mountain goats

634. Ground Level

Alex Russell Jenny From Thebes , , , , , ,

In “Ground Level,” we see the nuts-and-bolts of casing the joint.

Track: “Ground Level”
Album: Jenny From Thebes

John Darnielle has said the lines in “Ground Level” about getting by on low sleep are a shout out to new parents with young children. My first is going to be born in the next few weeks, so I’m keeping that in my mind as I write about this album.

“Ground Level” finds Jenny slipping into the underworld proper. No other band would ever try lyrics as banal as “one quick walkaround will give you // all the relevant information” but that’s because they don’t have “I’m never going to break my neck // falling downstairs” to follow it up. It’s been a trend among modern Mountain Goats albums to get into these details of heists and break-ins, because these dramatic turns offer a lot of exciting references and language. Usually they’re representative. Here, nope, we’re actually doing something.

Jenny is making progress, here. We know what’s coming, if we look deep down.

633. Clean Slate

Alex Russell Jenny From Thebes , , , , , ,

Jenny starts her journey hopeful and reflective in “Clean Slate.”

Track: “Clean Slate”
Album: Jenny From Thebes

I am writing this on the day that the Mountain Goats announced Peter Hughes is no longer with the band and I am writing this at a time when Jenny From Thebes is the most recent release. I started this just under a decade ago and never realistically thought I’d finish it. It feels like time to finish it.

“Clean Slate” kicks off the narrative of Jenny From Thebes with Jenny, the most significant Mountain Goats character with a name, finding the crew of misfits and remembering her past. She describes one from Copiah, Mississippi, not far from where my dad died. It’s a jaunty song that explodes as it builds, as all great Mountain Goats openers do, but it really delivers on that mixture of miserable ideas and excited horns and drums. “This will be the last time that I do this,” Jenny says, but then, “I’m pretty sure,” she couches. It’s all done over this phoenix-fire of jaunty melody.

We enter Jenny From Thebes with hope. We know to be cautious about this hope, but we have it, all the same.

632. Extreme South #1

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Extreme South #1” is another song about someone’s arrival, but one with some great hot-weather imagery.

Track: “Extreme South #1”
Album: Unreleased

As I mentioned with “Hye Kye” and “Brandy, Let’s Go” John Darnielle asks that people donate to one of two charities if they download songs from this three-song online release and here is that link. He released this song and two others after the fanbase donated to help a friend of his who was mugged and hurt badly. He’s put out a number of older songs over the years in similar situations, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t drop the link. The third of the three is “Extreme South #1.”

You can watch a much younger John Darnielle play “Extreme South #1” in 1994 at The Motley Underground in Claremont here. It’s part of a larger recording, but I am just amazed every time something like this exists from those days. The song itself is not really that different than many other unreleased and early Mountain Goats songs. The vocal performance is the best part, with all the voice cracks and spite and snarl, but I really just cannot believe that here, at the end of the unreleased ones (for now) there’s one more with video that just happens to exist all these many years later.

631. Shot, Repeatedly, At Close Range, In the Chest, By Your Love

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

Most of “Shot, Repeatedly, At Close Range, In the Chest, By Your Love” is the title, but what a title it is.

Track: “Shot, Repeatedly, At Close Range, In the Chest, By Your Love”
Album: Unreleased

John Darnielle said “I just like the punchline” when he played “Shot, Repeatedly, At Close Range, In the Chest, By Your Love” at City Winery in New York in September of 2021. You can hear that one and you can hear him play it on a live stream series that used to be semi-frequent called “Signal Flare.” Both versions are similar and reveal a song that’s more serious than you’d expect, with that title. I do like that he calls it a punchline, because it certainly is, but it’s not necessarily a funny song. At the City Winery show he also told a few jokes about writing the full title on an album and introducing it that way, with all those commas, to a confused crowd. He then led into “Against Pollution,” where someone else gets shot. Maybe intentional, maybe not!

The song itself doesn’t necessarily build on the title. Darnielle says it’s unfinished and probably always will be, but I love that we have it just to have that title. It’s up there with “I Love You. Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire” for best title. We only have a little bit of a song to imagine this person who doesn’t necessarily match with the title, but we don’t have to really squint too hard.

 

630. Stack Em Up

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

In one of the best unreleased Mountain Goats songs, we hear snippets of lives in “Stack Em Up.”

Track: “Stack Em Up”
Album: Unreleased

“Stack Em Up,” which doesn’t really have a name but may as well be called that, was played a handful of times a few years ago as of this writing. It’s one of the best of the unreleased Mountain Goats songs, for my money, and it’s one that you very easily could miss. It feels like a triumphant answer to a lot of Mountain Goats songs about people in California and Portland who are going through hard times. We hear a lot about those people and while we don’t often hear about what happened next, we can make some assumptions.

“Stack Em Up” refers to the people who become bodies and memories after those hard times get as hard as they’re going to get. “Some you lose track of,” John Darnielle says, and “some you have to bury.” These are not isolated messages or themes in the Goats catalog, but I am especially partial to this particular version. Specificity is what makes a Mountain Goats song a Mountain Goats song and “no one riding shotgun for seven years at least” is part of that. What’s really part of that, though, is that there’s enough here that you know these are not fictional people. May they all be as well as it is possible for them to be, if they made it out.

629. Abandoning My Father Talking Blues

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Abandoning My Father Talking Blues” recalls a few specific moments in John Darnielle’s childhood and freezes us in our own youth.

Track: “Abandoning My Father Talking Blues”
Album: Unreleased

“Abandoning My Father Talking Blues” is unlike any other Mountain Goats song in the sense that it’s a traditional style blues song that sounds like other things you’ve heard, but not from John Darnielle. By the end it freezes on an image of dryers in a shared laundry room that “keep the home fires burning,” so we definitely get to familiar territory, but there just aren’t other songs like this. “We had never lived in an apartment before // it was weird,” Darnielle sings/says as part of this true story from his life.

The entirety of The Sunset Tree aside, the personal songs about Darnielle’s young childhood often feel like you’re intruding as a listener. These aren’t general images and these aren’t tangentially relatable elements, these are specific memories, described to a crowd. Darnielle has made a world that’s meant so much to so many people, but very rarely does it go to this level of personal detail. The phrase I always hang on is “I’ll probably never know what it was like that night // for my dad, but I’d wager it was pretty bad.” Darnielle’s father passed away just a few weeks before this performance and the “probably” in that line makes me think of my own father’s passing and the things you feel like you know, but can no longer ask.

628. Casetino’s Nursery

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Casetino’s Nursery” is about a real flood at a real nursery as much as it is about a feeling.

Track: “Casetino’s Nursery”
Album: Unreleased

“Casetino’s Nursery” stems from a news story that John Darnielle saw where a man was interviewed about heavy rains and the impact on his nursery. The first verse mentions Malibu and there is still a nursery in Malibu by a slightly different spelling of Cosentino’s Nursery. I think it’s a safe assumption they’re the same place. Their website says they’ve been around for 40 years and faced fires and floods and aren’t going anywhere. Darnielle says he saw Cosentino, who it must have been, and that he said “if a leak was in the attic” then, no, they couldn’t save the nursery. Clearly they did, in some capacity, but it must have been a heck of a flood.

The song transitions into the blues staple “Hellhound on My Trail,” which Darnielle also covered on an album. The comparison, then, seems to be about these unstoppable pursuits and these forces we have no control over. You cannot hold back the rains any more than you can get away from whatever is chasing you. Beyond all that, though, I marvel at John Darnielle playing this once (or maybe more, history does not recall) when he wrote it and then dusting it off one more time two decades later. A similarly fragile thing, that is.

627. If England Were What England Seems, Then We Would Only Have Our Dreams

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“If England Were What England Seems, Then We Would Only Have Our Dreams” is a love song sold because you really, genuinely believe it.

Track: “If England Were What England Seems, Then We Would Only Have Our Dreams”
Album: Unreleased

The earliest version of “If England Were What England Seems, Then We Would Only Have Our Dreams” was played the same day as “Going to Some Damned English City” at a radio station in Evanston, Illinois, that is just a few miles away from where I am sitting right now. Before playing today’s song, John Darnielle says he might mess it up and have to start over. He says this as an interruption, which I think is a very funny little joke. Years later, in 2002, Darnielle played it again at the same radio station and did actually mess it up and start over, twice. I would like to believe in a universe where that’s intentional and all part of some grand plan.

But, seriously, I think this is one of the strongest from the early, unreleased batch. The title is intentionally unwieldy and the lyrics are grand. “In the place where the world stops forever // in the place where your body begins” is, certainly, grand, but also it doesn’t translate outside the space of the song. I’ve talked about this before and struggled to articulate it, but I am forever fascinated by the role emotion plays in these early songs. This narrator is telling you something big, to them, but relatable, to you. They’re doing it in the language of a love song, but also just offset enough that it’s something else. “Something really special,” you might say.

626. Wishing the House Would Crash

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

There are seeds of “No Children” in “Wishing the House Would Crash.”

Track: “Wishing the House Would Crash”
Album: Unreleased

Someone with three subscribers on YouTube (as of this writing) posted a video of John Darnielle playing “Wishing the House Would Crash” in September of 2019 here. Darnielle tells a joke at the end and says that a strength of early Mountain Goats songs is to deliver a “curse” or “verse” and then to be gone. Either works, here, and both are funny in a different way. I’m almost positive it’s “curse” but it’s just neat that it works both ways.

“Wishing the House Would Crash” is, as the man himself says at that show, an Alpha Couple song. It’s short, obviously, but it really does work with that central image. One Alpha is outside and they hope the house that symbolizes their failure collapses on them. They then wish the house would collapse on them, and on their partner, and then on them. We’ll hear this messaging again about a decade later in a much more memorable format, but the vibes are the same. The two of them are sometimes more eloquent in expressing their frustrations, but the image of the house just finally actually falling down on top of the two of them, and mixing that with the car accident language of “crashing,” really does the heavy lifting that additional verses and curses would normally do. 

625. That Hippolytine Feeling

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“That Hippolytine Feeling” is designed to grab your attention and it certainly will do that.

Track: “That Hippolytine Feeling”
Album: Unreleased

At this show in Birmingham, Alabama in 2021, John Darnielle played “That Hippolytine Feeling” in front of a crowd that cheers so loud for vaccination that the show is worth hearing just for that alone. After a very old song and a story about how it’s an old song, he introduced today’s song by saying “this is even more obscure than that one” and told a story he’s told versions of before. “As it happens, I had some pretty effective strategies for getting their attention,” he said, about being the opener and having to shock folks to earn respect (and quiet) from the crowd.

“That Hippolytine Feeling” works as that kind of explosion song, but there are a lot of explosion songs in that era of the Mountain Goats. It transcends that description by including “And then God // convincing, if not transparent in his motives // He opened up the floodgates” as lyrics. No other band in the world would even begin to consider this, but John Darnielle was using it as a grenade and a lead-off batter in the early 90s. There are other songs where horses are menacing, which is interesting and something I’ve never noticed, but the juxtaposition here with the handgun is one-of-a-kind.