mountain goats

304. Birth of Serpents

Alex Russell All Eternals Deck , , , , , , ,

“Birth of Serpents” finds John Darnielle in several places but having one single experience.

Track: “Birth of Serpents”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

John Darnielle has said a lot of things that stick with me, but I think a lot about a comment he made many years ago that “Waving at You” was a song he felt really close to. He said that the quiet ones were the close ones, even though most people thought it was when he was screaming. That answer probably has changed somewhat, especially as he’s written more about his own life in recent times. The last handful of albums have more songs about the real-deal John Darnielle than the first ten.

“Birth of Serpents” is only nominally about snakes. The chorus tells us to picture snakes under heat lamps, but really we’re in Oregon with John Darnielle. He never sings like this, with the last verse almost entirely pitched as high as he can go. So much of what makes the Mountain Goats great is the poetry and narrative, but the performance is central to “Birth of Serpents.” John Darnielle is feeling this one, which he probably always is, but he’s letting it show more here than usual.

He says that it’s about an experience in Portland where a friend told him another person they both used to know was working down the way. John Darnielle went to say hi, but found that they died a year earlier in a car accident. To understand the Mountain Goats is to understand this journey through Oregon and Iowa and California, but it’s also to picture this moment where you almost get to have an experience you thought impossible only to realize that actually, yeah, it’s as done as you feared it might be.

303. The House That Dripped Blood

Alex Russell Tallahassee , , , , , , , ,

Sinister vibes abound on “The House That Dripped Blood” as the Alpha Couple descends into the worst parts of their journey together.

Track: “The House That Dripped Blood”
Album: Tallahassee (2002)

“The House That Dripped Blood” could be a book report. The title is from a horror movie. The harmonica at the end is several parts laid on top of each other. The story is about the Alpha Couple and what dark things they get up to in the middle of Tallahassee when it’s all broken bad but every card isn’t on the table yet. Listen to it five times but not six because this is dangerous headspace to hang out in.

But that’s all the basics. Tallahassee is the best Mountain Goats album, though I’m sure John Darnielle would argue with that and most people reading this probably have fierce opinions, as well. It’s the best “album,” I’d say, because it tells a cohesive story and it works front to back. It’s one premise that is explored fully. At this point in the narrative, this is the drinking. “The cellar door is an open throat,” one Alpha tells the other, and we can picture them drinking and wandering around too-dark rooms. It’s horrible and it doesn’t have the hope of the opening songs or the resolve of the final ones.

The last live performance, as far as the Wiki is concerned, was in 2008. The final show opened with “Have to Explode,” one of the best Goats songs to open with, and closed with “Houseguest” into “No Children” into “Wild Sage” into “Palmcorder Yajna,” which is a pretty wild order to do that in. “The House That Dripped Blood” is a vital part of the album, but it feels a little weird to take as a set piece. It’s important as a means to get you from hope to despair, but be careful spending too much time on this part of the journey.

302. Spent Gladiator 2

Alex Russell Transcendental Youth , , , , , , ,

“Spent Gladiator 2” is John Darnielle’s insistent reminder that you have to hold out when it gets dark, even though that’s hard to do.

Track: “Spent Gladiator 2”
Album: Transcendental Youth (2012)

The Mountain Goats Wiki includes more than 150 live performances of “Spent Gladiator 2.” You could spend an entire day listening to all of them. I can’t recommend that, but you could. For several years in a row, “Spent Gladiator 2” was likely to be the last song the band played. It was often the conclusion of a second encore, sometimes with just Peter Hughes on bass and John Darnielle doing a slowed-down version with no mic. I once saw him wander through the crowd and sing it more or less at people, which was a truly special experience.

It’s the companion song to “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1,” which is much more triumphant and furious. The second one shows us a different type of resistance, with clenched teeth and final straws rather than burning bright. “Stay alive,” John Darnielle still says, but “maybe spit some blood at the camera.”

The message of Transcendental Youth is a consistent one. There is power in hope, even when it seems like there isn’t. The imagery in “Spent Gladiator 2” is grim, but it’s still worth standing up again. It’s always worth doing that, John Darnielle wants you to know. You’d pick up the same command from angry songs like “Up the Wolves” or frantic ones like “Dance Music” or a hundred other songs, but John Darnielle closes the show with “Spent Gladiator 2” because it’s the hardest lesson to learn. When you’re good and mad you’re likely to get back up, but you need to do it when it’s way harder than that, too.

301. For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands

Alex Russell Goths , , , , , ,

You don’t need to know much about Portuguese goth music to appreciate “For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands.”

Track: “For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands”
Album: Goths (2017)

In the leadup to the release of Goths, I remember when John Darnielle excitedly released “Andrew Eldritch is Coming Back to Leeds.” I’d never heard of Andrew Eldritch. It’s a really specific song about a topic I knew absolutely nothing about, which is not uncommon as an experience when listening to the Mountain Goats. You may or may not know the boxer Pinklon Thomas or the wrestler Ox Baker. You may not have seen The Lady from Shanghai. I don’t know that you have to be familiar with the subject matter to enjoy the song, but it helps.

I don’t listen to the kind of music John Darnielle listens to. If you follow him on any social media platform, you’ll see that he’s excited about new and old music all the time. He recommends recordings enthusiastically and seems to take in more music than anyone I know. It’s a great way to be and it’s really cool, even if it isn’t always to my tastes. I’m not a fan of any of the bands referenced on Goths and I’m not even really all that familiar with the scene. It doesn’t matter, especially for a song like “For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands.” This is so specific that most people won’t be familiar, so it has to be talked about with some universality.

It’s a song about being big in one place but still aspiring to have something else. John Darnielle says he wouldn’t expect to draw huge crowds in Japan and likens that to a band that’s enormous in some countries but might not play big rooms in America. It’s an interesting space to get lost in, even if you have no idea who Celtic Frost is.

300. Down Here

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

“Down Here” starts with a reference to Venus and only gets weirder from there.

Track: “Down Here”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

There are six annotations on “Down Here” on Kyle Barbour’s excellent site The Annotated Mountain Goats. They detail what the atmosphere of Venus is like, what a red-crowned crane is, and even what Lithuania is. Barbour’s site is instrumental to the more arcane details of Mountain Goats songs, but it’s also funny when it explains what Illinois is or what window blinds are. You get in the game to figure out what “The Monkey Song” is talking about but then you have to take that to the logical conclusion.

I am just going to say it: I have no idea what “Down Here” is talking about. I love the delivery of lines like “A telegram from Lithuania // and the news is not good” where you can hear John Darnielle snarl over the cranked-up guitar. It’s a great song and one I’ve heard dozens and dozens of times. Barbour’s annotations can unlock secrets for songs, especially the ones about myths, but sometimes there’s not enough on the page. I’ve said before that this whole exercise is an experience rather than an attempt to “solve” these songs, and I legitimately do not believe it is possible to draw a universal meaning from this one.

And that’s fine! The final verse is a construction you may have heard before, and Barbour links to this truly fascinating post where people spiral into discussions of this style through history. This may just be another story of a narrator facing doom of their own creation, but they’re talking about their end in a way that many before them did for generations. I’m not going to throw up my hands completely, but I do love that this one is just a little too weird to put a finger on entirely.

299. Woke Up New

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , ,

In one of the best-loved songs the Mountain Goats ever wrote, “Woke Up New” examines a relationship the day after the fact.

Track: “Woke Up New”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

I haven’t run the numbers, but I think it’s safe to say “Woke Up New” is the most popular song on Get Lonely. I think “Wild Sage” is the best song on the album and maybe the best song John Darnielle has ever written, but people love “Woke Up New.” Any time it’s played at a live show you will find couples embracing during it, which I really will never get used to seeing. It’s a crushing, brutal song that John Darnielle describes as being about one of the worst moments of his life, but the delivery seems to pass it off as a love song in some ways. There’s certainly a reading where these people are entranced by not the appearance of sweetness but the love they have being reflected in the fear of the loss of it, but it doesn’t really matter. A younger, angrier version of myself judged these people, but that’s the wrong way to live your life. They like the song, that’s all.

“Woke Up New” hit me immediately when I listened to Get Lonely, but as I spent more time with it I gravitated to the quieter, less accessible songs. “Woke Up New” is a phenomenal song, but it’s not one that I find puts me in the headspace that “Wild Sage” and “In the Hidden Places” do. It’s a breakup song like most of them are, but it’s one that feels like a story about a time rather than a demand for you to relive the time. John Darnielle often jokes in live shows about how he’s happily married and has all these songs about divorce, and depending on where you’re at on the timeline you may find “Woke Up New” to be exactly what you need.

298. Stars Around Her

Alex Russell Ghana, Songs About Fire , , , , , , , ,

We see one moment and have time to appreciate it in “Stars Around Her.”

Track: “Stars Around Her”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

There are hundreds of live Mountain Goats shows online, but I find myself getting hung up on specific ones like this show at Fletcher’s from 1996 that I’ve talked about before. Fletcher’s is gone, like a lot of places are gone, and the recording is frustrating because the audience won’t shut up. John Darnielle mentions it several times, including the introduction to “Stars Around Her” where he says it’s a quiet song that he probably shouldn’t play with a loud audience. As a much younger person I definitely talked at shows and I’ve tried to get better about that. Let people enjoy the show. You can catch up at the bar after the thing.

The Mountain Goats are never going to be a band for everyone, but they’re several magnitudes bigger now than they were in 1996. Fletcher’s seems like the kind of place where the audience might not be there because they wanted to see John Darnielle’s hyper-specific style of stomping and howling. It’s just the cost of doing business that sometimes you care about the show way more than the average person in the room. If most folks are there because the beer is cheap and the weather is nice then you might not get the best version of a song from a four-song release from forever ago.

Most of the live versions of “Stars Around Her” sound like the studio version. It appears to be a song about romantic longing that’s frozen in one image, though that may be a simplification. There are a lot of songs like this from this time period and that’s no slight to say, because this is a great one. John Darnielle’s voice is softer here than it usually is and it’s a truly nice moment. That’s enough, really.

297. Going to Wisconsin

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle delivers “Going to Wisconsin” through bared teeth, telling us this person is at the end of their rope.

Track: “Going to Wisconsin”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“You say you need me in California, but no thanks,” John Darnielle says in “Going to Wisconsin.” I can’t think of a simpler distillation of the early Mountain Goats narrator ethos. John Darnielle bites the lyrics and sounds furious, lending this narrator a sense of unhinged anger. Early Mountain Goats songs started as poems, and I don’t know if that’s true of this one or not but the alliteration in phrases like “the bottom of the boat” really pops either way.

The delivery is the point of this one. You can imagine this narrator telling everyone to go to hell and how they feel stuck on this idea. Persistence in the face of all opposition is a common idea in the early ones. “Everyone said just to sit still,” they even say, but we know you can’t stop someone like this. The chorus is an insistence that they’re headed to Wisconsin. California represents going home in a lot of Mountain Goats songs, but we don’t find out what Wisconsin means to this narrator. Is it Wisconsin just because the second verse mentions cheese? Surely not, but that’s one idea.

You can hear a live version of “Going to Wisconsin” played at Franklin Bruno’s house in 1992 on this recording, which may be the earliest Mountain Goats recording available. The anger comes through and it works just as well live as not, but it’s worth hearing both versions even though they’re similar. There may not be much to dig out of this one; sometimes it’s just about the snarl.

296. Shelved

Alex Russell Goths , , , , , ,

Peter Hughes shakes up the formula and sings a verse to remember on “Shelved.”

Track: “Shelved”
Album: Goths (2017)

Peter Hughes wrote and sang the final verse on “Shelved.” It feels so very real, with a character wondering how they get from point A to point Z and making their peace with how they’ll do it. It’s one of the stories that might have been, we’re told, and it’s not necessarily a bad one.

I think “Shelved” is the best song on Goths. The switch in vocals from John Darnielle to Peter Hughes doesn’t necessarily mean the character shifts, but I choose to believe it does. The whole song is about what happens when you can’t hack it anymore, or at least what happens when people who make decisions think you can’t. Do you compromise your integrity to keep getting on stage or do you hang it up? It’s a decision characters make all through songs on Goths, but this is the clearest the choice gets.

Much earlier in his career, John Darnielle wrote a song called “Anti-Music Song” that repeatedly slams real musicians. He said later that it doesn’t represent his actual feelings and that makes it a tough song to defend. I don’t know if “Shelved” is a character talking about Nine Inch Nails or John Darnielle talking about them, but either way this character doesn’t see themselves as that kind of artist. Goths is powerful because it goes beyond the decision to sell out and into what that actually means, but I love “Shelved” for freezing on the point you have to decide if it’s worth it. It’s easy to say that it isn’t, but what would it look like if you actually did it?

295. Black Pear Tree

Alex Russell Black Pear Tree EP , , , , ,

“Black Pear Tree” is about a near-death experience and how you picture it when you’re in the moment.

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

John Darnielle wrote “Black Pear Tree” when he thought he was about to die of a heart attack in Sweden. The doctor told him that he needed to let go of the feeling that he had to pay for past crimes. Can you imagine hearing that from a doctor? We’d all like to hear that our problems are not physical, sure, but what do you do with those instructions?

I once thought I was having a heart attack in the middle of the day, watching a movie I didn’t enjoy. It turned out to be nothing, but I had the same experience John Darnielle writes about here, where you suspect you are about to hear final news and then you don’t. “I saw the future in a dream last night,” he says, but also “there’s nothing in it.”

I’ve seen “Black Pear Tree” live four times, both with Kaki King and without. She brings a tremendous amount to the entire Black Pear Tree EP, and her vocals really change the experience of the title track. Both are excellent, but John Darnielle’s voice coming in as background vocals lends to the impact. He lived, as he thought he might not, and he reemerges as a voice behind the story of how he might not have. There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs that get close to these ideas, but few that end with “someday I am going to walk out of here free” that really, sincerely, definitely mean it.