Songs About Fire

363. Song for John Davis

Alex Russell Ghana, Songs About Fire , , , , , , , ,

“Song for John Davis” is a quick story but it will leave you wondering what these people are leaving or headed towards.

Track: “Song for John Davis”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

There are a lot of things to love about “Song for John Davis.” I love the vocal delivery of “England” and “when we landed” and the final lines with the absurd stretches. I love the unexplained, unexpected quotation of 1 Corinthians 13:11. I love the title which is both very clear but also doesn’t really tell you anything. This is a song for John Davis, you see, but how, and who is that?

John Davis is a musician and an activist who was part of the Shrimper scene when John Darnielle was there. He reviewed Transcendental Youth on his website with an insightful review that talks about what Jon Wurster brings to the Mountain Goats. Why is this short song about leaving a snowy New Hampshire to head to England by boat dedicated to him? That I don’t think anyone can say.

As far as I can tell, John Darnielle hasn’t ever played “Song for John Davis” live and there really isn’t anything that’s been said about it. It exists just as this two-minute story with a repeated line for a chorus. It’s always been a little difficult to unpack for me, but it’s for John Davis, so maybe that’s why. I do love the tone, with a longing and a sadness that you can’t quite explain but can definitely hear.

362. Papagallo

Alex Russell Ghana, Songs About Fire , , , , , , , ,

“Papagallo” showcases some specifics from John Darnielle’s writing style and ultimately drills in on a beautiful moment.

Track: “Papagallo”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

I have grown fascinated over the course of this project by the songs that no one ever mentions. “Papagallo” has never been played live, as far as I can tell, though it’s pretty difficult to prove a negative. It’s not available anywhere, at least, and even the seven-inch it was originally released on, Songs About Fire, may run you close to a hundred dollars if you want to buy your own. The entire single is a little longer than eight minutes long even with four songs on it. It’s just a really small thing and all four songs on it are small parts. The one that sticks with you is “Pure Gold,” for the fun sing-along phrases about a door burning.

You can miss “Papagallo” in that way, but you shouldn’t. In this era John Darnielle was amazingly productive, so it doesn’t mean anything that a song just got released and not revisited. This is still a time where John Darnielle thought he might hang it up eventually. There’s a confidence to this one, though. “It’s hard to grab ahold of some things sometimes // like you need me to remind you” is excellent phrasing, especially with the delivery on the second line to sell it as a joke or a weary reminder of a million shared experiences. One can even forgive the second verse’s triple rhyme of “water,” extreme even for John Darnielle, as that’s clearly a similar joke. The repetition also really sells the image. These are just two people in a singular moment, but if you listen to this one a few times, you can see it, can’t you?

298. Stars Around Her

Alex Russell Ghana, Songs About Fire , , , , , , , ,

We see one moment and have time to appreciate it in “Stars Around Her.”

Track: “Stars Around Her”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

There are hundreds of live Mountain Goats shows online, but I find myself getting hung up on specific ones like this show at Fletcher’s from 1996 that I’ve talked about before. Fletcher’s is gone, like a lot of places are gone, and the recording is frustrating because the audience won’t shut up. John Darnielle mentions it several times, including the introduction to “Stars Around Her” where he says it’s a quiet song that he probably shouldn’t play with a loud audience. As a much younger person I definitely talked at shows and I’ve tried to get better about that. Let people enjoy the show. You can catch up at the bar after the thing.

The Mountain Goats are never going to be a band for everyone, but they’re several magnitudes bigger now than they were in 1996. Fletcher’s seems like the kind of place where the audience might not be there because they wanted to see John Darnielle’s hyper-specific style of stomping and howling. It’s just the cost of doing business that sometimes you care about the show way more than the average person in the room. If most folks are there because the beer is cheap and the weather is nice then you might not get the best version of a song from a four-song release from forever ago.

Most of the live versions of “Stars Around Her” sound like the studio version. It appears to be a song about romantic longing that’s frozen in one image, though that may be a simplification. There are a lot of songs like this from this time period and that’s no slight to say, because this is a great one. John Darnielle’s voice is softer here than it usually is and it’s a truly nice moment. That’s enough, really.

150. Pure Gold

Alex Russell Ghana, Songs About Fire , , , , , , , ,

One lover tries to keep another one by warning them that the way out of their love is on fire in “Pure Gold.”

Track: “Pure Gold”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

There are many “pure” songs and they are not strictly connected. They may not share exact characters or locations like the Alpha songs do, but they are similar in that they all feature exactly two people talking about exactly one thing.

John Darnielle is on the record about his characters being interchangeable by nature of having no stated gender. It’s easy to describe a Mountain Goats narrator as “he” because John Darnielle sings in first person and is male, but by design he almost never tells you that the speaker is a man or the recipient of the message is a woman or anything of the sort. Most characters could be anywhere across the spectrum of gender and could be speaking to anyone.

It’s often ambiguous if the characters are lovers or friends. In “Pure Gold” we can assume because one character says they often hold the other one, but sometimes we don’t even get that much. Rachel Ware adds vocals to a few lines and reinforces that it is two people communicating, but really it’s just the narrator asking someone not to leave. “Hey, don’t touch the door, because the door will surely kill you” is a striking opening line, but it’s also a look into this narrator’s situation. It’s a love song, kinda, but it’s a close-to-the-end-of-love song.

Relationships across the Goats catalog are often in states of disarray. It’s no surprise that the “Pure Gold” couple struggles, but it’s interesting as a look into unreliable narrators. John Darnielle often uses song structure to point out that we only get one side of the story. We know from the lyrics that the other lover here doesn’t see the exit as such a dangerous thing, no matter how many times they’re told that the door is literally on fire.