Steal Smoked Fish

396. In the Shadow of the Western Hills

Alex Russell Steal Smoked Fish , , , , , , ,

Better days come to those who wait, or at least we hope they do, in “In the Shadow of the Western Hills.”

Track: “In the Shadow of the Western Hills”
Album: Steal Smoked Fish (2012)

“In the Shadow of the Western Hills” appears on the Steal Smoked Fish EP, alongside the song in the title. “Steal Smoked Fish” is one of the absolute best Mountain Goats songs of the last ten years and as a result, I’ve never given as much time as I should to the song that’s paired with it. Both songs go with the cast on Transcendental Youth, where people struggle to connect with the people around them and struggle in much greater terms to connect with themselves. During an introduction to this one, John Darnielle once spoke of the entire package of songs as an attempt to grapple with people in this struggle. With this song specifically, Darnielle imagines (or remembers) a person who is fighting the chemicals that make them do things they don’t want to do or can’t understand.

“Call up Rebecca, maybe try to explain // but she hangs up while I’m still talking, I walk out into the rain” is a sad image, but it’s also sad for Rebecca. Characters are rarely named like this and we never hear anything else from Rebecca, so it’s not like a Jenny character, but it is a real person. It’s not “a friend” or “my love” it is Rebecca, a person, someone else out there who maybe wants you to feel better and maybe can’t even identify that as what you need. This one imagines the pain in both directions, where it’s sad that you wander outside and imagine visions and try to make connections, but it’s also sad how that reads to everyone else.

190. Steal Smoked Fish

Alex Russell Steal Smoked Fish, Transcendental Youth , , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle offers some advice for his former compatriots in Portland in “Steal Smoked Fish.”

Track: “Steal Smoked Fish”
Album: Transcendental Youth (2012) and Steal Smoked Fish (2012)

If you’ve been to Portland, you know the Burnside Bridge. “Steal Smoked Fish” follows some of John Darnielle’s younger accomplices as they cross the bridge, see the iconic “White Stag” sign (before it was bought by the city and rewritten to say “Portland, Oregon”), and raid a convenience store. In another song, “two on point, and two on sentry” at the Plaid Pantry might be a metaphor, but here it’s more likely a literal plan of attack.

There are dozens of songs and multiple albums about John Darnielle’s time in Portland. He’s on the record over and over again about the mistakes of his youth, but “Steal Smoked Fish” allows him to return to those days as an omniscient narrator. In this bonus track from Transcendental Youth, the drug addicts and thieves of Portland “feast when you can // and dream when there’s nothing to feast on.” With perspective, we know this is a way to make it through tough times, but it’s tough to sustain that way in the moment.

Even with a reference to “the joys that the lesser days bring,” this still isn’t a song about good times. The days are lesser not just because you’re older now, but because the points of importance were so petty. You can feel Darnielle’s narrator whispering advice to these characters that they won’t take, but there’s still hope. It’s an interesting duality between memories of those times and hope that characters won’t stay in them in places like “disappear in a cloud of dust // but spare a thought for what it covers up.”

Ultimately, these characters are too far gone. John Darnielle introduces the song live as being about ghosts, but it’s still a story of who they were and both what they did and might have done.