Full Force Galesburg

415. Ontario

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

A narrator feels uncomfortable but open in the very vulnerable “Ontario.”

Track: “Ontario”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

The vocals for “Ontario” on Full Force Galesburg are what will get you. It’s a good song, played well, but it’s John Darnielle front and center in a way that really cannot be ignored. The album is a treasured one for a lot of fans, and I think a lot of that is owed to the fact that the median here is so high. There are a few songs that I don’t think hold up to the rest, but on average, I think the sixteen songs all average out higher than many of the other albums from this era of the Mountain Goats. That said, if there’s a standout, it’s probably “Weekend in Western Illinois” for the rock and the emotion, “Twin Human Highway Flares” as a genuine love song, or “Ontario” as a classic Mountain Goats song that’s a little bit of everything.

The Mountain Goats don’t do “one thing” but there’s certainly a similar feel to a lot of their work. The average Mountain Goats narrator is lonely if not outright alone, and they often are stressed about their situation rather than triumphant. “I know what can hurt me real bad // and what can’t hurt me anymore” is a powerful statement read one way, but it’s more realistically someone not really being honest with themselves. By the end of the song, they’ve devolved into rapidly shouting things like “day breaking // river rolling” with some hey-heys thrown in. This is a vulnerable song, clearly, and rather than digging into the meaning you need to engage with how this person feels.

413. Snow Owl

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

An early reviewer hated “Snow Owl,” but there’s a lot to learn about John Darnielle’s approach to lyrics in it.

Track: “Snow Owl”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

John Darnielle played “Snow Owl” as part of the Jordan Lake sessions recently, which is potentially only the third version of the song that exists. There’s the released version on Full Force Galesburg and exactly, probably, only one live version. In 2017 a fan asked for it at this live show in Virginia and this is absolutely the definitive version. You should listen to it to hear the full story, but John Darnielle explains that he never played it live because right after the album came out he walked into a music store in Pittsburgh and read a review that singled out the song as bad. Two years earlier he told the same story on Twitter.

That reviewer thought it was overly sweet. “Snow Owl” is a risk in that regard, with lyrics like “In your eyes were all the colors that the rainbow forgot.” It works, though, for the same reason John Darnielle was able to put the refrain from the theme from Cheers in a song a decade later. John Darnielle is unafraid to sound corny, which means it’s very hard for anything he makes to sound corny. It’s real, and you can tell that it’s real because of who is selling it to you. He was once very hard on “Going to Bridlington” for similar reasons, but I love that one, too. There are several physical descriptions of a snow owl in “Snow Owl,” but it all works because it’s so damned earnest.

368. Maize Stalk Drinking Blood

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

“Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” eventually got a horn section and some intense drums, but it was always great.

Track: “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

There is enough time between 1997 and when I’m writing this that people have had time to come up with thoughts about “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood.” One such person seems to have tweeted something and deleted it, but we still have John Darnielle’s reply to them. In case that, too, sometime is gone, he said “MSDB is not about a romantic relationship, I hate to say, but that’s all right.” So there you go, not a love song. That only leaves all other things.

This is one of the songs that has had a resurgence recently as the Mountain Goats now have a drummer and a horn player. The full band revisits some of the older songs and really blows them out. The best version of these I’ve seen is this one, with a rocking, long outro that goes on and on, blessedly. The studio version on Full Force Galesburg takes a similar path, but the sax really adds something that just wasn’t what John Darnielle and company were doing in 1997.

1997 was just before the “modern era,” which isn’t really the right way to put it, but I guess it’ll have to do. The songs were getting more complicated, to the point where no one seems to agree what “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” even means, at least as a title if not as a whole song. The music was changing, too, but it’s only now that you can see how much more room there was in songs like these. It doesn’t diminish the originals, it just makes them hum even more.

321. Twin Human Highway Flares

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

An actual love song told with Mountain Goats lyrics is a powerful thing in “Twin Human Highway Flares.”

Track: “Twin Human Highway Flares”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

It is easy to make a mistake with the Mountain Goats and assume every song is about John Darnielle. Most of it, especially the early stuff, is written in first person. It’s easy to imagine a lot of it coming from the same person. It’s really tidy to say that it’s all one person and that person is John Darnielle and to build a mythos from there. Most of it isn’t, though, and most of it isn’t even gendered. With very rare exceptions, most Mountain Goats songs are deliberate in their ambiguity. Most of them find one person telling one other person something, but you can’t quite tell what.

“Twin Human Highway Flares” is a love song John Darnielle wrote for the woman that would become his wife. It’s extreme in the way that a lot of Mountain Goats songs are, with “I hope my heart explodes” as a finisher and a declaration of love. That violence is what makes it stick in your mind. “I will burn all the calendars that counted the years down to such a worthless day” is pure Darnielle, in a way that you know exactly what I mean if you’ve heard a single other Mountain Goats song. You need the quotes around “love song” for most Mountain Goats “love songs,” but this one is brutal and honest and straightforward. The guitar leads you to expect something sad and distant and the language is destructive, but this is John Darnielle at his clearest and most hopeful. This is a song about telling someone that this moment signifies a future with both of you in it, which very few Mountain Goats narrators would recognize.

300. Down Here

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

“Down Here” starts with a reference to Venus and only gets weirder from there.

Track: “Down Here”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

There are six annotations on “Down Here” on Kyle Barbour’s excellent site The Annotated Mountain Goats. They detail what the atmosphere of Venus is like, what a red-crowned crane is, and even what Lithuania is. Barbour’s site is instrumental to the more arcane details of Mountain Goats songs, but it’s also funny when it explains what Illinois is or what window blinds are. You get in the game to figure out what “The Monkey Song” is talking about but then you have to take that to the logical conclusion.

I am just going to say it: I have no idea what “Down Here” is talking about. I love the delivery of lines like “A telegram from Lithuania // and the news is not good” where you can hear John Darnielle snarl over the cranked-up guitar. It’s a great song and one I’ve heard dozens and dozens of times. Barbour’s annotations can unlock secrets for songs, especially the ones about myths, but sometimes there’s not enough on the page. I’ve said before that this whole exercise is an experience rather than an attempt to “solve” these songs, and I legitimately do not believe it is possible to draw a universal meaning from this one.

And that’s fine! The final verse is a construction you may have heard before, and Barbour links to this truly fascinating post where people spiral into discussions of this style through history. This may just be another story of a narrator facing doom of their own creation, but they’re talking about their end in a way that many before them did for generations. I’m not going to throw up my hands completely, but I do love that this one is just a little too weird to put a finger on entirely.

158. It’s All Here in Brownsville

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

Two people travel to the end of the road in “It’s All Here in Brownsville,” but no farther than that.

Track: “It’s All Here in Brownsville”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Brownsville, Texas is home to 183,000 people and is the 131st largest city in the United States. It is directly on the United States-Mexico border. More than a third of its citizens live below the poverty line.

Full Force Galesburg is an album obsessed with location. One wonders if the extreme poverty in Brownsville informs the choice to use it for “It’s All Here in Brownsville” at all, or if that’s just a sad detail that changes the way the song comes across. It’s certainly relevant that it’s a border town as our couple wanders around in the heat and ponders the significance of the town in their lives.

“Why do we come down to Brownsville, year after year after year?” The couple from Galesburg wonders this out loud and seemingly finds no answer. This is the last track on the album, but the Mountain Goats often exit albums with their characters pondering rather than finding answers. Songs like “Pale Green Things” and “Alpha Rats Nest” are examples of this, where you would expect people to have figured everything out and yet, it ends up being more complex than that.

“It’s All Here in Brownsville” ends with a repetition of “it’s all coming apart again.” Destruction and destructive thought is rampant on Galesburg, so this ending is only fitting. It’s also a compelling place to leave the couple that’s wandered around the United States all over the album. It’s possible to read this as a love song despite the dark ending, but it seems more likely that they’re going to keep avoiding their doomed state. Warm scenery and extreme gestures like traveling to “where nothing starts” every year will keep you going even when you shouldn’t.

106. Original Air-Blue Gown

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

 

John Darnielle writes his own version of a Thomas Hardy poem in the ode “Original Air-Blue Gown.”

Track: “Original Air-Blue Gown”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice” includes the lines “Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then // Even to the original air-blue gown!” The rest of the poem talks about Hardy waiting for a woman’s return, though he slowly begins to realize that she cannot return. He thinks he hears her voice but also worries that she is a ghost. We get the sensation that his fears are founded.

The narrator in “Original Air-Blue Gown” waits for a similar return with similar fears. They describe colorful surroundings: green horseflies, plums, and red air. All of that color leads to “dark blue shapes” that they can just make out through their eyelids and the statement “I am not afraid of death.”

When a character says that we generally think they’re talking about their own mortality, but we need to look deeper here. Hardy was describing his wife in “The Voice” and Darnielle’s narrator is definitely describing someone else’s passing. They obsess over a black-and-white boxing match and the youth and power of Cassius Clay, which shows that they’re tied up in the past. The repetition of “my God, my God, my God // he was something” helps lock the image in the listener’s mind. You can’t breeze past it any more than the narrator can.

At the end of “The Voice” Hardy’s character attempts to come to terms with reality. Darnielle’s believes that the target of his affection has returned. The backing strings intensify and lend bonus eeriness to the scene. As a callback to the earlier repetition, the narrator looks out into the clearing where either a ghost or a loved one is and says “it’s you, it’s you, it’s you.”

105. Chinese House Flowers

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

 

The fierce “Chinese House Flowers” is suspiciously absent from live shows, but the one instance is magical. 

Track: “Chinese House Flowers”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

On September 11, 1996, John Darnielle played “Chinese House Flowers” at a concert venue called The Argo in Denton, Texas. It’s probably not the only time, but it’s the only time the good people at the Mountain Goats wiki list.

In various cars, apartments, backyards, and stranger venues I’ve played just about every song in the catalog for different people over the last decade. Just about everything — even the strangest of the strange — works for someone. “Chinese House Flowers” seems to work differently on me. People like it, but it doesn’t seem to get the same love as other fierce songs about love.

Chinese houses are purple and native to California. You can imagine mid-90s John Darnielle thinking of those flowers and home as he wrote Full Force Galesburg in Iowa. The album version features some trademark frantic strumming, but the selling point is the wavering, almost-terrified vocal track. His voice cracks over and over again and it drives home that this narrator is terrified. “I used to love you so much that I was sure it would kill me” could be a corny line in less deft hands, but it fits perfectly after “And just then the gleam in your eye // made my blood freeze” and other such expressions of fear.

Darnielle’s thoughts on the song aren’t obvious, though we can infer some things from the possible 20-year absence at live shows. If you’re like me and it works for you, I urge you to go check out that Denton recording. That venue’s long gone and Denton became immortalized far more famously by the Goats a few years later, but you should still go hear John Darnielle lose his mind over the chorus of “I want you more than I want anything // I want you the way you were.”

088. Masher

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

 

The narrator in “Masher” forgets words (and a lot more) as they confront a mysterious person in a tree.

Track: “Masher”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Full Force Galesburg really is a confounding album. “Twin Human Highway Flares” is a love song and John Darnielle is on the record numerous times about the couple: himself and his now-wife. You hear that song and think you understand where he was at in 1997, but then you wonder where “Ontario” and “Snow Owl” fit with that. Then you come across a beautiful song like “Masher” and listen to it hundreds of times and still can’t break apart the chorus from the verses.

The chorus of “I am losing control of the language again” is evocative. You remember a time when you were so in love or so flustered or so angry or so confused that you forgot something as ingrained as language. That alone wouldn’t sustain a song, though the droning repetition of the line does sell the problem effectively.

It’s the verses. Our narrator is talking to a loved one, like most of the narrators on Full Force Galesburg. They list certainties (brine boiling, air containing the smell) before revealing that they’ve been incarcerated in some way, which they seem to view as a third unavoidable reality. It might be a metaphor, but by the second verse they are losing their memory to a greater degree. They’re either unstable or being destabilized by the person they see in a tree. How you take that part depends on how you take the title, given a “masher” is primarily a tool for mashing potatoes, but can also be British slang for a creepy guy. The delivery is sweet, but the couple on Full Force Galesburg is generally not a happy one. With only one perspective, we’re left to wonder about the other view of their relationship.

071. Weekend in Western Illinois

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

 

The lovers in “Weekend in Western Illinois” admire happy dogs as they experience sweeping events all around them.

Track: “Weekend in Western Illinois”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

You may be the sort of person who likes the quiet of “Masher” or “Ontario” or you may be the sort of person who likes to speculate about the characters in “Minnesota” or “Evening in Stalingrad.” Full Force Galesburg is varied and excellent and it will support you, no matter what you’re looking for in a Mountain Goats record. Sometimes you’re just looking for a song for a windows-down drive. “Weekend in Western Illinois” is about as “rocking” as John Darnielle and company were capable of being in the days before the drums. If you can listen to it without tapping your foot or snapping along, I would question if your blood is indeed red.

Like the best version of “Going to Kansas,” the song’s instrumentation really evokes the apocalypse. The strumming is intense, but it’s the organ that really brings the house down. All of the lyrics also describe huge, sweeping events. Take your pick from “the sky’s opening up like an old wound,” “the ground underneath us shakes in the cracking thunder,” and “we are watching the sky unwinding.” The dogs out there in Galesburg even “howl as though the world were ending,” as if you couldn’t feel that in every tense second.

While the world’s figuratively (or literally, given the narrator’s insistence) ending around them, the characters go through their own turmoil. “We are burning up all of our choices” is a nice summation of the couple that’s falling apart across the album, and Darnielle mentions blood twice, which is high even for a Goats song. There’s much more to unpack, but you can find everything you need to know about these lovers in the way John belts out “some of our promises were binding up here where our dreams take form” over the final tense strums.