Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg

509. One Frozen River

Alex Russell Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg , , , , , , ,

“One Frozen River” is more intense than other songs on the album and leaves the story in a curious place.

Track: “One Frozen River”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

About a decade ago, some folks ran a project where they posted every single Mountain Goats song to spark discussion. A surprising number of these posts got no response, but the ones that did offer a more interesting view into fan theories than some of the broader corners of online discussion of lyrics for other bands. The post for “One Frozen River,” the last song on Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg, finds a user suggesting that John Darnielle was concerned for the violent content of the song and that led to the album not being released. I personally think this is too direct a reading of the song, but I am a firm believer that there are no “wrong” interpretations. Darnielle has said before that when people think other songs are about similarly grim or violent topics, they’re often assuming he’d write something he would never write. That’s what leads me away from that reading, but I don’t discount anyone’s experience. I tend to think the simplest answer is usually true. Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg, to me, is about similar characters as the other mid-90s Mountain Goats albums, and they fail to connect as they struggle with life in general. The location is different but the challenges are the same.

The album never came out and maybe shouldn’t exist. Some hardcore fans insist that listening to it at all is forbidden, and I definitely held to that when it first came out. I still remember finally “giving in” and finding that the songs are good, but not as good as other Mountain Goats releases. There’s a lesson in there, probably, but my personal position is that as John Darnielle now plays them live, they officially “exist” and there’s no harm in speaking of them.

508. Crane

Alex Russell Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg , , , , , , ,

“Crane” is a simple story but the language choices provide another view that’s quite different.

Track: “Crane”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

“Crane” is a sort of culmination of all of the ideas across Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg. The narrator wanders around town and feels like the only person left in the world, similar to “Ending the Alphabet.” They try to show someone a commercial good (here, a watch, but in “Milk Song,” an answering machine) that is a representation of something larger about communication and experience. They look out over natural beauty and struggle with it as it contrasts with their emotions.

The best part is the phrasing of “I was afraid that my arm was broken // but it was only kinda run down.” We can hear in that description a person given to dramatic expression, similar to the choice of “felt like I was the only guy in town.” These are important reminders of the limitations of perspective. This is often an accident, as narrators in love songs make us feel like both people are in love with each other, but John Darnielle uses it purposefully. You get the sense across many of these songs that these narrators had more to do with their current state than they let on. If you’re the only person whose thoughts we can experience we feel bad for you if you feel poorly, but this obscures at least one other human being. There’s a little defensiveness bleeding through here with “and I don’t need you to tell me so,” but the whole watch conversation just confirms what you probably already suspected.

507. Ending the Alphabet

Alex Russell Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg , , , , , , ,

“Ending the Alphabet” finds a narrator unable to connect to the world at large.

Track: “Ending the Alphabet”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

“What is there left in a city like this // when everyone you know has gone?” The narrator says this near the end of “Ending the Alphabet” and I suspect most of you can identify a moment in your life where this felt true. I’ve only moved away from a city a few times in my life but there was always a time when I realized it was time to do so because of how I felt about what was left. It’s important to note that the narrator is explicit that “the avenues are throbbing with people.” This is not the lonesome, desolate world of Get Lonely. This is a bustling city, you just feel alone in it.

The pitch-corrected version of this is different because the vocals are different, obviously, but they both feel the same to me. The same emotion comes through from the narrator whether they’re in John Darnielle’s normal voice or a higher version. “I can almost hear their voices,” our narrator says, as they tell us over and over that they are both here and not here. As part of the larger emotions of Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg, we might put some romantic loss on this person, but I don’t think it has to be that, at all. You experience the world like this when your brain is trying to tell you something. You may take some time to parse just what that is, but the difference between this day and the one before it is very real.

506. Red Choral Diamond Spray

Alex Russell Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg , , , , , , ,

Two characters find a moment of peace before a stormy future in “Red Choral Diamond Spray.”

Track: “Red Choral Diamond Spray”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

If you can explain the title to “Red Choral Diamond Spray” you can solve a mystery I am not able to solve. Red coral, spelled differently, is a type of jewelry, often used with diamonds. That’s as far as I can get. Inscrutable title aside, this is a story John Darnielle tells elsewhere in Mountain Goats songs. People leave one place and arrive at another one. They fear the change, but they fear what it says about each of them and their relationship even more. “We will never see Ireland again,” they say, but places in Mountain Goats songs are about much more than geographic locations.

The vocals are almost a whisper and the guitar is so gentle here, especially following songs that are angrier, if not sadder. The use of physical locations to represent people you cannot become again is one thing, but the plucking here really tells you more than that. For me, the best moment of “Red Choral Diamond Spray” is the voice crack over “add the distances between them all.” This is one where I’d recommend the “not fixed” version over the pitch-corrected track, because there’s an almost sweetness to this version that I like. These two characters are not headed for better days and they are explicitly mourning the loss of who they once were. That’s not sweet, obviously, but they have each other as they look back. That’s something, which the tone here reminds us even if the lyrics insist it’s downhill from here.

505. Ghosts

Alex Russell Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg , , , , , , ,

The narrator in “Ghosts” tries, unsuccessfully, to appreciate their surroundings before exploding on someone.

Track: “Ghosts”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

If there’s a song that has survived from Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg, it has to be “Ghosts.” The Mountain Goats Wiki counts fifteen live performances, which is five times more than any other song on the album. I don’t know that it’s the best song on the album, but it’s certainly in the top half. The pitch-corrected version helps somewhat, as John Darnielle’s vocals in deeper tones make the narrator sound a little calmer and, almost, more considerate. That might be too far, but that’s what I get.

I think people like this one because the chorus is easy to understand: “It made me wish I was dead.” There are a handful of Mountain Goats narrators who are more direct than this, but not many of them. This one experiences a black dog that they take to be an evil portent and they experience “a familiar sun” that they say will shine forever in a familiar land, though that familiarity isn’t a positive. By the third verse they’re even calling out the view as terrific and praising the sunshine’s impact on their mood, but it all falls apart. “Five years is a long time,” they say, “and I spent five years in Sweden, dying for you.”

In another song, by another band, this might sound dramatic. It does here, I guess, but not as the word is typically used. People reach for “Ghosts” because so much of this album, and, honestly, the surrounding ones, can feel distant. That distance makes those songs complex, but sometimes you just want to snap back at someone, even when it isn’t fair. Maybe especially when it isn’t fair.

504. Milk Song

Alex Russell Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg , , , , , , ,

The central action in “Milk Song” is extreme and memorable and works beautifully as a response to loss.

Track: “Milk Song”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

You can see John Darnielle play “Milk Song” in Gothenburg in 2019 here, from someone who has three subscribers on YouTube. It’s a crisp recording and it does the song justice, but it isn’t necessarily essential. You should also hear the pitch-corrected version of it here, which is similar and also really works. To be complete, you can also hear this live version from 2020 in, I believe, the last live, in-person show before the pandemic. The banter there about the experience of having and not having an answering machine is incredible. Don’t take my word for it.

This is one of the two or three best songs on Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg overall and almost certainly the best set of lyrics. Our narrator is pining for someone, as most of these narrators are, but this one tells us more than most of them do. What makes “Milk Song” memorable to me is not the “gradual” vanishing of one figure or the bitterness of the other, but the ridiculous-but-believable destruction of an answering machine in response. This huge gesture, plus the accounting of it as a financial loss, is the kind of thing we laugh at in other people but choose to gloss over in ourselves. Maybe you’ve never literally smashed up a machine in response to a loss and growing bitterness in yourself, but if you search the files in your head long enough I suspect you might find something similar. Maybe don’t look too hard.

503. I Love You. Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire

Alex Russell Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg , , , , , , ,

We hear from a familiar style of narrator in a vulnerable moment in “I Love You. Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire.”

Track: “I Love You. Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

Of course, there’s the title. What Mountain Goats fan could read “I Love You. Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire” and not need to hear it? If that person exists, they look a lot different than the dozens of people I’ve met over the years at shows and other chance meetings. This title is entrapment, if we are to assume that a “true fan” would avoid listening to Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg, as it isn’t intended to actually exist. Even further, sources disagree on if it has a period or a comma in the middle of the title, which is an interesting, if possibly unimportant, distinction. The song has been played live once, as far as I can find, in 2009 as an introduction in the spot where Darnielle has said he traditionally plays songs that few people are likely to know. That show, where Darnielle described the songs as “fairly obscure,” is worth hearing, though that description tells you that better than I can.

Title aside, this is a special one. The third verse should be the payoff, but it ends in a typical early John Darnielle style with “I saw everyone.” There are certain phrases that John Darnielle loves and a better scholar than I could interrogate their uses over time. He once “apologized” for the extensive use of rhymes like hair / there and while that was a joke, you do see the same things again and again in the early stuff. This doesn’t detract, as it gives the narrators a sense that many of them have the same emotions if not the same Social Security numbers. It’s this part that kills me: “What’s making me take it all too far // you are // you are.”

502. Four New Trees

Alex Russell Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg , , , , , , ,

“Four New Trees” goes one by one through, well, four trees, but doesn’t tell us why.

Track: “Four New Trees”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

“Four New Trees” is part of the half of Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg that exists only in this recording. Technically, it also exists as a pitch-corrected version which you can, and should, hear here. John Darnielle has said that if you’re going to listen to this album, you should try to find a way to listen to it as it would have eventually been released. That second version is, presumably, what that would sound like. The vocals are better, and definitely more like the John Darnielle you know, but in general it sounds more like an “advanced” version of the same thing. Is that solely because most fans have heard the higher vocals or because the deeper version sounds more like an adult? I can’t say.

“Four New Trees” feels, lyrically, like an old, old song. There is a tendency with unreleased or rare material to elevate it just because of the rarity. You want to, at some level, have your favorite song be something twenty people have heard. Let everyone else love the first track on the most popular album. Those people don’t get it, you tell yourself. That tendency is one that Goths pushes back on consistently as an album, which could open up an argument we don’t have the space to get into. I don’t think “Four New Trees” is one of the hundred best Mountain Goats songs or anything, but I think it’s fascinating in the way the best early songs are when you spend time with them. What do these trees represent? What do we make of the word choice, both gendering the evil tree and the repetition, in general? It’s tempting to guess, but I think it’s mysterious on purpose.

501. Hello, Old Rabbit

Alex Russell Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg , , , , , , ,

“Hello, Old Rabbit” opens up the “lost” album with a narrator telling us a lie in the chorus.

Track: “Hello, Old Rabbit”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

I told myself I would not include anything from Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg unless I got to the end of this process. The album doesn’t technically exist and wasn’t released, so there’s a strong argument to not even mention it. In 2007 it was leaked online and the band started playing songs from it live again, so it seems like John Darnielle has made his peace with it. If you’re of the opinion that no one should talk about it, I can’t say I blame you.

“Hello, Old Rabbit” is the opening track. The version you’ll hear, usually, isn’t pitch corrected. You can find a version that is, if you look, and you’ll hear something that sounds more like John Darnielle in 1995. You can get lost in semantics here, as neither is “real,” but there’s not a huge difference for this one. I tend to favor the “not correct” version as I’ve been hearing that one for years, but you do you.

In a lot of ways, this just feels like another song from the era. Someone is near some water and someone else beats themselves up while they overanalyze the situation. I really like this song, but I wonder how much of that is the secret nature of it. I was a relatively new fan when it was discovered and I remember wondering if it was “okay” to like it. Darnielle has said consistently that the “lost” and “secret” songs are worse than the official ones and that’s why they’re lost. I think the simplest answer is to enjoy this as more music by the band, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking this is a holy relic.