215. Hotel Road

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

On a beach in the biggest city in India, a monk looks out over the world and reflects.

Track: “Hotel Road”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

Imagine that you are John Darnielle and it is the late 1990s. You have just written and released The Coroner’s Gambit and you are about to begin the work of All Hail West Texas. This is a big moment for you, though of course, because you exist in the present, you have no way of knowing that. In this head space, you write several songs that form small EPs. Many of them are about death, even more than usual for you.

“Hotel Road” opens the beautiful, but very different, On Juhu Beach. The album is out of print because it included intricate, handmade packaging. John Darnielle still loves complex packaging, but nothing is really close to On Juhu Beach. The songs reflect this level of craft, with an eerie specificity to them that makes you picture not just the idea of India, but a very grounded, very real part of India.

The liner notes tell us this is an old monk in a hotel room at the top of a building. The monk watches the world around them and contemplates their surroundings. The waves are clear and the children are joyful. In my reading, the ending finds the monk not embracing death, but wondering why death should be something we think about at all. “It’s hard to say why // I should come here to die” could mean any number of things, but I choose to read it as an acceptance of the passing of time, but not quite yet. Not on a day like this in a place like this.

214. Commandante

Alex Russell Devil in the Shortwave , , , , , , ,

The bouncy, exciting “Commandante” hides dark ends with one last singalong for the road.

Track: “Commandante”
Album: Devil in the Shortwave (2002)

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Mountain Goats songs about two anxious, furious people who feel that their situation is important, dire, and ending. Depending on what point in the timeline we meet those people, John Darnielle tells their story differently. By the early 2000s, the couple gained a name as The Alpha Couple. It is a point of debate, though clearly ridiculous debate, whether any two people who fight and hate as much as they love are The Alpha Couple or just two other people feeling the same way. There’s enough commentary from John Darnielle that we can infer that not every couple in every song is the same one, of course, and that the feelings are just universal enough that we think it’s the same folks going through the same pain.

These aren’t the famous ones, I don’t think. These are just two people who sound deceptively happy if you don’t listen to the lyrics. John Darnielle clearly has fun on “Commandante,” with the howling chorus and the scream-along-ready line of “I am never going back to Cincinnati,” which, incidentally, went over like gangbusters in Cincinnati in 2013. The studio version is fast and peaks in the right places, but live shows like that really sell it. You can hear the foot stomps from the crowd and the individual folks in the audience that put their own meaning into sailing through the night sky like a pair of bottle rockets.

These two are already at the end. Threats to drink more whiskey than a famous Irish alcoholics and vague mentions of grievances and great big secrets are really obvious signs that not all is well. But John Darnielle reminds us with the melody that the end sometimes feels fun, right before you get there.

 

213. Handball

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

“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.

212. They Are Stone Swallowers

Alex Russell Get Lonely

“They Are Stone Swallowers” is a brief diversion into the world of 4-track recording with an eerie feel.

Track: “They Are Stone Swallowers”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

There are three songs exclusive to the Japanese version of Get Lonely: “Naming Day,” “Keeping House,” and “They Are Stone Swallowers.” John Darnielle loves bonus tracks and loves stashing oddities in places where most people aren’t likely to hear them. That’s become less true with how we access and consume media now, but the old habits die hard.

On a recent podcast, John Darnielle talked with Joseph Fink about the phenomenon of not being able to look up lyrics to a song that hasn’t come out. In older times, if you didn’t know a lyric or you were curious about a song’s meaning, you just went without. Now, it’s much harder to remain in the dark. “They Are Stone Swallowers” is a huge departure from the rest of the album and it is the kind of thing that would baffle someone in the early 90s. You’d have no way to figure out why this is so different and you’d only hear it if you imported the Japanese version specifically at your record store.

The old days are gone and some of the mystery is surely removed from being able to look up John Darnielle’s explanation for the weird sound of this song, but we’re at least able to decipher it. John Vanderslice gave John Darnielle a 4-track and thus we have this experiment. There’s nothing really like it anywhere else in the catalog. The tech adds an alien feel to this description of very strange (but very Mountain Goats) events. Two characters notice physical changes in each other as serpents and an ancient sun invade the conversation. It’s mostly notable because of the experimental nature, but you’ll definitely notice your heart rate going up as the nervous energy sells the story.

211. Ox Baker Triumphant

Alex Russell Babylon Springs EP , , , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle sings a song for the bad guy in all of us in “Ox Baker Triumphant.”

Track: “Ox Baker Triumphant”
Album: Babylon Springs EP (2006)

Wrestling’s story involves the same beats as every other kind, but it benefits from more black and white narratives than other types of performance. The “heels” of wrestling often have to be very obvious to get an idea across quickly to an audience.

Ox Baker was a heel who punched people in the heart. You only need to hear one Ox Baker promo to understand him. He hates you and the goodness you represent, and he’s here to punch everyone who stands in the way of his dominance. When John Darnielle introduces “Ox Baker Triumphant” he often talks about the power of that idea. Ox Baker isn’t here to set up a complicated battle between good and evil and he isn’t here to win you over. He wants to punch your good guy in the heart. You don’t really get more to the point.

“Ox Baker Triumphant” is exactly what it says on the label. Ox Baker has been betrayed by the world he loves and he is here to get revenge on everyone and everything. Given what we know about Ox, we can assume he saw this coming. He demands that the others click their heels in a mock attempt to go home before yelling “I bet you never expected me!”

Darnielle’s soaring delivery on the studio version and the blown-out fury on most live versions accomplish the same thing. We get a sense that Ox Baker is done with all this and that his retribution is well-deserved. For all the time the good guys will get in later Goats songs, “Ox Baker Triumphant” reminds us why we love to watch the moments when people get pushed to their limits. It doesn’t really matter what he came to do in the first place, now it’s his time to shine.

210. Malevolent Cityscape X

Alex Russell Infidelity , , , , ,

In “Malevolent Cityscape X” a narrator throws a barb at another character in a fiery, red moment.

Track: “Malevolent Cityscape X”
Album: Infidelity (as The Extra Glenns) (1993)

There are many small “collections” within songs by the Mountain Goats. There are dozens of songs that start with “Going to” and offer us a mental picture to accompany a story. There are four “Orange Ball” songs which are loosely connected. There are more “Alpha” songs about the Alpha Couple than can be counted. There exist only three songs in this particular collection: “Malevolent Seascape Y,” “Malevolent Cityscape X,” and “Ambivalent Landscape Z.”

All three are Extra Glenns songs, so they don’t get the kind of rotation that traditional Mountain Goats songs get at live shows. You’d need to dig very far back to find a recorded live performance of “Malevolent Cityscape X.” You’d find yourself at The Empty Bottle in Chicago, where you’d hear “Seascape” transition into “Cityscape.” The former is a quiet, sad song about the meaning of relationships. It wasn’t released for seven more years, on Martial Arts Weekend. The latter closed Infidelity, the three song EP that kicked off the Extra Glenns.

The connective tissue through these three songs is one character addressing another about the end. This isn’t an uncommon subject for John Darnielle, but “Cityscape” gets weirder than he usually does. Another character sings a song and changes the color of the sky, which causes our narrator to yell “you strike me as mean-spirited!”

So many other Goats narrators would love to find such a succinct message for the object of their ire. They’d also probably agree with the end of the second verse: “I love you beneath the red sky // but for the life of me I couldn’t say why.”

209. Going to Lubbock

Alex Russell Infidelity , , , , ,

“Going to Lubbock” follows a solitary drive through Texas on a Tuesday with surprising results.

Track: “Going to Lubbock”
Album: Infidelity (as The Extra Glenns) (1993)

In 1993, John Darnielle and Franklin Bruno, as part of their group The Extra Glenns, put out a song called “Going to Lubbock” on an album called Infidelity. As far as I can tell, their relationship with it ended there. I’m certain they played it live, but no set list I can find mentions it and there’s no record of anyone even talking about seeing it.

That’s not uncommon or surprising. There are only a few dozen Extra Glenns songs and “Going to Lubbock” is one of the more perplexing ones. A character drives until they run out of gas in the middle of nowhere and finds a skull. It’s very Darnielle, but it’s also the kind of tale that leaves you wondering what you’re supposed to do with it. Why did you tell me this, you’ll wonder, and what am I expected to feel?

It took me a few listens to find my own answer. A character digging in a very specific space in the desert and finding a human skull suggests many things, until you realize they’re only there because they ran out of gas. This isn’t someone finding a body they buried, it’s random. What’s more, they then lay the skull in their own backseat.

There’s room here to draw other conclusions. Maybe they ran out of gas and then walked the rest of the way, which would suggest that they are responsible for this skull in the first place. That changes the character, but neither explanation helps us understand the “pronounced depression” they notice at the base of the skull. It’s a short, quizzical song from nearly three decades ago and it leaves you with nothing but questions. I’m almost sure that, and not figuring it out, is the point.

208. Infidelity

Alex Russell Infidelity , , , ,

The first of a two part story about cheating, “Infidelity” focuses on short-term returns.

Track: “Infidelity”
Album: Infidelity (as The Extra Glenns) (1993)

“This is a song about when you’re just on the cusp of doing something terribly wrong… and it’s nice.” – John Darnielle

John Darnielle introduced “Infidelity” with the above quote in 2002 in San Francisco. He wrote a handful of songs that express this idea, but “Infidelity” the song on Infidelity the single is the prototype. The single was released in 1993 by Harriet Records, a now-defunct label that also released some albums for The Magnetic Fields. It’s an Extra Glenns record, but the distinction between the Glenns and the Mountain Goats doesn’t mean much thematically. It’s pure John Darnielle, especially the early years, as characters look out over nature and ponder their place in the world and the consequences of their actions.

“We watched the water // we looked right through it // and I let my hand rest a minute on your stomach // like there was nothing to it” is as physical as it gets in “Infidelity,” but the title of course suggests so much more. Franklin Bruno’s backing vocals add some serious melancholy to the song, which complicates the emotions further. These people are essentially in the same situation as the two in the much-later song “Alibi,” but we’re not supposed to be nearly as happy for these two.

The earliest live record of “Infidelity” I can find is from 1995 at The Empty Bottle in Chicago. John Darnielle says “this is, like, a true story” and follows the performance with “Adultery,” a much angrier song about the same couple. Cheating is wrong, we all agree, but John Darnielle presents a range of emotions without ever showing us the other impacted characters. We’re left to imagine what they know (and don’t know) and how this will resolve.

207. Third Snow Song

Alex Russell Philyra, Protein Source of the Future...Now! , , , , , ,

A lone character bangs a key against an icy bridge in a statement about what it’s like to live in the cold in “Third Snow Song.”

Track: “Third Snow Song”
Album: Philyra (1994) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

At a show in Florida in 1998, John Darnielle played “Third Snow Song” on request. He dedicated it to anyone who has lived “in snow” and told the Tallahassee crowd to thank “whatever forces control your life” that they don’t have to experience multiple feet of snow. What’s more, after he finished the song, he asked the requester if they only asked for it because it’s an obscure song.

At the time, the only way to know “Third Snow Song” would be to have a copy of Philyra. Here in 2019 a copy will cost you about $30 USD, but there’s no telling how hard it would have been in 1998. John Darnielle mentioned that he didn’t even have one. It was re-released on the compilation Protein Source of the Future…Now! the next year and obviously, now, it’s everywhere online, but it makes one wonder what that person wanted from this song in 1998 in Florida.

It’s a short song with some catchy guitar. The into is toe-tapping and John Darnielle’s voice is upbeat. His character walks down Broadway in Portland and scrapes ice off the bridge with an old key. The goal seems to be to read the bridge’s dedication plaque. I’m unable to find what it says, but it doesn’t feel like it’s critical to the song. The character may or may not care, but given what we know about John Darnielle’s time in Portland, it’s more likely that they just needed a goal, however arbitrary.

If you’ve ever lived somewhere with lots of snow, you can sympathize with the feeling of trying to bang snow and ice off of something. You can feel yourself against a huge structure and the larger world as the cold makes you feel like the world itself is out to get you.

206. Going to Maryland

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , , ,

One character explores craps betting as a stand-in for the difficulties of a relationship in “Going to Maryland.”

Track: “Going to Maryland”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

There are hundreds of different locations across Mountain Goats songs. The geographic mentions often ground otherwise general songs in the specific, allowing the listener to imagine themselves in the open English countryside or the mysterious political workings of an ancient civilization. How you read the location changes based on who, and where, you are. If you’re from Maryland, what does it mean to be “Going to Maryland?”

Locals apparently generally add the article “the” to Chesapeake Bay. John Darnielle isn’t from Maryland, which explains the absence of “the” in the line “and your eyes shine tonight on Chesapeake Bay.” I’m not local either and have never noticed it before, but it’s interesting what even small shifts in language tell us. Everyone’s home has those nuances, like how the contraction “ya’ll” rather than “y’all” serves as a sign that someone may not be used to using it or whether you use pop or soda to refer to a fizzy drink may identify where you were born.

This obviously isn’t central to the understanding of the song, but it serves as a springboard to talk about a live performance of “Going to Maryland” at the legendary CBGB in New York. John Darnielle changes the line that follows “five dollars says that it’s gone in a minute” from “five dollars says that your heart goes with it” to “five dollars more says my chances went with it.” The original version is slow and the gambling references through the lyrics feel sorrowful, but the live version drives much quicker and feels desperate. The shift is small, but it changes how you feel about the speaker. Are these people in love or this a different kind of relationship?