shrinks into the distance. They share longing glances, but they also comment on how they’re deeply in love and might just need each other. It’s rare for a Mountain Goats song to discuss such uncomplicated love, and it feels like John Darnielle needed to imagine what would justify the choice to leave somewhere you don’t want to leave.

110. The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , , ,

“The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” muses on he meaning of big things for other people versus small things for ourselves.

Track: “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life”
Album: Ghana (1999)

So many Mountain Goats songs suggest an interpretation but stop short of insisting upon one. It’s easy to infer what songs about the folly of insurance fraud or the risks of selling drugs are supposed to make us feel, but rarely does John Darnielle directly say “this song is about this thing.”

Darnielle himself responded to a comment on his Tumblr and told a fan that “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” is “essentially a riff on ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’,” which is a poem by W. H. Auden. The fan asked why the song ends before it discusses Jimi Hendrix’s death, but Darnielle insists that’s the whole idea. He said that it would “lose whatever power it has” if it devolved into drugs and death.

The song is quiet, even for an early Goats song. You can picture Jimi Hendrix waking up and performing the basic tasks described in the lyrics. Darnielle highlights relatable things for a reason. His Jimi Hendrix is about to die, but today he’s just having a normal morning. If you’re lucky, you’ll have thousands and thousands of mornings like this and the last one you have will look a lot like the others.

Auden’s poem examines a classic painting: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Icarus is shown in the sea after burning his wings, but none of the other people seem to care. They have their own lives, so even the remarkable story of the fall of Icarus means very little. Darnielle doesn’t tell us how to feel about it, but he echoes Auden’s notion that we must be who we are and live in our experiences, even when circumstances seem like they deserve more attention and pause.

101. Going to Kirby Sigston

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , ,

“Going to Kirby Sigston” looks in on the life of two people in a town of 100 in the north of England.

Track: “Going to Kirby Sigston”
Album: Ghana (1999)

Kirby Sigston is home to 100 people. It’s just north of Leeds in England and it is 72 degrees Fahrenheit there today. In the early 90s, John Darnielle got a postcard from a friend in Kirby Sigston and was so taken by the name that he used it for “Going to Kirby Sigston.”

That’s how most of the “Going to…” songs seem to start. They’re as much about characters in different physical space as they are about listeners appreciating how important physical space is. When you listen you can imagine yourself in an impossibly small village in the English countryside and you can consider what differences that life would contain. The characters board up windows, dance outside, and eat “cold, black eggs” from their “special chicken.” It’s probably going to be a difficult adjustment for most of you.

The song itself is quick. It’s over in two verses and two minutes and it raises some nagging questions. This couple is less clearly defined than many in the catalog, so it’s hard to tell what their relationship is like. They seem happy enough, though dancing isn’t always a good sign in a Mountain Goats song. Depending on how you want to read it, the “I had a present for you hidden somewhere” line is either sweet or ominous. No matter how you take it, “Going to Kirby Sigston” is a short experiment about a couple trying to live a totally different kind of life. John Darnielle seems to allow that couple a few sweet moments, if nothing else.

070. Alpha Gelida

Alex Russell Ghana, Taking the Dative , , , , , , , ,

 

The Alpha Couple is in Nevada during “Alpha Gelida,” scaring each other before the really scary part to come.

Track: “Alpha Gelida”
Album: Taking the Dative (1994), Ghana (1999)

There is continuity in the catalog of 500+ Mountain Goats songs, but John Darnielle has often said that he doesn’t consider it possible to find one true version of it. It’s a journey, not a destination, and whatever threads you find seem to be generally okay with him. That makes a process like this more like storytelling and less like history, but even so there are primary documents. In an introduction for “Alpha Gelida” in the summer of 2014, John described the song as “one of the songs that looked towards Tallahassee.” He said of the Alpha Couple that “they’re from California, but they go to Nevada, and that’s where they get married.”

The specific details of the horrible/wonderful couple at the heart of most of “the Alpha series” of songs aren’t important, but the specificity of their journey is part of what makes it more than a story. These aren’t real people, but they’re every single bad relationship everyone has ever had. They’re the horrible darkness in all of us that we’re afraid, sometimes, is all there really is.

That’s why the details matter. In “Alpha Gelida” they’re drinking in Nevada and, like John, they’re avoiding Tallahassee. It’s a horror story, filled with biblical versions of destruction (“let the young lions come out // let me break their jaws” is from Psalms) and smells of popcorn and cheap coffee. You can smell the room as one of them focuses on the fridge. They are drawn to it, as all characters in horror stories are always eventually drawn to something with evil overtones. John has said at shows that he doesn’t know what’s behind the fridge here, but you can hear in the quiet, intense delivery that even if it isn’t specific, we’re supposed to understand how they feel.

057. Hatha Hill

Alex Russell Ghana, Orange Raja, Blood Royal , , , , , , , ,

The meaning of “Hatha Hill” will change depending on who you ask, but that ambiguous nature feels intentional.

Track: “Hatha Hill”
Album: Orange Raja, Blood Royal (1995) and Ghana (1999)

There are four songs on Orange Raja, Blood Royal and they really deserve to be listened to as one unit. The singles and EPs are less thematically cohesive than the full length releases, but this one is certainly united in other ways. The droning, eerie “Blood Royal” sets the stage and comes off as especially haunting with guest Alastair Galbraith’s violin. “The Only Thing I Know” is more familiar snarling between lovers, but again Galbraith sets the song apart as unique with harmonica accompaniment. “Raja Vocative” is the standout, with some beautiful violin and true pain in John Darnielle’s vocals and lyrics. Where does that leave the closer “Hatha Hill?”

The shorter songs from the early days can sometimes feel slight in comparison to the explosive fury of “Oceanographer’s Choice” or the scene changes of “The Mess Inside.” People aren’t screaming for “Hatha Hill” when they see the Mountain Goats, but that doesn’t mean it can be glossed over. It deserves attention because of its placement on such a great single, even if “Raja Vocative” is the one that’s endured.

There’s a lot tied up in very few words. “As the sun went away // you were sending out signals” will mean something different to you than it means to me, and John Darnielle’s relatively liberal allowance for “what this song means” in general leaves enough room for everyone to be right. The exact intention of what “sugar” is in this song is almost certainly impossible to derive, but it doesn’t really matter. The lines about sugar exist to get to the ending, which you can read as part of the grand tradition of Mountain Goats narrators being distrustful or you can start the song over and continue to look for specific meaning in what may be an intentionally undecipherable song.

048. Golden Boy

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , ,

“Golden Boy” may be a loathed request for John Darnielle, but it’s still great for what it is (and that’s all it is).

Track: “Golden Boy”
Album: Ghana (1999)

I randomized the list of songs to pick an order, but if I hadn’t done that I would have done “Golden Boy” absolutely last. It’s a really difficult song to talk about because there’s probably no good way to do it. If you want to find a bad way, you should read this brutally awkward interview MTV did with John Darnielle. The interviewer is clearly a big Goats fan, but he starts the interview by talking about “Golden Boy” and forces John Darnielle to say “I just find nothing amusing about “Golden Boy” yelling. It’s boring and awful. I might play it more if people wouldn’t routinely wreck the concert moment by yelling it. I just don’t want to feed the troll.”

“Golden Boy” originally comes from a compilation album called Object Lessons: Songs About Products that is literally what it sounds like. “Golden Boy” is about Golden Boy brand peanuts, a seemingly defunct brand of peanuts you used to be able to get in Asian grocery stores in California. It’s essentially a joke in that the message is that you must live a good life and go to the part of the afterlife where Golden Boy peanuts are available. In the context of a series of songs about products, it functions as the most extreme form of advertising possible: the endorsement of heaven.

“Golden Boy” is genuinely funny and it’s funny without being silly. That’s difficult to do, but there are very few songs like it in the catalog. Right there on Ghana with it there are a few others, “The Anglo-Saxons” and “Anti Music Song” especially, but you have to take them for what they are. Don’t yell for the funny songs at a show. Not even the best of them, about “those magnificent peanuts from Singapore.”

025. Noctifer Birmingham

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , ,

Two people are connected unexpectedly in one of the Mountain Goats’ favorite of their own songs.

Track: “Noctifer Birmingham”
Album: Ghana (1999)

The layers to a song like “Noctifer Birmingham” take years to unfold. In a rare live performance of the song in 1996, John Darnielle introduced it as “pretty goddamned obscure” and then joked that it was “a song about my fucking brother” before laughing and playing it. He didn’t play it again (so far as is generally known) until 2012, and even then he introduced it as “the first tricky song” in the catalog. In the album notes on Ghana he says that it’s the “high-water mark of the years 1992-95” and it’s one of his favorite songs.

You will notice that the guitar is very delicate, it’s one of the songs where the tune plays in the background. In the liner notes, John adds: “In a rare show of restraint, I do not even once attempt here to physically destroy the guitar by playing it as hard as I can.” It’s no “Cubs in Five” then, but it certainly doesn’t need to be. Rachel Ware’s bass and vocals add to a droning, continuous sense of the events of the song. The feel is beautiful, and her absence from the band for so long explains why it doesn’t really get played anymore, even though it’s one of John’s favorites.

It’s a classic style for the Mountain Goats, wherein we get enough of a story to be curious but not enough to really understand what’s going on. One character is shocked by a phone call and comes immediately to see someone else in Alabama. There are katydids in the background and other specifics, but what actually happened isn’t as important as that feeling we all know when we have to take a trip we don’t want to make as a result of some unexpected news.