Jam Eater Blues

186. Jam Eater Blues

Alex Russell Jam Eater Blues , , , , ,

The simple pleasure of delicious jam offers a brief respite from — what else — Tampa in “Jam Eater Blues.”

Track: “Jam Eater Blues”
Album: Jam Eater Blues (2001)

The difference between jam and jelly is that jam has more pieces of actual fruit, so it’s chunkier. That’s why it’s easy to picture the narrator in “Jam Eater Blues” pawing jam out of a jar with just their hands as they ponder the world and their place in it.

“Life is too short to refrain from eating jam out of the jar” is a fine summary of the Mountain Goats’ mentality. Even the darker moments of the catalog affirm the need to act quickly and the importance of living without reservations. It’s the kind of statement you can see John Darnielle making and writing down in a notebook, wondering what he’ll end up using it for later. Then it shows up perfectly as the refrain in “Jam Eater Blues” and leads surprisingly into a song about the challenges of love.

Our narrator says they won’t stay up waiting for someone to come home, but they will eat jam. They won’t leave the windows open to take part in the world, but they will eat jam. They won’t live out their days in Tampa, a common symbol of dead ends in Mountain Goats songs, but they will eat jam. “Life is too short to let it go to waste like this,” they tell us, “but I never tasted jam before that tasted like this.” We can forgive the this/this rhyme because it explains the character so well. The vagueness of who is coming home and what Tampa and open windows mean to the narrator are in stark contrast with the pleasure of jam out of a jar. We don’t know what these problems mean, but we know what pigging out in joy to escape them feels like.

103. Straight Six

Alex Russell Jam Eater Blues , , , , , ,

 

Jenny shows up in “Straight Six” but the narrator has only the moon and their thoughts to help on a late drive.

Track: “Straight Six”
Album: Jam Eater Blues (2001)

Jenny can be a blessing or a curse in a Mountain Goats song. In “Jenny” she’s a symbol of tremendous hope for the narrator. That character and Jenny ride away from their troubles on a motorcycle and seemingly get away with it, at least in the moment. In “Night Light” she’s the lifeline that a terrified narrator needs to keep their sanity. They’re being pursued by external or internal demons and they get calls from Jenny that keeps them tethered to the real world.

The Jenny of “Straight Six” doesn’t seem to be as much help as her “Night Light” counterpart. In “Straight Six” she serves the same function as a proposed savior for the narrator, but she’s not likely to be as successful given that “Jenny’s on the cellular // high as a kite.” Considering how rarely characters in Goats songs actually get names it’s safe to assume that all three are the same Jenny and to view her as functionally the same character with the same purpose through the catalog.

“Straight Six” is the third and final song on Jam Eater Blues. The title track is, well, a blues song about making the most out of life’s simple pleasures. The middle track is a brutal look at specific, violent death and how it impacts us. The through line here is tough to find, but all three songs feature some form of introspection in a dark time. The trick is that they all find different outcomes. The narrator in “Straight Six” offers both possible outcomes to introspection on the single as they consider their troubles: “sometimes the moon shines like a beacon to the weary and the sick in spirit // and sometimes, sometimes it’s dark.”

032. Store

Alex Russell Jam Eater Blues , , , , , , , ,

“Store” is a violent, expressive song about the only thing scarier than death in the abstract: death right in front of you.

Track: “Store” (also called “Aisle”)
Album: Jam Eater Blues (2001)

“It’s called ‘Aisle’ but I always want to call it ‘Store’ but I might have that backwards. You can call it whatever you want, because generally speaking if you’re requesting it, I won’t play it anyway.” – John Darnielle, on “Store.” (Which, obviously, you can also call “Aisle”)

There are a lot of songs from the catalog of roughly 25 years that don’t get played a lot these days. Some of them are for obvious reasons — I’ve already expressed my love for “Beach House” but it’s a lengthy diatribe about seals, so, okay, might not fit in with the divorce album and the meth album and so on — but some of them just don’t exactly represent where the band is at anymore. See: “Going to Georgia,” a longer conversation for a later time.

“Store” is one of the “songs about dead friends” in the catalog. The narrator walks in a store and has a painful experience (John sometimes calls it “a vision” but you can read it as literal or metaphorical pain and it works the same) and passes out for a moment in the middle of the aisle. They experience the memory of the sight of a dead friend with a head wound and exclaim “ah, the blood! all of that blood!” over and over and over.

When we think about a death we often think about the loss of a person moving forward more than actual, literal death. The reason the exclamations of “ah, the blood!” and the screams and the hard strums here work so well is because they force us to look at the same thing our hero is seeing. They force us to consider something even more extreme than a representation of loss, and that’s “the sight of the hole in the side of your skull.”