In League with Dragons

397. Cadaver Sniffing Dog

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A narrator requests that you bring in the cadaver sniffing dog to sniff the metaphorical cadaver in “Cadaver Sniffing Dog.”

Track: “Cadaver Sniffing Dog”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

At the time of this writing, fans of the Mountain Goats are mad about someone who ranked every existing Mountain Goats album. The ranking is internally inconsistent and appears to be a troll job, so I’m not even going to link to it. I mention it because any attempt in any forum to say anything the Mountain Goats have done is better than anything else elicits an argument. I read one thread where people listed every single album in a comment akin to “I can’t believe [XYZ] was snubbed.” If it’s your favorite, to you, it should be everyone’s favorite.

I did not love “Cadaver Sniffing Dog” when I first heard it. I still think it’s the least interesting song on In League with Dragons, but that’s a pretty good place to be. I’d probably say In League with Dragons is my second-favorite of the last ten albums, just behind Heretic Pride. Are these widely held opinions? Does it matter? No, but I felt I couldn’t drag that other list without putting something out there. And I only mention this in this space about “Cadaver Sniffing Dog” because John Darnielle even jokes about the metaphor. The dog is sniffing for a relationship that’s long-since died. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that, because the jam carries it through. The jam also carries the chorus, which is the title restated four times. None of this is to diminish the song, and in fact I think this is all intended to show just how strong I find the rest of the album. Comparisons are handy, but rankings never really do it for me in the world of the Mountain Goats. Just enjoy the groove.

283. In League with Dragons

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The title track of In League with Dragons shows us what dragons can do for us and asks us if we’re prepared to see it.

Track: “In League with Dragons”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

In League with Dragons is two albums, really. It’s a fantasy epic and it’s a retrospective of John Darnielle’s songwriting career. Even this duality is a simplification, obviously, as everything any artist makes can be said to be in conversation with everything else they’ve said. I think the man himself would have a lot of problems with this reading, but we need to sit in it for a moment to talk about the title track.

“In League with Dragons,” the song, is a melding of the two ideas. The narrator is navigating life until a dragon comes and burns up everything that troubles them. There a lot of narrators hoping for this outcome (or at least a similar enough one) but this one is likely going to get what they want. One of the many messages of the Mountain Goats is to bide your time, that darkness fades and you will be rewarded for your patience. “In League with Dragons” is about what you do when your moment actually gets here. Do you look and watch the flames or do you feel complicated about retribution, even justly given?

“It’s so hard to get revenge // the human element drags you down,” John Darnielle tells us. We want to be the kind of person who turns the other cheek. We want to rise above and to grow. But sometimes, as in “Up the Wolves” and a dozen other songs, we want to watch the fire that’s finally here to do what fire does.

282. Possum By Night

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“Possum By Night” challenges us to consider beyond the first-take, surface level consideration.

Track: “Possum By Night”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

When I first listened to In League with Dragons I didn’t get into “Possum By Night.” I thought it was fine, but nothing on it clicked with me and I moved on. Based on the number of performances, John Darnielle loves it. That happens, sometimes. There are hundreds (thousands?) of Mountain Goats songs and they don’t all need to work for everyone. One of his absolute favorite songs he’s ever written (not this one) is my least favorite song he’s written and that’s a me problem. When that happens, I feel like I need to crack the code and understand what about it isn’t working for me.

The band opened the encore at this show with “Possum By Night.” That did it for me. It’s not that it’s significantly better or worse live, it’s that you feel the passion of the crowd that way. The band toured with a logo of a possum with a sword and had a huge banner of it behind them at this show. It’s a clear mascot for what John Darnielle wants to say with his characters — a possum is misunderstood to be scary, but really it’s a creature that just wants to “find my own way — and it was in that performance that whatever needed to be connected in my brain became connected. As with most songs I didn’t like, it was a me problem.

The band has several anthems for outsiders. “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1” and “You Were Cool” are recent examples, but there are a lot. “Possum By Night” is another one, and a sweet one when viewed the right way. It’s also a lesson in thinking what a song might be for someone else. I’ve found that second layer of consideration to be worth it nearly every time.

281. Doc Gooden

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“Doc Gooden” shows us a snapshot of a baseball pitcher who hopes it’s coming back but knows it probably isn’t.

Track: “Doc Gooden”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

Dwight “Doc” Gooden pitched in Major League Baseball for 16 years. He was excellent and then he wasn’t. He battled addiction and he’s been arrested several times for a variety of offenses, mostly drug related but not entirely, and he was on a VH1 reality show about addiction with Lindsay Lohan’s dad and a guy from Baywatch.

There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs about people who are troubled and a lot of them aren’t about real people. The benefit of using an unnamed character is that we only know what you tell us about them. Someone standing by a river as a boat pulls away also has another life we don’t get to see. We fill in what we need to be true about them to support the story. John Darnielle loves quotidian details in songs to help tell us what kind of person this is, but it’s never enough to know them completely.

That’s not true for “Doc Gooden.” This is someone who is in the falling action of their career, but they don’t know it’s going to get much, much worse. They are engaged with failure directly, though, which is unique. “Summon up the spirit of a brighter time // looked back last week against the Blue Jays” is a fascinating set of lines. Gooden wants to feel better about how it used to be, but the immediate past tells him he’s not that guy anymore.

We know, because we exist outside of this song, what is going to happen after this. We know that even this distant hope for a triumphant second act isn’t going to pay off. It deepens the sadness because it’s real, and it especially does because even the worst that Gooden is bracing for isn’t as low as it’s going to go.

280. Clemency for the Wizard King

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A leftover from an album that became something else, “Clemency for the Wizard King” tells us one thing directly but leaves room to wonder.

Track: “Clemency for the Wizard King”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

I was in a bar in a few years ago and the bartender had a Mountain Goats tattoo. I asked them about it and during a brief conversation they said they loved the band but didn’t love the new albums. Heretic Pride was the first Mountain Goats album I encountered “new” and I do, fairly or not, consider that a personal “break point” for the band between old and new. I’m sure for this person it was something similar.

It’s interesting to see how people respond to new albums as the band gets bigger. John Darnielle has said that a lot of people didn’t give The Life of the World to Come a fair shake because of the subject material. I have to wonder what those people thought of a “rock opera” about a fantasy land with wizards and dragons. It’s certainly not that strange, given the rest of the material John Darnielle has made, but it’s not The Sunset Tree.

In League with Dragons is partly what it was originally (fantasy town drama) and partly something else. It ends up being personal and distant at the same time, and it’s much more interesting as a result. “Clemency for the Wizard King” is from the first part, and John Darnielle joked when introducing it once that it’s about people asking for clemency for a wizard. It couldn’t be more direct. It’s a little odd, on an album with “Younger” and “Done Bleeding.” The album rewards successive listens as you tease out the story and fill in the missing pieces yourself, and while it’s not a deeply personal ballad, “Clemency for the Wizard King” does exactly what it needs to do.

279. Passaic, 1975

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Ozzy Osbourne is in front of thousands of people, but he just wants them to get high in “Passaic, 1975.”

Track: “Passaic, 1975”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

There are many real people in Mountain Goats songs, but I don’t think anyone shows up as often as Ozzy Osbourne. John Darnielle loves his music, but he seems equally interested in the story of how Ozzy came to power. There are other songs about his early years in a slaughterhouse and his mental state, but “Passaic, 1975” finds him in front of tens of thousands of audience members and not making the best use of the opportunity.

Or is he? In Memphis, in the song, Ozzy blacks out in front of a huge crowd despite a unique piece of tech supposedly keeping the show interesting and exciting. John Darnielle shows us over and over again that Ozzy doesn’t care in the way we think we’d care, he just wants to get high. Not only that, but he wants you to get high. It’s the greatest aspiration he can think of, so why do any of the rest of this stuff?

If you’ve been to a live show and heard someone yell for “Going to Georgia” in the middle of the wind up to a slower song, you can’t help but hear a line like “contingency plans in case the new one flops” as a line with a double meaning. The Mountain Goats aren’t Black Sabbath, obviously, but John Darnielle has to see some of his much younger self in Ozzy’s methods of dealing with the fame he’s found. I think reading too much into it is probably a mistake, though. This is the story of Ozzy getting what he supposedly wanted and finding that there are, to borrow another Mountain Goats line, “brighter things than diamonds.”

278. Waylon Jennings Live!

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Waylon Jennings has no idea what’s happening in one audience member’s mind and what might await them in “Waylon Jennings Live!”

Track: “Waylon Jennings Live!”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

John Darnielle likes to open live shows with a song the crowd won’t know. This show in San Francisco opened with “Any Available Surface” and then was almost entirely in alphabetical order. That song is excellent, but it’s about as obscure as Mountain Goats songs come. This show in Chicago opened with “Waylon Jennings Live!” This is the earliest performance of it I can find and it predates the album, so no one in the audience had ever heard it. You can hear people laugh at lines like “before I got myself this drunk” and you can tell it’s not just new to most of them, but to all of them.

The studio version is excellent, but the live versions make this one shine. I think it’s the best song the Goats have written in many years. That’s not an insult to any other song, this one just really works for me. It feels like a bridge between the characters in early Mountain Goats songs and the instrumentation of the modern band.

I was at that show at the Old Town School of Folk Music in 2018. It’s a really special venue and the person who taped this show really captures that. At the time, this was “Unreleased Waylon Jennings Song” on most of the blogs. A friend of mine got in a heated discussion with someone on Genius about what the name of the Iowa casino in the first line was. It’s Meskwaki and it’s halfway between Des Moines and Iowa City.

Our narrator is at a show and about to take a big risk. The story is easy to follow in the song, but it leaves just enough out to make you wonder. What, exactly, is on these flash drives? Even beyond that, what’s in the suitcase?

277. Sicilian Crest

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John Darnielle explores the cult of fascism and how people come to it in “Sicilian Crest.”

Track: “Sicilian Crest”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

John Darnielle loves “Sicilian Crest.” He loves the words. He loves the song. He loves everything about it, which is never more clear than on the episode of I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats about the song. The podcast is required listening for anyone who wants to really get into the band and how John Darnielle thinks about his creations, but this episode especially so. He excitedly yells the title over and over, selling it the way you’d have to sell it. It’s a song about getting excited for a really, really bad idea and signing on to something you shouldn’t just because of that enthusiasm.

It’s strange to engage with “Sicilian Crest,” a song about the pervasive nature of fascism, in 2021. It’s only been a few years since John Darnielle wrote it and it already feels so much more urgent. “All the talk we heard was true // the legends we all heard once,” the narrator excitedly tells us. They’re sick of waiting for a hero and they’re ready to believe this one, this time, is the one. They’re ready to look to one man as a savior, even though it’s obviously not a good idea. You don’t need my help to make the connection.

You can understand how this narrator wants to believe “everything’s new” and that this will work. You can understand wanting it, at least, which was John Darnielle’s goal with the song. It’s one of the darkest subjects possible and the grim reality is that there are millions of people who could be singing this song. They believe in a false past and a false dream of a future wrapped up in a cult of personality. You can almost see how you’d get there, as long as the dream was sold with a song.

276. Younger

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Thirty years of the experience of the Mountain Goats comes to a head in “Younger.”

Track: “Younger”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

I have a lot of love for “Waylon Jennings Live!” but I think “Younger” is probably the best song on In League with Dragons. It’s clever in a way that’s compelling, with at least a half-dozen references to other Mountain Goats songs to unpack. “I saw a face there once before when I was younger,” John Darnielle tells us, referencing a darker, older time from Get Lonely. The power of a reference like this is that it isn’t just something to figure out. It’s not just a line cribbed from another song. It’s a direct statement that we’re further along in the timeline of who John Darnielle is. It’s also a suggestion that times have changed.

John Darnielle wrote hundreds of songs before he started telling his story in them. Surely every piece of art has part of the creator in it, but only the later Mountain Goats albums even suggest that the narrator might be John Darnielle. He’s not the guy in “Going to Georgia” but he is the guy in “Broom People.” That matters a great deal for “Younger.”

Even the riff is based on “No, I Can’t,” a much older song that serves as a list of things that will “fix” someone. We’re more than two decades past that point and in “Younger” we see a character who feels the weight of what they’ve been through. “It never hurts to give thanks to the broken bones you had to use to build your ladder,” they tell us, in a grand telling of what the experience meant. “Younger” is huge and serious, but that’s how you feel when you’re looking back. John Darnielle wants you to engage with the entire thing at once here, which is an extremely tall task that “Younger” accomplishes.

275. An Antidote for Strychnine

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Poisons and cures are both possible paths in “An Antidote for Strychnine.”

Track: “An Antidote for Strychnine”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

It is not a new observation to say that In League with Dragons is full of self reference. One of the songs is a sequel and most of the songs reference other songs either directly or indirectly. The entire Mountain Goats experience builds upon itself, with characters like Jenny or the Alpha Couple showing up all over the place. John Darnielle playfully put a line on the front cover of All Hail West Texas that seemingly says the exact number of people contained in the songs, as if he wants you to try to do the math if that’s your thing. It’s fun to find the Easter eggs and it’s rewarding to figure something out, even if it only is a meaning you can find yourself.

“An Antidote for Strychnine” is the longest song on In League with Dragons, but I think it may only have one direct reference to a previous song. “I may not ever get free,” plays with the findings of “Never Quite Free,” especially as the next line starts with a quieter, almost hushed, “but I may.” There’s also a mention of lab rats that people think is a call to “Lab Rat Blues,” so maybe there are two.

Six minutes is a very long time to spend in a Mountain Goats song. It’s long enough that the character makes us wonder what they’re doing. It’s insular, lonely work to deal with poison and cures. It’s what you do when you feel like the world has abandoned you. It’s what you do when you’re not sure if you want to get better or not and you need to prepare for both paths.