Letter From Belgium

307. Letter from Belgium

Alex Russell Palmcorder Yajna, We Shall All Be Healed , , , , , , ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU5Xv1LK4X0

“Letter from Belgium” is a song for lockdown that wasn’t intended to be that originally, but now can be your COVID-19 jam.

Track: “Letter from Belgium”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004) and Letter from Belgium (2004)

At the start of quarantine in 2020, John Darnielle tweeted that “Letter from Belgium” is the “quarantine deep cut” among Mountain Goats songs. I’d heard the song hundreds of times before that moment and never connected it to the experience of the moment. It’s impossible not to hear it, though, when you’re listening for it: “We’ve been past the point of help since early April.” Depending on where you live, COVID-19 became a reality in your world around then. A weird line, especially in a song about “waiting for the fever to break.”

“Letter from Belgium” is about a different cause for alarm, but the panic is similar. These characters are locked in rooms with other substances they need, to the point where they reject the world. They obsess over stage makeup and odd, disconnected artwork. They express fear of neighbors and outsiders. It’s very much in line with the We Shall All Be Healed character study.

It doesn’t matter if you read it through a modern lens or through the album’s. This is a song for when you can’t go outside, whether there’s an external reason for that or not. Sometimes you’re just in there because you have to be in there, John Darnielle tells us, and you’ll make do with what you have. The items are only connected if you get in the right headspace, which is hopefully not a place you find yourself for an extended period of time.

255. Nova Scotia

Alex Russell Letter From Belgium , , , , ,

With a haunting vocal effect, John Darnielle shows us someone very far out on their own in “Nova Scotia.”

Track: “Nova Scotia”
Album: Letter From Belgium (2004)

There are three songs on Letter From Belgium, the second single from We Shall All Be Healed. The title track sees the cast of addicts from the main album collecting disparate items and holing up in their own version of quarantine. The final track, “Attention All Pickpockets,” serves as connective tissue between this period and The Sunset Tree. Both are significant songs, and of all the non-album tracks, I think “Attention All Pickpockets” is among the best.

As far as I can tell, even in the usual resources, no one has said anything about the song between the two on Letter From Belgium. “Nova Scotia” is an oddity in that respect, but it’s also just a strange song. The effect placed on John Darnielle’s voice leaves the narrator sounding distant, like we’re hearing them over radio transmission. The percussion comes in with a thudding, plodding effect that mimics walking through snow. There’s more than a full minute of outro after the second verse, which leaves us with a lot of time to ponder the final words this character says.

The second verse is worth quoting directly. “Listen,” they tell us, “everything I love I will devour // and bury the bones down in the snow.” Even if it weren’t on Letter From Belgium this would help us place this one. It calls to mind the narrator from “All Up the Seething Coast,” who similarly tells us to stop trying to rely on hope. There is no happy ending coming for the person who wants to just “let me go, let me go” in “Nova Scotia.” The choice to lead this into “Attention All Pickpockets,” where the characters have false hope, makes that realization especially bleak.

114. Attention All Pickpockets

Alex Russell Letter From Belgium , , , ,

“Attention All Pickpockets” is about trying to keep it all together and the hope that someone else might help you do it.

Track: “Attention All Pickpockets”
Album: Letter From Belgium (2004)

John Darnielle generally prefers to be vague about song meanings. That’s part of what makes the journey through the catalog so interesting, because it’s less about trying to find the right answers and more about making connections that work for you. If you want to think “The Monkey Song” isn’t about a monkey, well, go for it. There’s no primary text to stop you.

“Attention All Pickpockets” is different. It’s indisputably about the same characters that show up in “Dilaudid” on The Sunset Tree, as John Darnielle has confirmed. He calls this song from the three-song EP Letter From Belgium a “study” for developing the characters. In “Broom People” they deal with their teenage years and take solace in sex. By “Dilaudid” they’re into hard drugs and the things that go along with them. “Attention All Pickpockets” is a kind of middle point between the two.

The title comes from a deliberate misinterpretation of a sign John Darnielle saw in Paris that warned him about pickpockets. He recorded this song at a festival there and you can hear the joy in the other musicians as they chime in for the chorus. It sounds exuberant at first, but the lyrics reveal the transition. The characters are “not the same people that our old friends knew” but what are they now? “Broom People” ends with a primal scream and the statement that one person can be enough to save you, but “Attention All Pickpockets” sounds more like a desperate plea from one person to another in the hopes that they continue their saving. Since “Dilaudid” follows this we know they stay together, but is that really the best outcome for everyone involved?