Sweden

115. Tahitian Ambrosia Maker

Alex Russell Sweden , , , ,

 

The most important moment in “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker” is slight enough that you might miss it in your real life.

Track: “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker”
Album: Sweden (1995)

As far as the usual sources are aware, “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker” has never been played live and John Darnielle isn’t on the record about it. It’s on Sweden, which many fans count among the greatest records the band has produced, but Sweden has nineteen tracks.

The liner notes on Sweden contain, appropriately, Swedish subtitles for each song. Some of them are cryptic with lines like “the coldest winter” and “those who escaped were innocent,” but the subtitle for this song is just “he’s recognized you.” That might imply that the characters are pursued by someone they’re trying to lose or it might mean something else entirely. It might even refer to the speaker, from the perspective of the other character. It deepens the mystery of what’s going on here without expressly revealing it, which is fitting for a Swedish subtitle on a Mountain Goats record.

With a lack of primary and secondary sources, we are left with the text itself. Two characters are hungry and one offers bread to the other. John Darnielle’s “moments of grace like this being wholly unmerited” is beautiful, but it also says something about the state of these two. The final verse is all about a familiar moment in a Goats song: one character touches the other one gently and the recipient imbues it with powerful meaning. It happens in a number of Goats songs, but it’s a useful device because we’ve all had that experience. The speaker devolves and screams “pure gold, nothing but gold” and is driven to promise a coconut cream pie, but the reasoning is open to interpretation. “Because I saw the sky coming down to meet you,” like any good Goats lyric, is malleable enough to be sweet or foreboding, depending on your current feelings towards love.

080. Downtown Seoul

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

With a simple, but strange, description, “Downtown Seoul” offers a brief look at love that’s better than any pop song.

Track: “Downtown Seoul”
Album: Sweden (1995)

Is Sweden the best Mountain Goats record? A lot of fans contend that it is, and I think they’ve got a good case. The album opens with the extremely brutal “The Recognition Scene” and follows up with “Downtown Seoul.” Songs like “The Mess Inside” and “Half Dead” might be rougher, but there is no harder one-two punch in the catalog than the two songs that open up Sweden.

Every song on Sweden has a Swedish sentence written next to it in the liner notes. For “Downtown Seoul” it is very simple: “He is younger than me.” The meaning of some of the Swedish sentences is tough to decipher, but this one seems to suggest that the song may be about John Darnielle himself. It predates the autobiographical records like The Sunset Tree, but it’s easy to see how Darnielle sympathizes with his narrator here. In the first verse their beloved walks across a square in Seoul. They are consumed by the moment. “As the rest of my life went by,” they say.

What makes this song so wonderful is the specificity. Most love songs talk about generic love, but the Mountain Goats offer you a moment where a person takes another’s finger in their mouth and rests it lightly on their tongue. It sounds strange, but you know what it means. We are all different and we cannot totally explain the best moments of our lives to other people, because they were not there. “I remember your eyelids,” they say, and we also remember something extremely exact and indescribable about someone we loved in a place far away from our present.

073. Whole Wide World

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

“Whole Wide World” is a simple look at a child in a tree and some contemplative respite on a really brutal album.

Track: “Whole Wide World”
Album: Sweden (1995)

At a show in Brooklyn in 2008, John Darnielle opened with “Whole Wide World.” It’s not a particularly rare or surprising song — the name of the “Everything Else” section of the band’s forums is named after it — but it’s a very odd opener. The Goats usually open with a ton of noise or an album-starter that has a natural lead in. “Whole Wide World” is a very quiet song from Sweden. It’s very beautiful and slow, with just one child in a tree and their thoughts as they deal with the cold wind and the snow. It’s very open-ended and tougher to break down than most of the character studies on other albums.

Sweden is a thinker. “Tollund Man” and “Going to Bolivia” have specific characters and their last real moments. “The Recognition Scene” and “California Song” are all-time greats that look backwards at love and life when things were either better or just different and it’s hard to say which. There’s a lot of pain in the “love songs” like “Downtown Seoul,” and songs like “Whole Wide World” can come off as just connective tissue between the more heartrending stuff. It can seem like just a sweet picture of a child alone in the wilderness, but Darnielle’s voice — almost a whisper, in contrast to the screaming pain of the end of the album — elevates it. At that show he played it in response to a scream for “Golden Boy.” It’s a big faux pas to yell for “Golden Boy,” and Darnielle plays its exact opposite. “C’mon, yell for “Golden Boy” again just so I can say no again,” Darnielle says. It’s not abuse, it’s a reminder that the Goats have wide range and that you’ve got to appreciate the peace just as much as the fury.

047. Snow Crush Killing Song

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

On an album full of tragic figures, the lovers in “Snow Crush Killing Song” fail to even share one final tender moment.

Track: “Snow Crush Killing Song”
Album: Sweden (1995)

If you were to read the lyrics to “Snow Crush Killing Song” without hearing it, you’d think that it was an entirely different sort of song. “I know you’re changing // god damn you for that” is a message that begs to be screamed in anger. The chorus of “Chinese House Flowers” is at least a cousin to those lines with its pleading “I want you the way you were,” but “Snow Crush Killing Song” is a more complex beast.

You shouldn’t start with the live recordings, but this one from 2009 gives you a taste of what it would sound like with some more fury in it. It starts with the same quiet guitar as the original, but by the time the narrator comes to terms with the fact that this is hopeless, John Darnielle cracks into a tight scream. It’s not the same foot-stomp scream that accompanies “Commandante,” but it shouldn’t be. It’s not “god damn you” because the narrator hates the person they’re with, it’s “god damn you” because the narrator doesn’t have any outs left.

The biggest difference between Sweden and most of the other Mountain Goats albums from the 90s is that the cast of Sweden doesn’t really deserve this. From the possibly innocent sacrifice of “Tollund Man” to the hopeful youths of “California Song,” these are people whose lives have been derailed by outside forces. That’s surprisingly unique among Goats characters, and though we don’t know what lit the match in “The Recognition Scene” or “Snow Crush Killing Song,” we can tell from the tone that these are sad events rather than just rewards for lives lived poorly.

021. Tollund Man

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

 

2000 years ago, “Tollund Man” met with the end of his life in a bog in Denmark with his eyes closed and a peaceful look.

Track: “Tollund Man”
Album: Sweden (1995)

A lot of these songs happen in California and Florida, but for “Tollund Man” we need to go back to Denmark in the 4th century, BCE. The real Tollund Man was hung in a bog for indeterminate reasons, though historians believe it to be a case of human sacrifice. He was found, nearly perfectly preserved, by peat farmers in 1950. The body was over 2,000 years old, but it was so well preserved that everyone believed it to be a recent murder victim.

“Tollund Man” the song describes the man’s last day. He eats a meal of “cooked wild grasses” and waits for his people to come and condemn him to death. It’s very simply laid out, but that doesn’t cut into the melancholia of “goodbye cold air, I am going away” or the final “goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.” It’s the perfect kind of tale: not fully decipherable as it is lost to history but clearly a sad end. Historians believe he was a sacrifice rather than a criminal because his eyes and mouth were closed. He looks at peace.

When the Goats play “Tollund Man” live they often add extra verses. That’s not uncommon for the band — for a bit the “alcohol” in “This Year” got replaced with “heroin” — but the “Tollund Man” additions are special. The Annotated Mountain Goats put together a good list, but my favorite is the excerpt from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. I won’t be so bold as to interpret a sonnet here, but John belts out “there’s no mercy, which makes your love more strong // the love that, well, which you will have to leave before too long.” So many Goats characters can’t figure out how to deal in life, but possibly only Tollund Man found a way to leave this world at peace.

011. Going to Bolivia

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

In “Going to Bolivia” John Darnielle offers the listener one potential outcome of life without successful connections with others.

Track: “Going to Bolivia”
Album: Sweden (1995)

What meaning can you find in insanity? John Darnielle is “on the record” about a lot of his material, but he’s extremely clear about “Going to Bolivia.” In that interview from 2008, he picked “Going to Bolivia” as one of five character songs that he wanted to explain. His explanation is interesting, but it leaves more questions than it answers. He says that the protagonist of the song is “a little crazy” and that we “get the sense that he’s been isolated for a little while.” That’s what we know for sure: this is an unhinged person who is on their own, waiting for someone to return to them in Bolivia.

Beyond that, what is there in “Going to Bolivia?” Sweden is filled with isolated characters that probably shouldn’t be left on their own, and this is yet another poor soul like that. “Tollund Man” focuses on a man cast aside by his tribe, “The Recognition Scene” describes two people lost to each other, and “Prana Ferox” looks at two people who should be lost to each other. The world of Sweden is a lonely world — as contrasted with an angry or a remorseful world, like some other The Mountain Goats albums — and one wonders what John wants us to get out of this particular character. The song seems to be without implied judgment, so it’s left to the listener to invent a back story for just why this character is hearing distant carnivals and fearing the sight of the natural world. Whatever you decide made him this way, he’s a warning to other people that life can turn inwards on you very quickly, and that you need to be worried when you see animals that aren’t there.

002. Going to Queens

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

 

As two people consider the sounds of children in New York through a window, they realize they may not know each other 

Track: “Going to Queens”
Album: Sweden (1995)

“Going to Queens” fits into a number of categories for Goats songs. Most notably, it’s part of the “Going to…” series. Depending on which title you use for some of the unofficially named deep-cut, live-only songs, there are somewhere around 40 or 50 songs that feature “Going to” in their title. Fans think about the series in different ways, but they all recognize the importance of location in John Darnielle’s world. It’s partially about being specific — “Queens” is mentioned in the song before “New York City,” and it tells you so much more about where they are — but it’s also about the beauty of the mundane. In “Going to Queens,” the couple isn’t on one particularly beautiful street corner or in one awesome bedroom, they’re just in the same place that lots of other people are. They aren’t special, everything is special.

Sweden is the second studio album, and “Going to Queens” is a standout track. Despite seeming slight at first listen when compared to the later material, it actually conveys a lot with a little. It features the original female vocalist, bassist, and only-other-Goats-member Rachel Ware, and she lends a haunting quality to the track. She’s actually louder than John in the song, and John comes off almost uncertain in his delivery. It suggests that the characters are talking to each other in an intimate moment when their bodies are “heavy on” each other, and that they don’t really have enough of a connection to keep going. It’s a common sentiment, and “Going to Queens” benefits from being adaptable to multiple situations. Everyone understands saying “You were all I ever wanted // you were all I’d ever need” and hoping that this time, saying it out loud will make it become true.