reissue

142. Answering the Phone

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , , ,

 

 

The outtake “Answering the Phone” deserves a spot among the best concert singalong songs of the Mountain Goats.

Track: “Answering the Phone”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2013 reissue)

Arguably the best of the new tracks on the 2013 reissue of All Hail West Texas, “Answering the Phone” demands your attention. All the new tracks work, but you can understand why the others missed the original cut. They’re mostly complex and require multiple listens to sink into your brain.

This is decidedly untrue for “Answering the Phone.” The entire thing is surface level, right down to the title that John Darnielle says comes from being interrupted by phone calls during previous takes. Being surface level isn’t a bad thing. You immediately, from the first listen, will latch on to phrases like “you came here for comfort, you came to the wrong place” and the chorus of “I think something’s wrong with me.”

John Darnielle’s best narrators are missing small-to-large pieces of themselves. Depending on the album, they show varied levels of understanding towards their predicaments. This one knows where they stand in the world and uses three verses to guess as to the reasoning behind their state of mind. Maybe it’s their childhood of undernourishment or bad upbringing or maybe it’s their teenage years of angry music or maybe it’s their current state of drunkenness and repeated mistakes. It’s about the journey, as they say, and this narrator retraces their steps to no avail.

You can almost hear people in some dark bar that’s church-like in its reverence for bands like this as they scream “I think something’s wrong with me!” while John Darnielle shakes his fist from the stage. It never happened, or at least we don’t know about it, because this song didn’t make the original All Hail West Texas and never lived in the live rotation. The sneer over the third verse here is all-time good and it’s a real shame this remained an outtake.

126. Hardpan Song

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , , ,

In “Hardpan Song,” a narrator considers how terrible weather is relatable when you’re feeling down and out.

Track: “Hardpan Song”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2013 reissue)

Merge Records reissued All Hail West Texas in 2013 with seven additional tracks. The original 2002 release is a turning point for John Darnielle, and you’ll find lots of devotees who call it the best album he’s released. It has several iconic songs and straddles all the moods of a great Mountain Goats album from deep and personal depression to boundless and triumphant love. The seven additional tracks on the 2013 release include an alternate take of “Jenny” and some really interesting oddities, with the main connective tissue being that they all sound like they would have made sense on All Hail West Texas from the start.

“Hardpan Song” opens with a sample from the radio and sounds like so many songs from the first decade of the Mountain Goats. In the liner notes of the reissue John Darnielle says as much and says that it doesn’t really feel right for the album. It’s definitely classic Darnielle, with the incongruous jazz and then a low, quiet musing about plant growth and how it’s just like his own sad existence.

Hardpan is soil that won’t keep water and thus won’t grow anything. The narrator thinks about hardpan and how ruined soil seems like it’s ruined forever, but then it rains and rains sometimes. They snarl “it shows no signs of stopping” and it’s clear that the miserable conditions evoke something else. It’s too brief for us to know exactly what situation is at play here, but the tense guitar and “the rain comes // it floods the town // and kills everybody in it” tell us that it’s not a great day in Texas. “Hardpan Song” is essentially a musing on “when it rains it pours,” but with typical Mountain Goats flourish.