Unreleased

519. Cutter

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Cutter” hearkens back to youth, but it’s really a story about where you end up when you can’t help yourself.

Track: “Cutter”
Album: Unreleased

If you go to a Mountain Goats show in Bloomington, Indiana, smart money says you are likely to hear “Cutter.” John Darnielle was born in Bloomington, though he hails from California, and when he goes back he very often plays the only song that I know of that references his birth state. It’s a direct reference, too, and “I was born in Indiana thirty years ago” is about as direct as it comes. That line gets a “woo” invariably from the hometown crowd, but it’s an interesting song beyond that oddity.

It is easy, with a band like this, to speak in hyperbole. The band’s early official merch leaned into obsession with a slogan that became the name of a podcast with “I only listen to the Mountain Goats.” That said, even in that space, “I’m gonna wrap up my troubles in you” is extreme. So many Goats narrators are in dark situations, but this one defines themselves by it. You don’t say something like that unless you’ve, to some degree, come to terms with how things are going and you are dedicated to digging down, not out, of your hole.

The title references self-harm, so we’re obviously in a dark place, but this deserves to be grouped with songs like “Poltergeist” rather than songs from The Sunset Tree. There are brief moments that tell us this was once some other way, but this is beyond saving. There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs like this one, but I don’t know that the band has ever expressed that kind of frustrating inability to help yourself as succinctly as they do here. You cannot help but see this story for what it is.

518. You’re in Maya

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“You’re in Maya” was the first ever song John Darnielle wrote about himself, but it’s about you, too.

Track: “You’re in Maya”
Album: Unreleased

“You’re in Maya” is, if you’re of a certain mind, “the” Mountain Goats song. It’s unreleased and extremely rare, even among rare songs. It’s autobiographical, from an era where John Darnielle wasn’t writing about himself often. You may still hear someone yell for this at a live show, which I’ll admit I assuredly must have done at some point without knowing any better. But that’s the thing, you can’t yell for “You’re in Maya.” At one live show decades ago, Darnielle’s act of playing it was tied to an ask of if someone would “warm him up” a shot of Old Grand-Dad. It’s a specific thing, not to be taken lightly.

The song speaks for itself, in a way. The chorus is Gaelic, so maybe that sounds crazy, but you will immediately either remember this time in your life or you will recognize it as the right now of your life when you hear it. Every performance is a little bit different, to the point where the last four lines of the second verse get transposed in order half the time, but it always feels the same. This is an era where you play pinball until you don’t want to kill people. This is an era where you wear a coat that was important to your father even if you have complicated feelings about your father. This is where you drink and you hide out in Portland.

At some performances he says the address of the house he was in for the second verse. I went to see it in Portland, many years ago. Being in that physical location could be transformative, but it’s more about the time in your life. You’ll be this person, hopefully briefly, and you don’t need Portland to commune with them again.

517. My Favorite Things

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The Mountain Goats owe as much to what’s in “My Favorite Things” as they do to a tossed off response to it.

Track: “My Favorite Things”
Album: Unreleased

If you want to hear something unexpected at a Mountain Goats show, your best chance seems to be in California or North Carolina, the two primary “homes” of the band over the years. Sure, John Darnielle lived in Portland and Chicago, and sure, he and his wife lived in Colo, Iowa during some of the most critical years for the band, but it’s undeniable they have their roots in California and they live these days on the other coast. San Francisco shows especially have a tendency to bring out the early, early stuff and the stories on stage that make up the mythology we all love to turn over.

“My Favorite Things” is one of the “early, funny” ones and often if Darnielle chooses to play it, it’s because he suspects someone in the crowd might have heard it when it was a staple of his performance back at Pitzer. At a show in San Francisco in 2002 he told a story I think of every time I hear something like “Beach House” where he says it took people identifying him as a person who writes funny songs to force him into the grim, divorce territory that, honestly, made him famous.

“My Favorite Things” is a silly little song about passion and, tangentially, listening to My Favorite Things by John Coltrane. It’s a fun one, but it’s extra fun when contrasting it with the trajectory of the eventual Mountain Goats catalog. You can hear “No Children” in here, sure, but there’s so much more that came out of a rebellion against it.

516. Carmen Cicero

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Carmen Cicero” asks you in the lyrics to sing along, but I doubt that’s going to be a problem by the time you get to the end.

Track: “Carmen Cicero”
Album: Unreleased

There are some more “modern” ones that usurp this throne, but other than “You’re in Maya,” I think “Carmen Cicero” was the unreleased song I wanted to hear the most at shows when I started going to Mountain Goats concerts. At some point that feeling gave way to my favorite thing to hear a crowd yell: “just play what you wanna play!” I certainly, in my time, have yelled for some songs, but generally you get what you get, and that’s great, and it especially is true of the live-only stuff that only comes out when the band feels they can do it justice and the mood is right.

There are many versions of “Carmen Cicero” online, but the definitive one for me is this one, from October of 2000. The YouTube video cuts off the opening where John Darnielle demands the crowd sing when the time comes. The lyrics further demand your participation, directly, over and over. “And this is a song for your young men to sing when they run out of options” is the kind of thing that you hear in a certain mood, at a certain age, and you feel like you’ve never heard anything else.

Darnielle introduces the song sometimes with jokes about how much people want to hear this on a real release, but that you’d lose something. The final verse comments directly again that the song doesn’t have a chorus, but then ends in a devolution of “yeah” from the crowd. As he says at that performance, “every last one of you right now.” You need that room and those people who will do it with you. It’s something, still, without it, but it’s everything, there, with it.

515. Any Available Surface

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

You can find the sweet longing of “Any Available Surface” everywhere now, but it really only happened that one time, in that one place.

Track: “Any Available Surface”
Album: Unreleased

I’ve said this before here and I think I may be putting too much faith in this comment, but John Darnielle has said that he likes to open a show with a song that no one in the crowd will know. On February 25, 2009, he opened a show you can watch entirely on YouTube with “Any Available Surface,” which surely fits the bill. A few weeks later he played it again and also opened with it. That’s the whole history of “Any Available Surface,” at least as far as the usual sources are concerned. I’m a historian, by education, and that part of me wants to couch every comment like that in open-ended language. 2009 is a long time ago, now, but it’s also an era where I trust, to some degree, that answer has a chance to be complete. Those might be the only two times anyone heard this one.

I’m sure the other version is recorded and there’s this nagging part of me that feels like I’ve seen it live, too, at some show in Chicago. I think it’s more likely that I just came back to this one over and over again, released at the end of the era where I had hundreds of live MP3 files in a folder and just before YouTube and streaming made everything more immediate and open. I think it’s just this quiet, surprising moment where a crowd of devotees heard something they’d never heard and, it turns out, might never hear again.

The song itself is sweet and good, but it’s brief and it speaks for itself. People love the intense ones and the grim narrators, but those are extra powerful in contrast to someone watching someone sail away and then finding them again in the scent they left.

514. Standard Bitter Love Song #1

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , , ,

The original in a series, “Standard Bitter Love Song #1” is very silly, very extreme, and very relatable.

Track: “Standard Bitter Love Song #1”
Album: Unreleased

There are a few “official” songs released in the Standard Bitter Love Song list, but the first one never officially came out. You can only hear it on live recordings and I simply insist your first one be this performance in 2007 at Zoop, a benefit event for Farm Sanctuary in New York. The two Zoop recordings are, I think, the best live Mountain Goats recordings, and the crowd really stomps their way through this one on the recording of “Standard Bitter Love Song #1.”

The title’s a joke, but it’s also not. These are songs from the heart of an angry person, made ridiculous by being someone other than them. There’s a lyric in this song about shooting a kite with a shotgun. That’s an image you conjure up when you’re real-deal mad, but also part of you understands that eventually you will not feel this way. It’s extreme, but this is an extreme feeling. Belting it out in a barn with hardcore fans willing to go to a request show? That’s a once (or twice, there are two Zoops) in a lifetime thing.

On that note, because there’s nowhere else to put it, a friend of mine from college went to Zoop II and asked if I wanted to ride with him. I turned it down for something frivolous and friends, let me tell you, if there’s a Zoop III, sell the clothes off your back to get there. Listen to the guy wolf howl in the second chorus of this performance. You can tell it’s special.

513. Going to Bridlington

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle thinks it’s got a lazy chorus, but the simplicity of “Going to Bridlington” gives it a powerful honesty.

Track: “Going to Bridlington”
Album: Unreleased

A million years ago, when “online” was a different place, John Darnielle posted as “John” on his band’s forums. When someone mentioned “Going to Bridlington,” an ultra-rare, unreleased song from the old, old days even then in 2008, John Darnielle said that it “blows esp [especially] the lyrics are pretty lame but am happy if people are getting pleasure from it.” A year later, someone yelled for it at a show in Virginia and he played it, but commented on how much he didn’t like it. At that show you can hear a few people, but not many people, singing in the crowd. It’s been played live just a few times and the earliest, on a radio show in Amsterdam in 1996, is the best.

The author is right, sure: “saw you trying to smile // hey, you don’t have to smile for me” is not, probably, his best work. But what it is, to me, is honest. This is a love song that sounds like a love song. It has a moment that many Mountain Goats songs do in that one character sees another one and that act, the act of seeing them, is imbued with monumental power. Sure, it repeats a lot, and sure, the chorus is just that repetition sold by the performance, but love has these little moments. There is power in coming into the kitchen and seeing someone. This is not the only Goats song to have that image, but I love it here. Do I love this song in spite of the author’s distaste for it or because of it? This isn’t one of the all-time best, but there’s something here, and I love a broken toy.

319. Sign of the Crow 2

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle tells us as much as he can in “Sign of the Crow 2,” but part of this story is lost to history.

Track: “Sign of the Crow 2”
Album: Unreleased (but released on the forums by John Darnielle in 2015)

I live in Chicago and in recent years, John Darnielle has done multi-night stays here on most tours. Most of the time I try to go to all of them, but in 2018 I missed the third night of the tour where John Darnielle played “Sign of the Crow 2.” You can hear it here, and you should, and hear some charming line-flubbing that is a staple of any performance of these unreleased, weird songs. This one is notably harder than most of them, with lines like “stripped and scorched and skinned” and similar structure to verses that leads to forgetting your place. In the recording you can hear what sounds like “good job babe” from the person next to the recording, as someone helps John Darnielle with the missing lyric. I’m eternally fascinated by this when it happens at shows and I’m a sucker for it.

Even the official version of “Sign of the Crow 2” has one of these towards the end, which John Darnielle commented on when he released the song himself as an apology for some late pre-releases of Heretic Pride. The demo is good, but live performances are great. It really takes off when he amps up the final verse, nearly screaming it and speeding it up. I encourage you to seek some of those out. The story itself is interesting enough and you can likely piece it together from the lyrics alone, but the performance is really what makes it for me. I am fond of the chorus, however, and I love the idea of getting just a part of the story and knowing that the rest is unattainable.

315. From TG&Y

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle tells a version of his own story to help you with yours in “From TG&Y.”

Track: “From TG&Y”
Album: Unreleased (released by John Darnielle on the forums in 2007)

When John Darnielle released a version of “From TG&Y” on his band’s forums, he asked everyone to sign a pledge. If they listened to it, he said, they had to agree to not demand it is better than songs on The Sunset Tree and to, essentially, let it be what it is. It’s been played live a lot, especially for an unreleased song, and it’s a fan favorite. I will abide by the rules and say simply that I agree that it belongs “with” the songs from The Sunset Tree.

John Darnielle has said in tons of interviews that his earlier narrators are not him. They aren’t even necessarily like him, even in basic details like pronouns. It never occurred to me until I started writing this, but with very rare exceptions, you never find out the gender of a speaker or recipient of most songs. This falls away when the narrator is John Darnielle or when the story is specific, and the narrator in “From TG&Y” is John Darnielle. He has said this is “more or less a true story.”

I pair it with “You’re in Maya” in my mind. Both songs describe a young, troubled John Darnielle and both find him struggling to deal with the world around him. “One more night in this town // is gonna break me, I just know,” he says here, which pairs with “there was nowhere I needed to go // and nowhere I wanted to be.” They’re both songs that won’t be released because they’re special and they both mean a lot to people who are currently going through whatever they’re going through.

290. Hye Kye

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

It’s hard to know how to pronounce “Hye Kye” or just what’s happening in it beyond all the Christmas trees.

Track: “Hye Kye”
Album: Unreleased (Released online by John Darnielle in 2008)

Before we talk about it, John Darnielle asks that people donate to one of two charities if they download “Hye Kye” so here is that link. He released this song and two others after the fanbase donated to help a friend of his who was mugged and hurt badly. He’s put out a number of older songs over the years in similar situations, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t drop the link.

I have no idea how you say “Hye Kye.” I am guessing it rhymes and the first part is “high,” but I have absolutely nothing to base that on. The usual sources are stumped on the name, though Kyle Barbour at The Annotated Mountain Goats did the legwork of pointing out that Indian Hill is also in “From TG&Y” and that Gemco is a defunct department store chain.

It’s a classic Mountain Goats story. Our narrator comments on the weather and then does something odd. There’s really not all that much to decode here. It isn’t better or worse off for that reason, it’s just what it is. This is someone who is carrying a Christmas tree to a parking lot and then they get overwhelmed and lie down among the trees. Is it after Christmas, and is this all the waste? Is it before Christmas, and this is all for sale? But then why is our narrator carrying a tree to where all the others are? When I hear a song like this I don’t care about that answer, but I do wonder what this meant to John Darnielle when he wrote it. The name can stay a mystery, but I’m fascinated by the premise.