The Hound Chronicles

408. Standard Bitter Love Song #4

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

“Standard Bitter Love Song #4” is indeed a bitter love song, but it’s also got an image you just won’t forget.

Track: “Standard Bitter Love Song #4”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

There are six Mountain Goats songs, as far as I’m aware, that have “standard bitter love song” in the title. They are numbered #1 and then numbers #4 through #8. One wonders if #2 and #3 exist. They should, right? Or is it funnier to imagine that they don’t, despite the numbering suggesting that they should? Regardless, there’s no real tie that binds them all other than the fact that they are what they say they are in their titles. These are songs for people who are snarling at a former or current partner. They also feature violence, or at least references to violence, at a higher clip than your average Mountain Goats song.

“Standard Bitter Love Song #4” opens with its strongest image: “I see you’ve left me a photograph // of a leopard tearing an antelope in half.” This is funny because it’s so shocking, but upon further reflection it’s a terrifying threat. The act is deliberate and the message is sinister, if not completely clear. The narrator in all of these songs is bitter, that’s right there in the title, but here they seem to have good reason. “What have you done // with our love,” they ask a partner we never get to meet. This can be pointed out for a lot of Mountain Goats songs, but we only have the word of our narrator. They are getting threats, sure, but what did they do before the song started? If your partner goes through the effort to source a specific, threatening image, you have to examine your contributions to the relationship. You should also leave, but wonder what you did, as well.

407. שקט (Be Quiet)

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

The only title of a Mountain Goats song in Hebrew, “שקט” finds a narrator who is fed up and has to say something.

Track: “שקט” (Be Quiet)
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

There is only one song, as far as I know, with a Hebrew title in the Mountain Goats catalog. It’s “שקט” which technically has no subtitle, but is often called “Be Quiet” as the translation of “Sheket,” the title in English. A lot of fans mistook the Hebrew for the word “ape,” so you’ll still see this song called “Ape” in some places. I do not read or speak Hebrew, but Kyle Barbour’s The Annotated Mountain Goats, which is currently down as I write this, includes a note on translation that the word can mean “be quiet” or “quietness” or “it is quiet.” You have to make some assumptions here, but the text really suggests “be quiet” is the correct one.

This is weird, even for the early jams with the presets and the loops. The song also loops internally, with only minor word choices different between the two verses and a repeating chorus. It’s simple, but the beat behind it makes it feel very urgent. “I can’t be quiet,” our narrator says, “I can’t be quiet anymore.” We feel this urgency, and then there is about a full minute of sirens and escalating laser noises. I can’t say that I enjoy this part, but it does raise my heart rate. There aren’t any Mountain Goats songs where I can’t find at least something to love, but the breakdown in the middle of this one is hard to listen to decades later. That’s fine; much of the first album is, as well. It is at the very least interesting, and the choices John Darnielle was making then led to the ones he makes today.

406. Spilling Toward Alpha

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle shows us a narrator who isn’t as concerned as they should be in “Spilling Toward Alpha.”

Track: “Spilling Toward Alpha”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

John Darnielle often jokingly chastises people who hoot and holler at live shows when he says some version of “this was on the second tape” by telling them he knows they didn’t know it then. This isn’t gatekeeping or even really all that serious, it seems to be just the honest truth. The number of people who bought The Hound Chronicles in 1992 has been dwarfed by the number of people who have gone back out of curiosity. I was in elementary school. I didn’t hear this when it came out. I’m just gonna level with you.

“Spilling Toward Alpha” is one of the first songs about the Alpha Couple. It’s not the very first, but it’s pretty close. It seems like it’s late in the official chronology of their relationship, but it’s so interesting that John Darnielle was already writing about these two a full decade before they got their own album. The song holds up in ways that some of the early stuff doesn’t, to modern ears, though one wonders what contemporary listeners thought. They couldn’t have known what was coming and they couldn’t have known that this brief song would be part of a sprawling story. In 1992, this was just the story of a narrator talking about how they have learned to life with ominous actions from a partner that’s sharpening claws and creeping around late at night. The text has enough to make you worried, but the larger story of the Alpha Couple really unlocks the terror of these moments. You really should mind.

405. The Garden Song

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

One of the earliest Mountain Goats songs, “The Garden Song,” presents a narrator it’s impossible to sympathize with.

Track: “The Garden Song”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

John Darnielle famously does not play “Going to Georgia” anymore primarily because having a narrator who threatens violence is not something he wants to triumph. His choice to stop playing it really made me think about why I liked it and what I was getting out of it. People still yell for it at shows, but that’s just how that goes. I think it’s a pretty powerful stance to take about a song that could always burn the house down and it’s part of what makes John Darnielle such an interesting songwriter. It’s said of a lot of creative people that they “evolve” but John Darnielle was always plenty progressive and a force for good. He just also was a young man writing about young men, so he told the story how it really was. It’s often not a good story.

“The Garden Song” is another song in this vein. It’s about a stalker, which is obvious from the text but reinforced from his performance in 2006 at Pitzer College. It’s the only live performance that is easily available to find, but it’s also the only one you’d need. John Darnielle introduces the song as a song he used to play when he did open mics there and says it’s about a young man stalking someone. He’s able to laugh about it and it’s obviously not as direct and intense as “Going to Georgia,” but it feels even then like a song from a much different John Darnielle. Now, over a decade after that performance, it’s even more so just an oddity from the early days.

314. The Cow Song

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

The only readily available live performance of “The Cow Song” finds two people really, really enjoying it.

Track: “The Cow Song”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“The Cow Song” opens with the lines “Bang pow, look at me now // don’t let the cows stray off too far.” It’s a very silly song, as was not totally uncommon in the early 90s for John Darnielle. The chorus is a repetition of “I love the cows.” I don’t have a lot to say, here.

Or I wouldn’t, without this tremendous piece of video history. The video starts as the song starts, but from context we can tell that two guys requested “The Cow Song” at The Union in Athens, Ohio on a September night in 2006. On most of this tour, the band played a lot of songs from Get Lonely, unsurprisingly, and there are not many deep cuts on any of the shows that have set lists. One would wonder, then, why this show has the only live performance it’s easy to find of a weird, early joke song about cows. The video answers the question. These guys asked for “The Cow Song” and John Darnielle indulged them. One wonders what we’re missing here and if it might explain why this song, of all possible songs. It’s okay to have some mystery and not know.

The venue seems like the right one to do this in, if you’re going to do this. I’m of a few minds about this. The guy who uploaded the video even describes himself as “heckling” in the description, but he’s clearly a huge fan and, for whatever reason, wants to hear this song. He asks for “The Doll Song” after it ends and John Darnielle says he’s scowling at him. Apparently actually unreleased obscurities are a bridge too far.

297. Going to Wisconsin

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle delivers “Going to Wisconsin” through bared teeth, telling us this person is at the end of their rope.

Track: “Going to Wisconsin”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“You say you need me in California, but no thanks,” John Darnielle says in “Going to Wisconsin.” I can’t think of a simpler distillation of the early Mountain Goats narrator ethos. John Darnielle bites the lyrics and sounds furious, lending this narrator a sense of unhinged anger. Early Mountain Goats songs started as poems, and I don’t know if that’s true of this one or not but the alliteration in phrases like “the bottom of the boat” really pops either way.

The delivery is the point of this one. You can imagine this narrator telling everyone to go to hell and how they feel stuck on this idea. Persistence in the face of all opposition is a common idea in the early ones. “Everyone said just to sit still,” they even say, but we know you can’t stop someone like this. The chorus is an insistence that they’re headed to Wisconsin. California represents going home in a lot of Mountain Goats songs, but we don’t find out what Wisconsin means to this narrator. Is it Wisconsin just because the second verse mentions cheese? Surely not, but that’s one idea.

You can hear a live version of “Going to Wisconsin” played at Franklin Bruno’s house in 1992 on this recording, which may be the earliest Mountain Goats recording available. The anger comes through and it works just as well live as not, but it’s worth hearing both versions even though they’re similar. There may not be much to dig out of this one; sometimes it’s just about the snarl.

253. Going to Mexico

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

In a one-sided story, we hear one person get increasingly excited in “Going to Mexico.”

Track: “Going to Mexico”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

The narrator in “Going to Mexico” cannot help themselves. So many Mountain Goats narrators find themselves in this position. At the start of the song, this one sees a person through a window and really, really wants us to know that they see them. A lot of the early songs repeat like this, but you really notice it in “Going to Mexico.”

Taken literally, this character touches the other character’s hair and is overwhelmed. They experience this feeling several ways, notice the world around them, and then imagine a deeper relationship than they seem to actually have with this person. It’s sung as a love song, but it seems like it’s not a story the other person would tell the same way.

I don’t know if that’s reading into “Going to Mexico” too deeply or not. The more you listen to it the more it becomes the story of someone who thinks they are in a relationship (or at least some sort of semi-intimate situation) with someone that we never get to hear from at all.

“Last Man on Earth” is my favorite song that expresses that same idea, but much less ambiguously. I’m more than willing to be reading this one wrong, but the birds coughing in the trees and the screaming chickens tell me that all is not well as this character gazes through an open window. It’s an interesting trick, if that’s what it is, and I love the cracks in John Darnielle’s voice as this character gets so close to their version of ecstasy.

093. The Water Song

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle has some fun with metaphor as his narrator struggles to explain himself in “The Water Song.”

Track: “The Water Song”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

The early songs have simple names. In present day you get things like “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident” but in the early days you got “Sun Song” and “The Water Song” and “Water Song II.” There’s nothing wrong with simplicity, it’s just interesting to see how the band has evolved.

The women who provide the backing vocals on the early records are collectively known as The Bright Mountain Choir. They’re really prominent on some of the best early stuff and they add some lightness to the surprisingly fun refrain of “let them kill me” that repeats 17 times in “The Water Song.” The early songs have a way of juxtaposing the extreme with incongruous joy.

It’s a song about the difficulties of communication. The narrator can’t get through to the person they’re talking to, so they try using metaphors. In the first two verses they use water, but the most beautiful part of the song is the third verse: “you’re the salesman // I’m the buyer // you’re the tractor // I’m the tire // I’m the glass // you’re the water that fills me.” There’s something about the cadence that sells it. Even though it’s hard to imagine what the exact conversation is, you can appreciate the attempt at colorful language in a personal crisis.

“The Water Song” rarely gets played live, but I encourage you to listen to this one to appreciate it. John Darnielle leads the audience as they sing the rousing, handclapping chorus and it feels like a song he could write now. He’s clearly embarrassed about some of the early, simpler songs, but “The Water Song” sounds great there. Despite that, he closes the song by saying “in probably its farewell appearance, ‘The Water Song'” so get it while you can.

069. Lab Rat Blues

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

While it opens up with a truly sweet set of two lines, “Lab Rat Blues” largely tells the sad tale of the title rat.

Track: “Lab Rat Blues”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“I apologize for the “early” i.e. first 5 years’ worth of hair/there rhymes but as I remember it there was a lot of hair there” – John Darnielle

John Darnielle’s Twitter is routinely outstanding reading, but there is a special joy in little pieces of ephemera like that. Darnielle said the above in response to a tweet from the Canadian punk band Propagandhi when they said they were “studying Mountain Goats lyrics.” The man The New Yorker called “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist” has always been sheepish about his early work, but he’s rarely been as specific as he was in that tweet.

“Lab Rat Blues” opens with “I saw you // I saw your hair // I could spend the rest of my life in there” and it’s the best part of the song. The song seems to be an extended comparison of the titular lab rat and a lover who feels jilted. Both are beyond in love with their creator/lover and both express it through descriptions of power and beauty. The comparison is sad, but one we can appreciate in the memory of times we felt we were at the mercy of someone else, likely in an emotional balance of power.

The difference is that lovers perceive a disparate amount of power where lab rats are literally right about their powerlessness. “I saw you, but you saw me first” from the lab rat’s view reveals the terrifying reality of speaking to an actual creator that knows even the moments of your life that you’ll never know. There are a lot of emotions tied up in this comparison, but it’s also worth viewing at face value. “Trapped like a rat” is thrown around a lot as a phrase, but Darnielle asks us to consider the actual rat.

068. Going to Chino

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle speaks of his home and his mentality as he wails about the selling points of both in “Going to Chino.”

Track: “Going to Chino”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“Going to Spain” is one of the saddest songs in the two decades of Mountain Goats history, but the entire album The Hound Chronicles really has a sad feel to it. On “Going to Chino” you can hear John Darnielle’s voice crack over and over. Some listeners will find it too rough to enjoy, but that’s really the point. Early songs like “Going to Alaska” use the roughness of the recording to amplify their snarls and screams, but “Going to Chino” stands alone. John is wailing by the time he belts out “a unified school system // the likes of which you won’t find elsewhere” and the delivery is the entire point of the song.

It’s lyrically unimpressive by design. He’s singing about droll subjects because the actual setting of Chino isn’t the point. When John says he wants to “say hello to all our friends from Chino” he’s speaking to the entire cast of characters he’s created. Those characters didn’t exist to the public in 1992, but the meth addicts and alcoholic brides and scorned lovers of the Mountain Goats were real to him already and they were all from Chino.

There are good things about the area like “convenient access to the 60 freeway” and “accredited medical care down at Chino Valley Hospital,” but the Chino of the mind is a tougher place to live. You were born there and you will die there, so in this brief moment a very forlorn John Darnielle would like to extend a greeting to people who need one. After all, in his own way, he’s from Chino, too.