Unreleased

616. Let the Dogs Come Out

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The very early “Let the Dogs Come Out” shows how impressive a songwriter John Darnielle already was.

Track: “Let the Dogs Come Out”
Album: Unreleased

A lot of what I love about John Darnielle as a songwriter can be found in the very brief outtake “Let the Dogs Come Out.” It’s pretty playful for a song about embracing a terrible fate. You can imagine Darnielle making fun of some other writer with the opening of “new rivers forming on the surface of the world” and flipping it immediately with “I mean to say that it’s raining.” I’m just guessing, here, but it feels the same to me as the joke of several songs referencing the silly description of the sun as an “orange ball.” 

There’s not really much to it, but I submit that is part of the point. The entire second verse is a play on the same idea over and over again, turning “And I remember where I was the last time that it rained like this” to “And I know that you remember where we were last time it rained like this.” That can seem like placeholder text and Darnielle has talked before about a lot of these songs being one-take recordings and a product of the idea that if the idea doesn’t flow right out of you immediately you should discard it and start over. So, functionally, songs like this exist because of that process and not always an intentional choice, but both can be true as a result. The second verse here isn’t one I’d play for someone on day one of their Mountain Goats experience, but it’s beautiful in context. The listener has to create almost everything about this scene and these people. I could tell you anything, but why disrupt your mental image?

615. New Matha

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“New Matha” is a user manual for people who need to be reminded it’s all worth it.

Track: “New Matha”
Album: Unreleased

If you were in St. Louis in 1998, you could have seen John Darnielle play “New Matha” at The Rocket Bar. He also played “The Doll Song” that night. As near as I can tell, that was (maybe) your only chance to hear “New Matha” and it was (definitely) very near to your last chance to go to the The Rocket Bar, which closed about six years later and seemingly never became anything else.

That night at The Rocket Bar people talked through the set. I have sometimes talked through parts of the set. You shouldn’t do this, but sometimes you’re in the back of the bar (or, nowadays, bigger venue than a bar) and you see someone you haven’t seen since the last Goats show. You shouldn’t do it, but I get how it happens. You wouldn’t have had any way of knowing you were seeing something unique. “New Matha” is a song about making art because you love to make art. The irony of the only recording of it being in front of a crowd in St. Louis that had to be hushed is too obvious to really go deep on, but I had to at least mention it. It’s a beautiful little song that really stuck with an old friend of mine that loved the band as much as I do. “If you ever get money, print books” is about as sincere and as sweet an opening line as exists. May we all aspire to be worthy of it, even if we sometimes talk through the quiet parts.

614. Going to San Diego

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

A trip south in California may or may not help someone in “Going to San Diego.”

Track: “Going to San Diego”
Album: Unreleased

The “Going to…” songs are often about this idea that if you could just change your physical location, you might be able to change the deeper realities of your situation. It’s not one of them, but this idea is perfectly encapsulated in “The Mess Inside,” where two people take trips to try to fix a failing relationship and find that the problem comes with them even when they travel. That’s the thing about you. You’re still you, no matter where you go.

“Going to San Diego” is a very early Mountain Goats song and San Diego was a very attainable location for that version of John Darnielle. I don’t know to what degree that should play into analysis of the song, but I think it matters. The song tells us directly this person is taking a bus ride to see someone else, but we can see it more clearly with that title. What’s going on here, though? Someone at their lowest point being visited by someone who can save them? A relationship strained through distance that maybe cannot be rekindled? All we know for sure is these people travel in a circle big enough to know each other’s friends. The hope that physical presence will reverse some previous problems is the same as the hope that a trip to San Diego will save you, but at least it’s something.

613. Tribe of the Horned Heart

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The other songs on Transcendental Youth may sell the idea better, but also find hope in “Tribe of the Horned Heart.”

Track: “Tribe of the Horned Heart”
Album: Unreleased

Early Mountain Goats narrators are talking to “you,” the person that wronged them or that they wronged or that is in some sort of complicated situation. The more modern ones, especially in unreleased live-only songs, are talking to you, the Mountain Goats fan. I was originally going to call this a “natural progression” but that’s only true if you imagine the narrator as John Darnielle. It’s really important to remember it isn’t, but for some of these songs it at least is someone very, very similar.

“Tribe of the Horned Heart” is for people who had a difficult time in middle school. You do not hide out behind the power plant if you are doing okay. You do not look for signs unless you need to find signs. You do these things because you need to do these things, and Darnielle is here to offer good news to people who absolutely need it. “Some friendly ghost is listening to the prayers they used to say // at the slack end of the rope” is the clincher, but “no secrets can be kept from you // if your faith is strong enough” is what you need to take with you. This era of the Goats is full of hope, which is so beautiful, but it comes in this bundle that tells you that you must push through this part to find what comes next.

612. Going to France

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Going to France” imagines a typically magical vacation spot as a threat.

Track: “Going to France”
Album: Unreleased

For any long-time readers, you may be tired of me going outside of the song for a story, but I simply must for “Going to France.” The only performance of this one was in 1992 at a concert I have talked about extensively through this project. The electric guitar on this song was played by Ian D. Smith, who has other credits on Shrimper and similar projects and supposedly was in a band with John Darnielle previously. He has a common enough name that it’s tough to quickly find any information about him beyond that, which I am taking on faith as listed as true on the original wiki. I’ve talked before about how it is frustrating to contribute to the “truth” of some of these things without knowing, but I just don’t see what benefit there would be to saying those basic details if they aren’t true.

The guitar sells this one. It’s a screamer, which is fun, as is the subject flip of the idea that “going to France” as a duo could be a threat rather than a reward. Our narrator says they don’t break their promises, so you are going to France with them despite this argument or frustration or whatever else we’re supposed to superimpose onto that electric guitar. That central joke is enough to sustain this one.

611. The Moon Song

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“The Moon Song” feels like a love song’s mirror, where people exist in the space of a love song that isn’t happening.

Track: “The Moon Song”
Album: Unreleased

“I want to tell you that you look so pretty // but the words come out wrong and the rage gets in the way” is an all-time duo of lines for an early Mountain Goats narrator. Here, after writing more than 600 of these, it becomes impossible to not see the minor evolution of these narrators from frustrated, alienated people into a more complex version of the same set of emotions. What, truly, separates that idea from “Autoclave?” Obviously some more advanced songwriting for that second one, but the narrators here just get better at expressing themselves more often than they actually grow.

“The Moon Song” is very much of that very early Mountain Goats style. Certainly they aren’t autobiographical and we shouldn’t fall into that trap of analysis or discussion, but one can see how a lived experience with people like this would build into this moment’s immortalization. This is a moment where something truly profound and memorable could happen, or, maybe, you could let that moment pass and miss it. This is about that second version happening.

610. Tampa

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Tampa” didn’t make the album it was written for, but the mood it conveys is worth seeking out.

Track: “Tampa”
Album: Unreleased

“Tampa” didn’t make the cut for The Coroner’s Gambit, but it’s obviously part of those sessions given the topic. It’s an intense confrontation even among a series of similarly intense confrontations. Someone recorded a version of it at this show in Indiana in 1999. Immediately after playing it, John Darnielle asks for water. Immediately after that, someone requests “Grendel’s Mother” and we’re onto the next one.

It is a phenomenon to have this much “unreleased” material. When I started this project I assumed I’d never even talk about songs like these because there are just so many of them. “Tampa” demands it, though, as it’s one of those where you have enough details to know what the mood is but not enough to know what happened. These are among my favorites, because if I even say what I think happened people will insist I’m misreading it, and I genuinely love that. “Tampa” is a tip-of-the-iceberg song from an era where so many are like that, but it’ll stick with you for the way that last verse comes to a screaming, terrifying end.

609. Going to Spirit Lake

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Going to Spirit Lake” is a footnote in a much larger career, but it’s a beautiful, brief moment to live in.

Track: “Going to Spirit Lake”
Album: Unreleased

The only version of “Going to Spirit Lake” that is easy to find, and, by extension, maybe the only one to exist, is from a show in 1996 in Belgium. As near as I can tell, this was the midpoint for this venue, open from 1982 until 2007. There seems to be a book about the history of the venue you can read about on their website and a now-defunct Instagram account. If you were there, this specific Saturday night, you heard “Going to Spirit Lake” and twenty other songs that fit into the category of closing banter for this one. John Darnielle wraps this song and says “oh my goodness, it’s an old song!”

There is a real Spirit Lake in Washington that was heavily impacted by volcanic eruption and potentially lends a name to this song. It isn’t all that important, as it often isn’t for songs like this, because the feeling is what matters. For many songwriters you would be forced to groan at “you said the right thing // you fixed everything” but I love the earnestness of this era of Darnielle’s narrators. The Mountain Goats got huge off snarling, displaced people at the ends of respective ropes, but the early days are full of people like this who just don’t know how to express a suddenly very significant emotion. You’ve been there, haven’t you?

608. Going to Some Damned English City

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The title is silly, but there’s something big happening in “Going to Some Damned English City.”

Track: “Going to Some Damned English City”
Album: Unreleased

On one day in January in 1996, John Darnielle played “Going to Some Damned English City” on WNUR, Northwestern’s radio station. At this moment, that radio station is playing some modern blues and you can listen to it on a page that spells the name of the university wrong. Just before playing it, Darnielle says the name of the song and that he can’t remember the name of this city but that it is in the north of England. It’s a fun little moment, but, as always, I am more fascinated that this artifact exists at all. It is a wondrous thing.

This specific song is more memorable than a lot of the early one-offs. You still have a little bit of borderline filler in a chorus of “there was a cold wind coming off the ocean” but the actual thing that happens in this one is surprisingly concrete. A lot of early Mountain Goats songs show us two characters who experience a fleeting emotion that they may or may not be ready to talk about. Here we get much more than that. If nothing else, that title is something, but I will always love this one for the line “you said something really important.” What a gift to know that in the moment, but what a telling thing that it’s explained that way.

607. Chilean Fire Barrel

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

In the early days of the Mountain Goats, you could hear the start of it all in “Chilean Fire Barrel.”

Track: “Chilean Fire Barrel”
Album: Unreleased

KSPC was originally Pomona College’s radio station and is now part of the larger Claremont Colleges system. As of the moment I’m writing this, they are broadcasting some Mozart. The recording booth is photographed rather lovingly on the station’s wiki. If you’ve spent any time in any sort of college or community radio setting, it will look familiar. In December of 1992, John Darnielle played “Chilean Fire Barrel” in, presumably, that room and that is, as far as I can tell, that.

He introduced the song on that broadcast by saying that he almost forgot this one, and that it took him “twenty minutes to remember something that you won’t remember ten minutes from now.” He laughs off his own comment and says “that doesn’t mean anything” and plays the song. The song itself is lovely, but simple, and in typical fashion with Mountain Goats songs, disconnected from the title enough to make it difficult to remember which one this is. I am, as ever, fascinated all the same, by that story. Picture that moment, so early in the idea of the Mountain Goats, where that comment is both a joke and very much not one at the same time.