mountain goats

514. Standard Bitter Love Song #1

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , , ,

The original in a series, “Standard Bitter Love Song #1” is very silly, very extreme, and very relatable.

Track: “Standard Bitter Love Song #1”
Album: Unreleased

There are a few “official” songs released in the Standard Bitter Love Song list, but the first one never officially came out. You can only hear it on live recordings and I simply insist your first one be this performance in 2007 at Zoop, a benefit event for Farm Sanctuary in New York. The two Zoop recordings are, I think, the best live Mountain Goats recordings, and the crowd really stomps their way through this one on the recording of “Standard Bitter Love Song #1.”

The title’s a joke, but it’s also not. These are songs from the heart of an angry person, made ridiculous by being someone other than them. There’s a lyric in this song about shooting a kite with a shotgun. That’s an image you conjure up when you’re real-deal mad, but also part of you understands that eventually you will not feel this way. It’s extreme, but this is an extreme feeling. Belting it out in a barn with hardcore fans willing to go to a request show? That’s a once (or twice, there are two Zoops) in a lifetime thing.

On that note, because there’s nowhere else to put it, a friend of mine from college went to Zoop II and asked if I wanted to ride with him. I turned it down for something frivolous and friends, let me tell you, if there’s a Zoop III, sell the clothes off your back to get there. Listen to the guy wolf howl in the second chorus of this performance. You can tell it’s special.

513. Going to Bridlington

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle thinks it’s got a lazy chorus, but the simplicity of “Going to Bridlington” gives it a powerful honesty.

Track: “Going to Bridlington”
Album: Unreleased

A million years ago, when “online” was a different place, John Darnielle posted as “John” on his band’s forums. When someone mentioned “Going to Bridlington,” an ultra-rare, unreleased song from the old, old days even then in 2008, John Darnielle said that it “blows esp [especially] the lyrics are pretty lame but am happy if people are getting pleasure from it.” A year later, someone yelled for it at a show in Virginia and he played it, but commented on how much he didn’t like it. At that show you can hear a few people, but not many people, singing in the crowd. It’s been played live just a few times and the earliest, on a radio show in Amsterdam in 1996, is the best.

The author is right, sure: “saw you trying to smile // hey, you don’t have to smile for me” is not, probably, his best work. But what it is, to me, is honest. This is a love song that sounds like a love song. It has a moment that many Mountain Goats songs do in that one character sees another one and that act, the act of seeing them, is imbued with monumental power. Sure, it repeats a lot, and sure, the chorus is just that repetition sold by the performance, but love has these little moments. There is power in coming into the kitchen and seeing someone. This is not the only Goats song to have that image, but I love it here. Do I love this song in spite of the author’s distaste for it or because of it? This isn’t one of the all-time best, but there’s something here, and I love a broken toy.

512. Picture of My Dress

Alex Russell Getting Into Knives , , , , , , ,

“Picture of My Dress” is a small part of a big story, but also illustrates how John Darnielle thinks about small moments.

Track: “Picture of My Dress”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

You don’t need to wonder about “Picture of My Dress” at all. The poet Maggie Smith tweeted this in December of 2018. A few weeks later, John Darnielle replied with a screenshot showing he had written a song inspired by it. I’m sure there are other songs with some degree of primary text, but I can’t think of one where you can go independently see the inspiration, with a timestamp, and the resulting song in progress. We may have lost the era where you could find a random cut on Napster, but we’ve gained something else.

The songwriting here is the apotheosis of John Darnielle’s style. For my money, aside from maybe the extra-long line in “Distant Stations,” there is absolutely no song I’d single out to explain to someone what John Darnielle’s writing is like beyond this one. The concept is a simple, but grand one, as a woman drives across the country with a wedding dress. She engages in the mundane, including what could be a frustrating experience enduring an overwrought pop love song that instead is absurd. She orders an extremely specific Burger King order. What do we get out of knowing she gets extra mayonnaise, and why are there three full lines about a fast food sandwich?

If I have a thesis to this whole thing, it’s that specificity is what defines the Mountain Goats. It doesn’t matter that she gets this sandwich, it matters that she stops in the middle of a crushing confrontation of her own life to do something else, something small. Her life, like your life, is very big. But it’s also rolling your eyes in a Burger King, trying to find more napkins, even on one of the biggest trips you can imagine.

511. Get Famous

Alex Russell Getting Into Knives , , , , , , ,

“Get Famous” asks you to consider if you could, or maybe should, well, get famous.

Track: “Get Famous”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

Just before the two-minute mark in “Get Famous,” John Darnielle says “listen to the people applaud” and there is a tiny sound of applause in the background. When Getting Into Knives first came out, a review called this out and now I hear it every single time I listen to the song. I can’t find that review now and I don’t think it matters if you can, but that point is one I keep coming back to when I listen to the album.

Depending on how you count, John Darnielle and various collaborators and bandmates over the years have released or been featured on more than 70 releases, but I find Getting Into Knives one of the toughest to personally connect with. I don’t want to blow that applause sound effect out of proportion, but when I listen to “Get Famous,” I wonder why that is. The Wesley Willis reference is excellent, I like the music video, and I think the message here is funny, but not silly. It’s a great song.

Darnielle’s delivery makes this one for me. The backing horns are great, sure, but the snarl on “you” in “you should be famous” changes the meaning and really gets at the blessing/curse element of fame. It’s just also a song that speaks for itself, which is probably why things like putting applause on the word applause drove some reviewer nuts enough that they had to draw attention to it, and while that detail doesn’t really matter, there’s not quite enough of what I love about most of the other singles here for this one to be one of my favorites.

510. Corsican Mastiff Stride

Alex Russell Getting Into Knives , , , , , , ,

The Mountain Goats go in a new direction, or don’t, depending on your perspective, with “Corsican Mastiff Stride.”

Track: “Corsican Mastiff Stride”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

I have opened and closed the window to write this one more than a dozen times over the last few months. I find it very hard to talk about Getting Into Knives, and “Corsican Mastiff Stride” specifically. It’s a jaunty little song, quick and explosive, but it resists further discussion. But is that the song or is that me?

I’ve told this story before, but years ago I saw a bartender that had a huge Mountain Goats tattoo on their arm. When I complimented it, they said they don’t really listen to them anymore. I found that surprising and almost unthinkable. I was reminded of it during my third time listening to Getting Into Knives as I bounced off it again. It wasn’t that I disliked it, it’s that I just couldn’t find purchase. We’ve spent a lot of time on this site talking about if the Mountain Goats have “phases” or not, but I tend to think that they don’t so much as listeners have different tastes. It is possible to think The Sunset Tree is worthy of permanence on your skin but just think Getting Into Knives is not quite the same thing.

“Corsican Mastiff Stride” is a dance number. It’s a great song that will find you hitting the “replay” button. It’s a perfect introduction into an album that serves as the brighter (sort of) side to Dark in Here. John Darnielle and the band have been exploring larger, sweeping, fuller sounds over the last few years and seeing songs like this one live will sell you on that direction. I love the vocals and the snap-along beat, and I’m going to have to accept that any “challenge” to Getting Into Knives is with the listener.

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.