“Birth of Serpents” finds John Darnielle in several places but having one single experience.

Track: “Birth of Serpents”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

John Darnielle has said a lot of things that stick with me, but I think a lot about a comment he made many years ago that “Waving at You” was a song he felt really close to. He said that the quiet ones were the close ones, even though most people thought it was when he was screaming. That answer probably has changed somewhat, especially as he’s written more about his own life in recent times. The last handful of albums have more songs about the real-deal John Darnielle than the first ten.

“Birth of Serpents” is only nominally about snakes. The chorus tells us to picture snakes under heat lamps, but really we’re in Oregon with John Darnielle. He never sings like this, with the last verse almost entirely pitched as high as he can go. So much of what makes the Mountain Goats great is the poetry and narrative, but the performance is central to “Birth of Serpents.” John Darnielle is feeling this one, which he probably always is, but he’s letting it show more here than usual.

He says that it’s about an experience in Portland where a friend told him another person they both used to know was working down the way. John Darnielle went to say hi, but found that they died a year earlier in a car accident. To understand the Mountain Goats is to understand this journey through Oregon and Iowa and California, but it’s also to picture this moment where you almost get to have an experience you thought impossible only to realize that actually, yeah, it’s as done as you feared it might be.