Why You All So Thief?

242. Alpha Omega

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now!, Why You All So Thief? , , , , , , , ,

The original end to the Alpha Couple story, “Alpha Omega” features a last meal of a different variety.

Track: “Alpha Omega”
Album: Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

“Alpha Omega” was released on a compilation album in 1995 (and re-released in 1999 as part of another album) and was originally the last song in the story of the Alpha Couple. Tallahassee would eventually follow it in 2002 and offer a deeper look at the couple that gets together and breaks apart over dozens of songs across the Mountain Goats’ career.

It would have been a fine ending if Tallahassee weren’t such a spectacular album. The narrator wakes up to a note on scented paper that tells them it is over. They then make boiled peanuts and think about what this all means. This is the same couple as the two in “No Children,” so an eventual sad end was inevitable. The boiled peanuts is just a John Darnielle touch. If you’ve never had them, you should try them. Just like the Mountain Goats, no one “likes” boiled peanuts, you feel very strongly if you like them at all.

One half of the Alpha Couple standing around with boiled peanuts and a goodbye note is a sad image, but it’s even sadder with this delivery. John Darnielle’s voice cracks the same way your voice would crack if you told someone about this moment in your life. It stands out even among other intentional cracks from the early albums.

“Alpha Rats Nest” ultimately replaces this song in the story and offers us an ending that is slightly more ambiguous. The Alpha Couple doesn’t survive either story, but Tallahassee doesn’t have this hard door-slam moment. Tallahassee is possibly the most complete Mountain Goats album, but we’ll always have this earlier branch of the story where someone actually got out alive.

213. Handball

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M0wtc0BieI

“I did not come to play handball,” a narrator insists in “Handball,” and the menace is the point.

Track: “Handball”
Album: Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

“You’ll get nothing from me, do you hear? Nothing! Anything I know about this odd little song will go with me to the grave.” – Liner notes for “Handball” on Protein Source of the Future…Now!

John Darnielle has written hundreds of songs, but none of them like “Handball.” The first verse is four loose lines from Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The rest is the line “I did not come to play handball.” That is 100% of “Handball.”

There have been countless attempts to understand and debate the meaning of these songs. “Handball” is baffling in that the two verses aren’t connected in any obvious way, but it’s also very clear if one assumes that disconnect is the point. “I kill a man on the day his life seems sweetest to him” would be a Mountain Goats line if it weren’t something else already, so the choice to use the lines in the first verse is clear. How does that connect to any one of the multiple sports called handball?

John Darnielle wrote the lyrics down and asked a studio full of people to sing it with him on a radio performance in Chicago in 2002. At a show years later, he called that performance “creepy for the sake of being creepy.” All of this suggests that trying to dig into “Handball” may be an attempt to look for things that aren’t there.

I once made a fellow Mountain Goats fan a shirt with a clip art handball player and the phrase “I did not come to play handball” on it. The point of the shirt was that a fellow Goats fan would understand, but understand what? I can’t explain it, but I feel like once you get that, you get all of this.

145. Pure Heat

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now!, Why You All So Thief? , , , , , , , , ,

 

“Pure Heat” reminds us that even in the most beautiful moments, it’s possible to fear the end of so many things at once.

Track: “Pure Heat”
Album: Why You All So Thief? (1994) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

The “pure” songs are all intense. They’re not designed to be connected, but you can trace some patterns through them. Beyond intensity, they often share a vagueness. “Pure Heat” is one scene with one person seeing another one. There are so many Mountain Goats songs that fit that description that it is important to remember how rare that is. Generally songs are active or describe long spans of time. John Darnielle wants to tell you a story about one moment between two people and he wants you to see it vividly. Everything else you bring is your own deal.

Alone, this might be a song about two happy people in one happy slice of a happy life. Knowledge of the Mountain Goats greater catalog means that is unlikely to be true. These two people may be in love, but they’re more likely in the final stages of something they once thought was love. They are in a beautiful place, to be sure, and “Pure Heat” is a clear reminder that the California native son John Darnielle also loves Iowa and North Carolina. Their time in the fields with kerosene lamps and cool breezes may be picturesque, but it is tenuous.

“Pure Heat” is also the only other Mountain Goats song on Why You All So Thief? with “Going to Tennessee.” John Darnielle says they are both about “cheating death.” We’re forced to connect the two further. They could both describe the same couple, using sex and beautiful moments to avoid the greater realities of their situation. Many Mountain Goats songs would mean a breakup or a toxic relationship as a “situation” but the fear these two are staving off may go even deeper than that.

098. Going to Tennessee

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bLSgWd8jbk

Two lovers share a quiet moment and feel a different kind of warmth as the sun sets in Memphis in “Going to Tennessee.”

Track: “Going to Tennessee”
Album: Why You All So Thief? (1994) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

John Darnielle loves geography. There are at least 50 “Going to…” songs in the catalog, but I never expected to find one about my hometown. I’m from Memphis, Tennessee, which is a far less exotic location than Bolivia or Denmark or Malibu, but it’s a specific kind of place that conjures an image in your mind even if you haven’t been there.

Darnielle’s song “Going to Tennessee” is heavy on specifics even though it avoids the ones you’d think. There’s no Elvis or Beale Street or anything even like them. We only get scattered facts, like the lack of a baseball team and the presence of Arkansas nearby.

“Going to Tennessee” uses specificity to set the stage on the Mississippi River in Memphis, but it’s after more general emotions. The couple lives close to the interstate and they share tender moments in their likely dingy apartment. One washes their face and the other says “I am glad I am alive,” which is an extremely rare sentence in a Mountain Goats song. We’re left to discern that they share at least a kind of love. That’s not uncommon by itself, but these two exit their song in an interesting place.

John Darnielle has said the song is about “cheating death” and there is no better way to feel like you’ve gotten one over on the end times than to feel boundless love. The sun is setting in one of the hottest towns in America, but the couple describes their skin as “warming up.” It’s not solely a love song, but that ending suggests at least one more day of joy for two people in the Bluff City.