mountain goats

122. Treetop Song

Alex Russell New Asian Cinema , , , , , , ,

 

“Treetop Song” is a rare bit of positive thinking in the world of the Mountain Goats.

Track: “Treetop Song”
Album: New Asian Cinema (1998)

At this show on April 9th, 2009 in Bloomington, Indiana, John Darnielle played some of Moon Colony Bloodbath with John Vanderslice. He played the never-released “For TG&Y” and the old classic “Cobscook Bay.” At the end, he came out and played a three-song encore that many Mountain Goats fans would swoon over: “Treetop Song,” “Cutter,” and of course, “No Children.”

This performance is the only live recording of “Treetop Song” that I can find. John Darnielle stumbles over a line towards the end and the crowd has to help him. This happens sometimes when he tries to play a very old, very rare song. It’s endearing, because it shows that even the man himself can’t keep a 500+ song catalog in his head at once. It’s always a fun moment when one voice calls out the missing lyric to a weird song in the middle of a concert, even if that might sound like a weird thing to like.

You won’t hear this live very often because the harmonica is important and that’s John Darnielle playing it. Aside from the harmonica, it’s almost a slight song. Both Darnielle’s delivery and strumming seem calm. It’s a great album-ending track in that way. The characters in New Asian Cinema are all struggling, but we see most of them right before the bubble bursts. The narrator of “Treetop Song” makes a decision to jump from one tree to another, but they also assure us that this choice means good things. Darnielle emphasizes the “be” in “And I knew that I would be all right.” In other songs this kind of statement might make you wonder if they were trying to convince themselves, but here it sounds like a fact.

121. Going to Malibu

Alex Russell Chile de Árbol, Protein Source of the Future...Now! , , , , , , ,

The robotic drum beat and delivery on “Going to Malibu” turn an argument into a march to war.

Track: “Going to Malibu”
Album: Chile de Árbol (1993) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

Chile de Árbol is not an easy listen two decades after release. The recording is scratchy and caries all of the “poor-quality-on-purpose” charm that the early releases do. Lyrically, it’s challenging and confusing. There are tons of Biblical references, a song about Billy the Kid’s magic shoes, and an extended discussion of the Easter Bunny that might be about the end of the world. We’re deep in the weeds in 1993, but there are treasures there.

“Going to Malibu” is the most “Mountain Goats” song on the album. All five songs have charm, but “Going to Malibu” is a direct address from one character to another about the state of their relationship. The relentless, mechanical rat-a-tat-tat marching drum sells a sense of unavoidable dread. These characters have to have this argument and it has to happen this way. John Darnielle’s delivery has a robotic quality to it that works alongside the drum. You can almost feel the fist pounding the table to punctuate each word in the chorus of “that’s not true // that’s a rotten thing to say // that’s a damnable lie.”

Your enjoyment of “Going to Malibu” may vary. It’s definitely a weird song, even for the early ones, and the delivery and backing drum do lack the raw emotion that makes much of the early catalog so passionate. For me, this song wouldn’t work any other way. It’s intended to be a battlefield by the use of “neutral ground” and the battle march aesthetic is a logical choice. Lines like “the thoughts that race around my mind // could fill a long unreadable book” are worth the sound quality, and if you can put yourself in the non-magic shoes of the narrator, you might appreciate why they feels like they’re going to war.

120. World Cylinder

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

“World Cylinder” closes the delightfully strange On Juhu Beach with a message about ignoring your problems.

Track: “World Cylinder”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

Juhu is a neighborhood of Mumbai on the western coast of India. The beach is well-known and that’s definitely the Juhu referenced in On Juhu Beach, but the liner notes for the album are in Japanese. John Darnielle lived in Iowa in 2001 and released an album with Japanese liner notes and a title named after a beach in India. The packaging is hand sewn and the album itself is rare, which means you’ll pay several hundred dollars if you want a real one.

All of this is to say that the five songs that make up On Juhu Beach are strange. It’s the perfect combination of things that contributes to the mythos of the Mountain Goats. The Japanese liner notes include “explanations” of each song, and they’re fascinating translated. “World Cylinder” boils down to “dance music for uncool people,” which seems like a good summation of what Mountain Goats fans are looking for some nights.

The song is fun and bouncy. The repeated “do I have to hit you over the head with it” sounds exasperated, but you can almost hear a smile and a laugh in John Darnielle’s voice. This is just after the bleak The Coroner’s Gambit and just before the complex All Hail West Texas. John Darnielle describes On Juhu Beach as “really different and out there” and it’s easy to see why. It doesn’t serve as connective tissue between anything and it’s tough to assign an overall feeling to the five songs. The album title does create a setting: a person not interested in the specifics of the world, but someone who really just wants to hang out by the beach and ignore the things that can’t be changed. Just what they’re ignoring is a canvas you can fill in yourself.

119. Alpha Rats Nest

Alex Russell Tallahassee , , , , , , ,

The Alpha Couple is on their last legs in “Alpha Rats Nest” but they aren’t quite finished.

Track: “Alpha Rats Nest”
Album: Tallahassee (2002)

Tallahassee may take some time to process. When you first hear it, you’re probably going to latch on to “No Children.” That’s perfectly normal. The hook in “No Children” is outstanding and it gets across the message of Tallahassee easier than most other tracks. Subsequent listens will probably highlight the rockers. You might like the dance music of “Southwood Plantation Road” or the chugging anger of “See America Right.” It will depend on your mood and relationship status, but all of Tallahassee will eventually seep into you.

Different people like different Mountain Goats albums, but Tallahassee is likely their best and most complete. It’s the journey of one couple (the Alpha Couple) as they drive from California to Florida to spend their married life together. They love each other and hate each other and something in between that’s closer to how people feel at their worst. They try to save their marriage (sort of) but they mostly pour cheap vodka all over it and glare at each other in the heat. They know it’s all over but they’re so in love with the end of it.

John Darnielle says that “Alpha Rats Nest” was always going to be the last song on the album. The strumming makes it feel like a “fun” song, which is fitting for a song about the end and Tallahassee. It’s not just a divorce album, it’s about how this couple thinks even their end must be dramatic. They’ve just been through “Oceanographer’s Choice” and yelled at each other, and there’s still an end to come after “Alpha Rats Nest.” “Sing for the damage we’ve done,” one says, “and the worse things we’ll both do.” Their actual end is too dark to be a song, so it’s fitting that we leave on a questionably “happy” note.

118. Some Other Way

Alex Russell Undercard , , , , , ,

“Some Other Way” looks at grand gestures and doing dangerous things to “win back” someone who is long gone.

Track: “Some Other Way”
Album: Undercard (2010)

Undercard is the first album from The Extra Lens, which is John Darnielle and Franklin Bruno. They’re same two guys that make up The Extra Glenns. Franklin Bruno plays piano and several other instruments on a number of Mountain Goats releases. At some point, the difference between The Extra Lens/Glenns and the Goats themselves becomes academic.

Franklin Bruno wrote “Some Other Way” and it shows. The opening four lines see the narrator string a rope to hang themselves and fill a pot of tea with poison. Just as quickly, they decide those aren’t going to work and that they need “some other way” to earn the love of another person. Bruno also wrote the song “Houseguest” as a part of Nothing Painted Blue, which has been covered dozens of times by the Goats and features a similarly unhinged narrator trying to express themselves in dark ways.

By the next verse we’re back to the same scene. The windows are sealed and the gas is filling the room and then, just as suddenly, the window is smashed and the narrator is back to the drawing board. There are a lot of ways to read the motivations behind these actions, but the threat of suicide as an unhealthy means of earning love is desperate behavior. The song fades out with a repetition of “to make you love me” that’s haunting given what we know about the character, but the music is almost jaunty. It lends a pulse to the song and seems to suggest that while this person is definitely going about it wrong, they know that. “There are things a letter won’t explain,” after all, but you can’t make your case if you aren’t here to make it.

117. Standard Bitter Love Song #7

Alex Russell Zopilote Machine , , , , , ,

“Standard Bitter Love Song #7” reminds us of a time we couldn’t leave a relationship without saying one last horrible thing.

Track: “Standard Bitter Love Song #7”
Album: Zopilote Machine (1994)

There are six songs with “Standard Bitter Love Song” in the title, so far as anyone seems to know. #4, #7, and #8 are on albums, #5 and #6 exist in the corners of the Internet, and #1 is a screaming, stomping fan-favorite that’s seen a revival in the last few years after John Darnielle played it at Farm Sanctuary in 2007. #2 and #3 likely exist, if for no other reason than it’s more likely that they’re real than not, but you never know. Maybe it’s better and stranger if they never turn up.

They’re angry, bitter songs sung from one lover to another. The Alpha Couple songs do a lot of the heavy lifting regarding “bitter” in the Goats catalog, but these seem more like a place for John Darnielle to try out a deeper anger. The title is so on-the-nose that he can get away with being direct. In most of them, the narrator either talks about violence and there’s lots of blood and gnashing of teeth. They’re songs for the specific set of emotions that boil up when you feel like a “standard bitter love song” is exactly what you need.

In #7 the narrator imagines themselves as a fly on the wall earlier, likely in the hopes of seeing what caused “that innocent look” the other lover displays. The love is totally gone here, and it’s summed up best with the most brutal lyric: “I know you’d kill me if you could stand the sight of blood.” The guitar behind it all feels tense and John Darnielle’s snarl persists through both verses. When you’ve made up your mind like this it’s time to leave a relationship, but the standard bitter love songs exist for those final jabs you can’t help but get in first.

116. Thank You Mario but Our Princess Is in Another Castle

Alex Russell Black Pear Tree EP , , , , , , ,

 

Toad from Super Mario Bros. speaks for all of us in “Thank You Mario but Our Princess Is in Another Castle.”

Track: “Thank You Mario but Our Princess Is in Another Castle”
Album: Black Pear Tree EP (2008)

This is Toad’s song, of course, but it’s so much more than that.

“Thank You Mario but Our Princess Is in Another Castle” is exactly what Toad, the servant of the Princess, tells you when you rescue him at the end of each world in Super Mario Bros. As far as references in a Mountain Goats song go, this one is practically commonplace. Lots of people remember the frustration of getting to the end of a set of levels and hoping to rescue your beloved Princess, but instead being told that you’re at a dead end.

The subject matter is silly, as Toad is an inherently ridiculous character. He’s got a mushroom on his head and he exists in a world of “eight-bit choirs” on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Toad is a source of comic relief in many Mario games, and when he’s not silly he’s terrified. He’s worried about “guys dressed up like sorcerers” that torment his people in Super Mario World. People seem to like to point out that those only exist in a different game, but if we’re going to be that specific, how does Toad know what “screeching tires” sound like?

Beyond the silliness, there’s real fear here. The album Black Pear Tree EP is about a time John Darnielle thought he might have a heart attack. Some of the other songs seem more serious at first, but why shouldn’t Toad represent a fear of death? He’s defenseless and likely to lose everything. When Kaki King joins John Darnielle for the chorus, it’s about the relief of passing a moment you expected to be your last: “Yeah when you came in // I could breathe again.”

115. Tahitian Ambrosia Maker

Alex Russell Sweden , , , ,

 

The most important moment in “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker” is slight enough that you might miss it in your real life.

Track: “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker”
Album: Sweden (1995)

As far as the usual sources are aware, “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker” has never been played live and John Darnielle isn’t on the record about it. It’s on Sweden, which many fans count among the greatest records the band has produced, but Sweden has nineteen tracks.

The liner notes on Sweden contain, appropriately, Swedish subtitles for each song. Some of them are cryptic with lines like “the coldest winter” and “those who escaped were innocent,” but the subtitle for this song is just “he’s recognized you.” That might imply that the characters are pursued by someone they’re trying to lose or it might mean something else entirely. It might even refer to the speaker, from the perspective of the other character. It deepens the mystery of what’s going on here without expressly revealing it, which is fitting for a Swedish subtitle on a Mountain Goats record.

With a lack of primary and secondary sources, we are left with the text itself. Two characters are hungry and one offers bread to the other. John Darnielle’s “moments of grace like this being wholly unmerited” is beautiful, but it also says something about the state of these two. The final verse is all about a familiar moment in a Goats song: one character touches the other one gently and the recipient imbues it with powerful meaning. It happens in a number of Goats songs, but it’s a useful device because we’ve all had that experience. The speaker devolves and screams “pure gold, nothing but gold” and is driven to promise a coconut cream pie, but the reasoning is open to interpretation. “Because I saw the sky coming down to meet you,” like any good Goats lyric, is malleable enough to be sweet or foreboding, depending on your current feelings towards love.

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?

113. The Window Song

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now! , , , ,

 

“The Window Song” could have been lost to time, but now persists to express one truly great image.

Track: “The Window Song”
Album: Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

Protein Source of the Future…Now! is a collection of four early Mountain Goats albums and a handful of songs released on other compilations. “The Window Song” is originally from Pawnshop Reverb, a 22-song collection released by Shrimper in 1992. If you want the original, it’ll run you $40 and you’ll have to find a way to play a cassette.

The truly early stuff in the catalog is full of oddities, but “The Window Song” is a standout. 1992 is the second year of the Mountain Goats and this is the first song that features the Bright Mountain Choir, the all-female backing vocalists that includes original bassist Rachel Ware. It’s an essential part of Goats history, but it would be lost to time without the reissue. Nowadays you can find just about anything from the Goats online, but I think to appreciate this one to the fullest you have to imagine someone trying to order Pawnshop Reverb in 1997. I don’t know that music was better when it was harder to find, but there’s a romanticism to that chase.

No matter how you find it, “The Window Song” is a beautifully sad one. The chorus of “I know you, you’re the one // I’ve spent three seasons trying // to pretend that I never knew” repeats four times as it grows in intensity, but it’s the second verse that always gets me. “I moved toward your voice and my body got so light I could have walked on eggs right then and not broken a one of them” is a classic Goats line. It’s crammed full of words and yet only expresses one idea. Economy of language is usually about expressing an image quickly, but here the specificity helps you think of someone who has this impact on you.