music

219. Going to Utrecht

Alex Russell Nine Black Poppies , , , , , , ,

The simple message of “Going to Utrecht” feels heightened through consistent urging from an isolated narrator.

Track: “Going to Utrecht”
Album: Nine Black Poppies (1995)

I’ve been to the Netherlands but I’ve never been to Utrecht. The Netherlands includes 12 provinces, of which the smallest is Utrecht. I’m not going to pretend to know anything about it. Apparently the only Dutch Pope is from Utrecht. The point is that you conjure something in your mind when you think of the Netherlands and “Going to Utrecht” should do the same thing for you, unless you have intimate knowledge of the province or city named Utrecht.

Earlier this year, John Darnielle performed “Going to Utrecht” in Utrecht. Someone yelled for it and he told them that he’d played the song the last time he was there and thought it was too obvious, but then played it again anyway. It’s a strong live song, but the performance doesn’t differ strongly from the version on Nine Black Poppies. The live version is usually solo and thus you miss the backing vocals, but mostly it’s the same driving, building tune.

John Darnielle also says this is a true story. In April of 1995 the Mountain Goats toured Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and it’s entirely possible that this song comes from an experience he had during that stop in Utrecht. The lyrics are straightforward, but there’s a lot of emotion tied into the repetition of “I couldn’t believe it” and “with my own eyes.” It’s him and it’s not him, but really it’s anyone who has felt physically isolated from someone that they were, in some way, right there with, anyway.

218. Cubs in Five

Alex Russell Nine Black Poppies , , , , , , , , ,

The impossible becoming possible does not dull the message of “Cubs in Five.”

Track: “Cubs in Five”
Album: Nine Black Poppies (1995)

“Well, I’m free of all that now; there’s a lot of unlikely stuff that’d have to happen before I’d ever dive back into that radiant, glowing, magnificent ocean of high highs and hurt feelings.” – John Darnielle, about the creation of “Cubs in Five”

This quote that John Darnielle said in an interview with Slate is a lie. It’s true that he said it, but he said that he knew that he was kidding himself. This love story is the central joke in “Cubs in Five,” after a list of things that are unlikely or impossible. “I will love you again,” John Darnielle and Peter Hughes say, “I will love you, like I used to.”

The Cubs won the World Series. I live in Chicago and I lived here when that happened. I’m not much for baseball but even I understood the significance when it happened. Prior to it happening it seemed impossible, which is something many people feel about snakebit sports teams, but this one really might be the top of the list. Then it happened.

The song doesn’t lose anything by that happening. Tampa Bay also won a Super Bowl, which the song also suggests would be impossible, and that doesn’t matter either. What matters is that in the moment the song details, the narrator tried to come up with a list of things that seemed actually impossible and they centered their list with two things: the Cubbies winning everything and this love coming back. They both ain’t happening, and the certainty of the former helps you understand the certainty of the latter.

The power behind the sentiment (and the droning guitar) is what matters. There is so much powerful language in Mountain Goats songs, but never is someone trying to make a point more emphatically than this.

217. Transjordanian Blues

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

A song of praise that’s filled with potential disaster, “Transjordanian Blues” fits right in with other Mountain Goats songs.

Track: “Transjordanian Blues”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

“Transjordanian Blues” has been played live more than a handful of times. In nearly all of the recorded performances, John Darnielle comments on the fact that he’s playing old songs and isn’t confident that he knows them well enough to do them justice. This isn’t uncommon for a Mountain Goats show, but it’s interesting that the sentiment combines so consistently with this specific song.

You get the sense that John Darnielle really enjoys the act of playing “Transjordanian Blues.” The liner notes call it a “sermon” but that’s also obvious just from hearing it. There are dozens of religious songs in the catalog, but few that are this direct. The strumming makes you want to clap along, campfire style, and the lyrics are infectious. By the end, he’s howling praise for the Lord and the audience, in every live version, is howling right along with him.

At a performance in 2017 in Australia, John Darnielle said that every live show in Pomona in the early days was “basically that for 20 minutes” after playing it passionately and loud as anything. It’s true, too. A lot of the early set lists are 10 furious songs played in under half an hour, with themes from the specific preparation of foods to the loneliness of the end of the world as a metaphor for a relationship ending. From the beginning, the man who would eventually write an entire album of songs with Bible versus for titles was interested in the power of things larger than oneself. It’s a song about the strength of salvation, but it’s also just a way to get yourself into the zone. It fits in with everything else not because of the subject, but because you can’t help but belt it out.

216. Bad Waves

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

A narrator considers how to get a very serious message across in “Bad Waves.”

Track: “Bad Waves”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

We have a price and a time. It’s 1972 and our narrator is staying in a twenty-dollar-a-night hotel in “Bad Waves.” The placement on On Juhu Beach tells us we’re in Asia, even if the Bangladeshi children breakdancing doesn’t. It’s a curious scene, especially with the mention of Waterford crystal in a banquet hall. We’re clearly somewhere expensive and we’re preparing for a revelation from our narrator.

The drone of the recorder really makes this one feel miserable. John Darnielle wavers his voice over the chorus of “the waves will tear us all to pieces,” sometimes pitching his voice upwards to show that this is a difficult expression to get across. The liner notes mention that this narrator wants to tell someone something, but is worried about how the message will be met.

“I will try to gather my strength // I will rest up all week,” they tell us. This is clearly complicated and it’s clearly important. In this expensive hotel with a grand setting, our narrator wants to be sure their audience considers the impact of what they are about to hear. After so much build up, the reveal of “the waves will tear us all to pieces” is shocking.

What are we supposed to make of this? The tone is despondent and the message matches. In the first verse, the narrator considers some boys dancing and says that waves will destroy them. In the second, the narrator says the same will happen to all of us. It’s a pessimistic message, to be sure, but is it what people need to hear? Our narrator seems to feel that way, but they also don’t know if this is going to go over well. Dark, brutal realism about death is not uncommon in the Mountain Goats, but it’s rarely this direct.

215. Hotel Road

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

On a beach in the biggest city in India, a monk looks out over the world and reflects.

Track: “Hotel Road”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

Imagine that you are John Darnielle and it is the late 1990s. You have just written and released The Coroner’s Gambit and you are about to begin the work of All Hail West Texas. This is a big moment for you, though of course, because you exist in the present, you have no way of knowing that. In this head space, you write several songs that form small EPs. Many of them are about death, even more than usual for you.

“Hotel Road” opens the beautiful, but very different, On Juhu Beach. The album is out of print because it included intricate, handmade packaging. John Darnielle still loves complex packaging, but nothing is really close to On Juhu Beach. The songs reflect this level of craft, with an eerie specificity to them that makes you picture not just the idea of India, but a very grounded, very real part of India.

The liner notes tell us this is an old monk in a hotel room at the top of a building. The monk watches the world around them and contemplates their surroundings. The waves are clear and the children are joyful. In my reading, the ending finds the monk not embracing death, but wondering why death should be something we think about at all. “It’s hard to say why // I should come here to die” could mean any number of things, but I choose to read it as an acceptance of the passing of time, but not quite yet. Not on a day like this in a place like this.

214. Commandante

Alex Russell Devil in the Shortwave , , , , , , ,

The bouncy, exciting “Commandante” hides dark ends with one last singalong for the road.

Track: “Commandante”
Album: Devil in the Shortwave (2002)

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Mountain Goats songs about two anxious, furious people who feel that their situation is important, dire, and ending. Depending on what point in the timeline we meet those people, John Darnielle tells their story differently. By the early 2000s, the couple gained a name as The Alpha Couple. It is a point of debate, though clearly ridiculous debate, whether any two people who fight and hate as much as they love are The Alpha Couple or just two other people feeling the same way. There’s enough commentary from John Darnielle that we can infer that not every couple in every song is the same one, of course, and that the feelings are just universal enough that we think it’s the same folks going through the same pain.

These aren’t the famous ones, I don’t think. These are just two people who sound deceptively happy if you don’t listen to the lyrics. John Darnielle clearly has fun on “Commandante,” with the howling chorus and the scream-along-ready line of “I am never going back to Cincinnati,” which, incidentally, went over like gangbusters in Cincinnati in 2013. The studio version is fast and peaks in the right places, but live shows like that really sell it. You can hear the foot stomps from the crowd and the individual folks in the audience that put their own meaning into sailing through the night sky like a pair of bottle rockets.

These two are already at the end. Threats to drink more whiskey than a famous Irish alcoholics and vague mentions of grievances and great big secrets are really obvious signs that not all is well. But John Darnielle reminds us with the melody that the end sometimes feels fun, right before you get there.

 

213. Handball

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now!, Why You All So Thief? , , , , , , ,

“I did not come to play handball,” a narrator insists in “Handball,” and the menace is the point.

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

“You’ll get nothing from me, do you hear? Nothing! Anything I know about this odd little song will go with me to the grave.” – Liner notes for “Handball” on Protein Source of the Future…Now!

John Darnielle has written hundreds of songs, but none of them like “Handball.” The first verse is four loose lines from Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The rest is the line “I did not come to play handball.” That is 100% of “Handball.”

There have been countless attempts to understand and debate the meaning of these songs. “Handball” is baffling in that the two verses aren’t connected in any obvious way, but it’s also very clear if one assumes that disconnect is the point. “I kill a man on the day his life seems sweetest to him” would be a Mountain Goats line if it weren’t something else already, so the choice to use the lines in the first verse is clear. How does that connect to any one of the multiple sports called handball?

John Darnielle wrote the lyrics down and asked a studio full of people to sing it with him on a radio performance in Chicago in 2002. At a show years later, he called that performance “creepy for the sake of being creepy.” All of this suggests that trying to dig into “Handball” may be an attempt to look for things that aren’t there.

I once made a fellow Mountain Goats fan a shirt with a clip art handball player and the phrase “I did not come to play handball” on it. The point of the shirt was that a fellow Goats fan would understand, but understand what? I can’t explain it, but I feel like once you get that, you get all of this.

211. Ox Baker Triumphant

Alex Russell Babylon Springs EP , , , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle sings a song for the bad guy in all of us in “Ox Baker Triumphant.”

Track: “Ox Baker Triumphant”
Album: Babylon Springs EP (2006)

Wrestling’s story involves the same beats as every other kind, but it benefits from more black and white narratives than other types of performance. The “heels” of wrestling often have to be very obvious to get an idea across quickly to an audience.

Ox Baker was a heel who punched people in the heart. You only need to hear one Ox Baker promo to understand him. He hates you and the goodness you represent, and he’s here to punch everyone who stands in the way of his dominance. When John Darnielle introduces “Ox Baker Triumphant” he often talks about the power of that idea. Ox Baker isn’t here to set up a complicated battle between good and evil and he isn’t here to win you over. He wants to punch your good guy in the heart. You don’t really get more to the point.

“Ox Baker Triumphant” is exactly what it says on the label. Ox Baker has been betrayed by the world he loves and he is here to get revenge on everyone and everything. Given what we know about Ox, we can assume he saw this coming. He demands that the others click their heels in a mock attempt to go home before yelling “I bet you never expected me!”

Darnielle’s soaring delivery on the studio version and the blown-out fury on most live versions accomplish the same thing. We get a sense that Ox Baker is done with all this and that his retribution is well-deserved. For all the time the good guys will get in later Goats songs, “Ox Baker Triumphant” reminds us why we love to watch the moments when people get pushed to their limits. It doesn’t really matter what he came to do in the first place, now it’s his time to shine.

210. Malevolent Cityscape X

Alex Russell Infidelity , , , , ,

In “Malevolent Cityscape X” a narrator throws a barb at another character in a fiery, red moment.

Track: “Malevolent Cityscape X”
Album: Infidelity (as The Extra Glenns) (1993)

There are many small “collections” within songs by the Mountain Goats. There are dozens of songs that start with “Going to” and offer us a mental picture to accompany a story. There are four “Orange Ball” songs which are loosely connected. There are more “Alpha” songs about the Alpha Couple than can be counted. There exist only three songs in this particular collection: “Malevolent Seascape Y,” “Malevolent Cityscape X,” and “Ambivalent Landscape Z.”

All three are Extra Glenns songs, so they don’t get the kind of rotation that traditional Mountain Goats songs get at live shows. You’d need to dig very far back to find a recorded live performance of “Malevolent Cityscape X.” You’d find yourself at The Empty Bottle in Chicago, where you’d hear “Seascape” transition into “Cityscape.” The former is a quiet, sad song about the meaning of relationships. It wasn’t released for seven more years, on Martial Arts Weekend. The latter closed Infidelity, the three song EP that kicked off the Extra Glenns.

The connective tissue through these three songs is one character addressing another about the end. This isn’t an uncommon subject for John Darnielle, but “Cityscape” gets weirder than he usually does. Another character sings a song and changes the color of the sky, which causes our narrator to yell “you strike me as mean-spirited!”

So many other Goats narrators would love to find such a succinct message for the object of their ire. They’d also probably agree with the end of the second verse: “I love you beneath the red sky // but for the life of me I couldn’t say why.”

209. Going to Lubbock

Alex Russell Infidelity , , , , ,

“Going to Lubbock” follows a solitary drive through Texas on a Tuesday with surprising results.

Track: “Going to Lubbock”
Album: Infidelity (as The Extra Glenns) (1993)

In 1993, John Darnielle and Franklin Bruno, as part of their group The Extra Glenns, put out a song called “Going to Lubbock” on an album called Infidelity. As far as I can tell, their relationship with it ended there. I’m certain they played it live, but no set list I can find mentions it and there’s no record of anyone even talking about seeing it.

That’s not uncommon or surprising. There are only a few dozen Extra Glenns songs and “Going to Lubbock” is one of the more perplexing ones. A character drives until they run out of gas in the middle of nowhere and finds a skull. It’s very Darnielle, but it’s also the kind of tale that leaves you wondering what you’re supposed to do with it. Why did you tell me this, you’ll wonder, and what am I expected to feel?

It took me a few listens to find my own answer. A character digging in a very specific space in the desert and finding a human skull suggests many things, until you realize they’re only there because they ran out of gas. This isn’t someone finding a body they buried, it’s random. What’s more, they then lay the skull in their own backseat.

There’s room here to draw other conclusions. Maybe they ran out of gas and then walked the rest of the way, which would suggest that they are responsible for this skull in the first place. That changes the character, but neither explanation helps us understand the “pronounced depression” they notice at the base of the skull. It’s a short, quizzical song from nearly three decades ago and it leaves you with nothing but questions. I’m almost sure that, and not figuring it out, is the point.