mountain goats

404. Cobra Tattoo

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle whispers through much of “Cobra Tattoo” as our narrator tries to hold on.

Track: “Cobra Tattoo”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

Erik Friedlander plays cello with the Mountain Goats often and is one of twelve people listed as a “former collaborator” of the band on their Wikipedia page. He played with the band on the only live recording of “Cobra Tattoo” I can find and he really adds to the mood. Someone yells, predictably, as it goes, for “death metal band” but you can excuse that. I only mention it because it’s hard to imagine a more opposite outcome if you ask for that song and instead get a string section with a performance of the quiet “Cobra Tattoo.”

As with much of Get Lonely, you do not necessarily need to take in “Cobra Tattoo” line by line. There are three biblical references, at least, but I contend that you do not need to decipher them to “get” this one. Honestly, the more I think about “Cobra Tattoo” and what I’ve gotten from it over the years, it’s mostly that mood. The first strum is a slam, but then it wanders around. The narrator is out of sorts. The tune meets the mood. It’s a whisper, but it’s an unnerving one.

“What does this mean” and “what is this trying to do” are different questions. You can try to find meaning in the title’s tattoo, but do you need that for “Cobra Tattoo?” You don’t really need it for any of them, but this is a rare one where I have never really sought much beyond the surface. I feel like it accomplishes the mood, which seems to be the point, though that’s not to discount anything you’ve found.

403. If You See Light

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , ,

“If You See Light” stands out on Get Lonely because of the drums, but it’s right at home with the overall message.

Track: “If You See Light”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

“If You See Light” thematically fits with the rest of Get Lonely, but it’s a different sonic experience. It’s upbeat, for one, and the horns and the crashing percussion make it a strange cousin to most of the darkness on the rest of the album. It’s absolutely at home as a song about monsters and lonely experiences as humanity turns their back, but it’s one you might turn to in a slightly brighter mood, as well.

John Darnielle once said in an interview that they made some of the crashing noises by just throwing things like music stands around in the studio. The result is chaotic, which works with the jam, but it’s also difficult to replicate. That’s what makes this such a good studio song, though the live versions allow John Darnielle to stretch his range and scream out the “and no one knows how to keep secrets ’round here // they tell everyone everything soon as they know” part, which I encourage you to seek out.

It’s a cousin to “Up the Wolves,” I think, in that it’s about what you do when you’re pushed to your breaking point. The difference is that in “If You See Light,” the subjects waiting for the crowd don’t feel as confident they’ll be able to withstand the attack. The beat and the drums may suggest triumph, but there’s a strong suggestion that at the end of winter, things are going to go much worse here.

402. Song for Lonely Giants

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , ,

“Song for Lonely Giants” is what it says it is, but it’s also about being very far away from everyone emotionally.

Track: “Song for Lonely Giants”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

Much the same as In League with Dragons, there was an original idea for Get Lonely that does not totally match the final product. In League with Dragons was a fantasy story before it was a larger meditation on aging. It still is both things, but it’s also something about how those two meet. Get Lonely, similarly, was a story about literal monsters before it was a story about lonely people and the lonely things they do. One does not fully replace the other, and the version we have today is actually a mixing of the two ideas.

“Song for Lonely Giants” is from when this was about actual giants, though that’s really an oversimplification. The giant here is a stand-in for a way you feel when you feel too large to be cared for by others. So much of Get Lonely is about loneliness, true loneliness, not just a longing for a relationship or a romantic interest. This is a song about being so far removed that you see yourself as another species, and one possibly too different to relate to humanity. It’s an extreme kind of distance but it’s one that narrators feel all over the songs on Get Lonely. This one, however, has a whole connected poem if you want to learn more.

401. Moon Over Goldsboro

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , , ,

The stakes are very high and the mood is very low on “Moon Over Goldsboro.”

Track: “Moon Over Goldsboro”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

There is something very personal about Get Lonely. It may be that it was the first new Mountain Goats record when I first heard the band. I listened to this one new with everyone else for the first time and I digested it at a time in my life when I felt very much like these narrators. I was living in Peoria, Illinois, and I was definitely the kind of person who was “talking to you under my breath // saying things I would never say directly.” I am trying to keep this whole project from being explicitly a personal blog, but if you are interested in personal narrative mixed with the story of the Mountain Goats by a better writer than I am, Richard O’Brien’s personal retrospective should be your first stop.

“Moon Over Goldsboro” is about emotions that you experience and then hopefully move away from. That’s what a lot of Get Lonely is about, but this character is wallowing more than most of the others on the album. There are enough details to piece together the larger story, but we again only get one person’s side. There’s not enough here to know who did what or how much we should believe. “I heard a siren on the highway up ahead // kinda wished they’d come and get me” suggests that the narrator believes things to be beyond saving, but it’s also the sort of thing you say when you know it’s your fault.

400. Get Lonely

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , ,

“Get Lonely” is about a much more intense emotion than we usually think of when someone says “lonely.”

Track: “Get Lonely”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

Get Lonely is a brutal album. Each narrator, assuming they aren’t all the same person, is experiencing alienation and loneliness. These are people completely cut off from humanity. Many are lamenting a specific relationship, but the reduction of the theme to “a breakup” doesn’t quite cut it for a song like the title track. “Get Lonely” is about something much more extreme.

Sure, the narrator says they will “send your name off from my lips // like a signal flare” but it isn’t just about this person they are no longer with. This is about not connecting with the world at large. They talk about feeling alone in a crowd, which is an oft used comparison but used more literally here. This person actually is out in a crowd and recognizes that they are not like the people around them.

The ending to the second verse pivots towards hope, in a way. The narrator says “and I will come back home // maybe call some friends // maybe paint some pictures // it all depends” and we hear someone trying to dig out of themselves. We hear someone who knows the way out of the darkness, or at least one of the ways. What we don’t hear is a confidence that this will even happen. What makes Get Lonely such a powerful album is the sense that these are real problems a real person is experiencing. This isn’t just the blind rage of a lover scorned and this isn’t angst. This is when internal and external forces combine and cause you to lose your sense of self. This is a bad place and this is a moment where you have to summon up some additional strength to get out of it, spirit willing.

399. Get High and Listen to The Cure

Alex Russell Welcome to Passaic , , , , , , ,

“Get High and Listen to The Cure” provides you a playlist to execute on the title’s command.

Track: “Get High and Listen to The Cure”
Album: Welcome to Passaic (2019)

If I had to pick one word for the Mountain Goats it would be “specific.” From the early days, John Darnielle’s songwriting has been focused on specificity. You aren’t going to “the city,” you are going to Port Washington. It doesn’t matter, basically at all, what is in Port Washington or why that’s where you’re going. It does matter, however, that you’re going to a specific place and that you are envisioning yourself as different because you’re going there.

This specificity has manifested differently in the more modern era of the Mountain Goats. John Darnielle challenges himself now to create more complex and more ambitious music. It’s very different, very often. This is what led a bartender with a sleeve tattoo inspired by the band to tell me that he doesn’t like the new stuff as much. This is to be expected with all bands and John Darnielle has commented in the past on the phenomenon of people resisting change in a band. Peter Hughes is on the same page, often saying that growth in the band doesn’t invalidate the roots and that you should try to appreciate all of it.

This is a long road to talking about “Get High and Listen to The Cure,” a song that almost entirely that title and about a dozen titles of songs by The Cure. This is a specific experiment, it seems, where John Darnielle wanted to write a song that is only titles of songs. You can listen to a playlist of them here, but you don’t necessarily need to do that. Even if you don’t know anything about The Cure, you can appreciate that John Darnielle appreciates them.

398. Sentries in the Ambush

Alex Russell Sentries in the Ambush , , , , , ,

“Sentries in the Ambush” offers a look into what In League with Dragons was before the finished product emerged.

Track: “Sentries in the Ambush”
Album: Sentries in the Ambush EP (2019)

On the Bandcamp page for the Sentries in the Ambush EP John Darnielle describes exactly what “Sentries in the Ambush” is. This was one of the songs for the original version of In League with Dragons when it was a fantasy story about a town called Riversend and actual, literal dragons and wizards and such. The final album is very different, though it has some elements of that original story, and thus “Sentries in the Ambush” is on an EP and not on the main album.

The song is about people who fight and die in an ambush. It’s literal. You can pick it out from the lyrics, but none of that is as interesting as the “how” of the song. John Darnielle doubles his vocals even on the demo which became the final version. He calls it “a pretty crazy little thing” and whew, he’s right. The doubling here pairs it well with the waltz “Divided Sky Lane” that accompanies it on the EP, but it works better here. The pace is frenetic and it makes sense, given these characters are in chaos. “Slaughter them if you can // kill them all where they stand” is delivered the only way it could be, and then it all peters out with John Darnielle saying “and so on” with a laugh. I’m often a fan of the proof-of-concept demo songs and this is no exception, even with the end being a joke. In League with Dragons ended up being a better album than the story of Riversend would have been, probably, but do take the time to appreciate what might have been.

397. Cadaver Sniffing Dog

Alex Russell In League with Dragons , , , , , , ,

A narrator requests that you bring in the cadaver sniffing dog to sniff the metaphorical cadaver in “Cadaver Sniffing Dog.”

Track: “Cadaver Sniffing Dog”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

At the time of this writing, fans of the Mountain Goats are mad about someone who ranked every existing Mountain Goats album. The ranking is internally inconsistent and appears to be a troll job, so I’m not even going to link to it. I mention it because any attempt in any forum to say anything the Mountain Goats have done is better than anything else elicits an argument. I read one thread where people listed every single album in a comment akin to “I can’t believe [XYZ] was snubbed.” If it’s your favorite, to you, it should be everyone’s favorite.

I did not love “Cadaver Sniffing Dog” when I first heard it. I still think it’s the least interesting song on In League with Dragons, but that’s a pretty good place to be. I’d probably say In League with Dragons is my second-favorite of the last ten albums, just behind Heretic Pride. Are these widely held opinions? Does it matter? No, but I felt I couldn’t drag that other list without putting something out there. And I only mention this in this space about “Cadaver Sniffing Dog” because John Darnielle even jokes about the metaphor. The dog is sniffing for a relationship that’s long-since died. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that, because the jam carries it through. The jam also carries the chorus, which is the title restated four times. None of this is to diminish the song, and in fact I think this is all intended to show just how strong I find the rest of the album. Comparisons are handy, but rankings never really do it for me in the world of the Mountain Goats. Just enjoy the groove.

396. In the Shadow of the Western Hills

Alex Russell Steal Smoked Fish , , , , , , ,

Better days come to those who wait, or at least we hope they do, in “In the Shadow of the Western Hills.”

Track: “In the Shadow of the Western Hills”
Album: Steal Smoked Fish (2012)

“In the Shadow of the Western Hills” appears on the Steal Smoked Fish EP, alongside the song in the title. “Steal Smoked Fish” is one of the absolute best Mountain Goats songs of the last ten years and as a result, I’ve never given as much time as I should to the song that’s paired with it. Both songs go with the cast on Transcendental Youth, where people struggle to connect with the people around them and struggle in much greater terms to connect with themselves. During an introduction to this one, John Darnielle once spoke of the entire package of songs as an attempt to grapple with people in this struggle. With this song specifically, Darnielle imagines (or remembers) a person who is fighting the chemicals that make them do things they don’t want to do or can’t understand.

“Call up Rebecca, maybe try to explain // but she hangs up while I’m still talking, I walk out into the rain” is a sad image, but it’s also sad for Rebecca. Characters are rarely named like this and we never hear anything else from Rebecca, so it’s not like a Jenny character, but it is a real person. It’s not “a friend” or “my love” it is Rebecca, a person, someone else out there who maybe wants you to feel better and maybe can’t even identify that as what you need. This one imagines the pain in both directions, where it’s sad that you wander outside and imagine visions and try to make connections, but it’s also sad how that reads to everyone else.

395. Roger Patterson Van

Alex Russell Black Pear Tree EP , , , , ,

With a seeming difference between the music and lyrics, “Roger Patterson Van” memorializes a musician who passed on.

Track: “Roger Patterson Van”
Album: Black Pear Tree EP (2008)

Roger Patterson was the bassist for a band called Atheist. He died in car accident right as the band was picking up steam, it seems, though I’ll confess I’m not very familiar with Atheist. I’ve tried to piece together what happened from the fan pages and the memorials, but the most helpful pieces are not in the style of police reports but the videos of Patterson playing. I encourage you to dig around yourself. His death is a tragedy, but there’s joy in trying to learn about these figures that John Darnielle is interested in. So much of his art, especially lately, has been about elevating figures that his audience might not know about. I may be representing my own experience, but metal and goth music are not my usual fare.

The tune was one Kaki King was playing as an instrumental that John Darnielle added lyrics to as a memorial for Roger Patterson. There are a lot of memorials in the catalog, but this one is downright jaunty. The construction explains why this sounds like it does, but really, does a memorial need to sound sad? “Nothing left inside now // nothing left to do // empty out the empties // half this stuff belongs to you” is a really incredible description of the physical steps left over after the emotional ones, so even though it’s in the middle of a bouncy, elaborate song, does that change how you take it? I’ve always been fond of this one, even with no connection to the subject. It’s a valuable lesson in the ways we think of grief and the many forms it can take.