Unreleased

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.

606. Cut Off Their Thumbs #1

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Cut Off Their Thumbs #1” is a brutal song about brutal feelings, with a chorus that hammers that home.

Track: “Cut Off Their Thumbs #1”
Album: Unreleased (released by John Darnielle online as a holiday gift in 2005)

John Darnielle once told an audience that “Cut Off Their Thumbs #1” was his version of the moment in Fight Club where the narrator fugues out and punches someone to destroy them and make them hideous and someone comments on the fact that they went somewhere else, mentally. Darnielle has made this comparison before, I think, but it was for a different song. It’s one of those details that doesn’t really matter and so I don’t want to go look it up and confirm it, but in my memory it was just after “In the Craters on the Moon” at the first show I ever saw in Chicago. Checking my work here, I told the same story there, on that post, so it’s probably for the best that we’re very close to the end of this project.

This one is similarly intense and finds a character imagining the destruction they’d like to exact on “everybody in this room.” There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs that one could describe as “intense” but it’s often paired with a distant, unknowable menace. Here, it’s right in the room. We don’t have to wonder what happened, even though we don’t get the exact, specific story, and Darnielle even lampshades how these stories play out with a line asking the audience to raise their hands if they don’t know “how this story goes.” When you feel this way, you feel only this way.

605. Song for My Stepfather

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Song for My Stepfather” wasn’t included on The Sunset Tree, but you can hear the same pain in both.

Track: “Song for My Stepfather”
Album: Unreleased

I almost didn’t want to include this one because it’s so obviously personal. John Darnielle’s story of abuse and his stepfather is one you can follow through The Sunset Tree and extensive other sources, but it’s never as direct as it is on “Song for My Stepfather.” The song speaks for itself in that it details abuse and the protective shell that a young Darnielle found for himself to survive and to become another person in the future, not influenced by that abuse but having survived it. There’s really no other word for it, so forgive the double usage of “survive.”

Darnielle has linked this song with “Pseudothyrum Song” when introducing this one and notes that they have the same chord structure and are both about his stepfather. When I wrote about that song in 2017 I did not even consider what is very obvious in retrospect. I have always been guilty of hearing romantic pairings in songs, but these are about a more painful, more personal kind of damage between two people. Darnielle has his reasons for leaving this song off of The Sunset Tree, but you can hear the characters in those songs reckoning with this same kind of despair.

604. The Mummy’s Hand

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

Another lost soul threatens to burst onto the scene, this time literally, in “The Mummy’s Hand.”

Track: “The Mummy’s Hand”
Album: Unreleased

I know I go down this road a lot in this series, but a song like “The Mummy’s Hand” is really, to me, more about the medium than the song itself. John Darnielle played it for a radio session in Seattle in 2005. That radio station no longer hosts the file, but a fan who uploads a lot of rarities uploaded it to YouTube in 2013 with a comment that I have to preserve here, as well: “my favorite song ever (as of last week).” In between those two moments, a fan asked Darnielle during an open call for questions on Reddit if he would ever reissue it and Darnielle made a mummy joke in response. As of today, as far as I know, that is the total history of “The Mummy’s Hand.”

The recording is high quality and the song itself is a great riff on an idea explored through a ton of Mountain Goats songs. It’s good, but not necessarily memorable and I wouldn’t put it in my top handful of unreleased tracks. That’s no condemnation of it so much as it is a point for a lot of songs that Darnielle went back to over and over and played for rooms full of sweaty folks who were “living and dying with this one,” as he once said of a cover of a beloved indie rock staple. I have no doubt “The Mummy’s Hand” has a longer life than that moment, but it’s amazing to me that even that tiny flicker is enough to keep it alive.

603. Minor Joan Crawford Vehicle

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The story of Joan Crawford takes many turns, but the end is visible in “Minor Joan Crawford Vehicle.”

Track: “Minor Joan Crawford Vehicle”
Album: Unreleased

We do not have the space here to go into the story of Joan Crawford, the real person, but we can touch on the parts of her life that inspired John Darnielle to write “Minor Joan Crawford Vehicle.” Crawford is one of the biggest stars in American film history, but she is debatably even more famous to modern audiences for the arc of her life. She went from an enormous star to a campy, tuned-up version of that same star in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? to a late-period B-movie actress. That arc happens to people, but rarely as famously and as completely as happened to Crawford, and rarely from such heights. Darnielle introduced the only known performance of the song during a cruise concert by saying he’s fascinated by divorce and people who stay public after their “sell-by date” and you probably already knew that, if you knew his material.

There are a variety of comparisons to make. You could see this as an extension of some of the scenes from Tallahassee, though obviously those characters got to those pre-divorce moments in a less public way. You could see this as what it literally is described to be, another version of so many songs about actual people who find themselves in cigarette-stained dens wondering what went wrong. It’s really both, I think, and while it’s similar to much of Darnielle’s output, it’s another reminder that it can happen to anyone.