The healing message of “Absolute Lithops Effect” takes on new meaning as we spend time indoors.

Track: “Absolute Lithops Effect”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

I am writing this entry at the end of 2020. I started this process many years ago. I try to leave the personal out of this as much as I can, because I don’t think everyone has my experience and I think the more universal you can make this the better chance it has of connecting. It’s impossible to do that with “Absolute Lithops Effect” in 2020.

Lithops are plants commonly called “living stones” because they look like rocks. They use this as camouflage to survive in harsh climate. John Darnielle uses this as the central image for a song about waiting around and hoping to bloom in emotionally harsh climate. When he wrote this song more than eighteen years ago he could not have imagined how it would sound in 2020. This narrator is recovering from “one long sweltering summer” and their plan is to go to a friend’s house and forget their time inside. Who among us doesn’t feel like that is the key to everything after a year of quarantine and the collapse of so much else?

“I am taking tiny steps forward,” our narrator says, “and I feel sure that my wounds will heal.” In the context of All Hail West Texas, this is a revolutionary statement. The Mountain Goats do not always offer such direct statements of redemption and hope. This person has spent “one blind season alone in here” and now they “are going to find the exit.” It’s striking, both in 2002 and in 2020, to hear someone insist that they are going to get through this. Whatever traps you, be it internal or external, it’s a message that will do you some good to hear.