song meanings

391. Cotton

Alex Russell We Shall All Be Healed , , , , , , ,

“Cotton” is about specific cotton for a specific purpose, but it’s also about the things you leave behind physically but not mentally.

Track: “Cotton”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

It’s kinda remarkable that a song like “Cotton” has been played hundreds of times live. It’s an outstanding song on an outstanding album, but it’s so personal. John Darnielle has said that it’s about imbuing objects with yourself such that when they go away you feel the pain. I relate to this deeply, and my personal totems aren’t as specific as John Darnielle’s, but the process of how they get there feels similar. John Darnielle’s father owned a desk that the younger Darnielle took to Portland. We Shall All Be Healed is about what happened in Portland. You don’t need me to tell you that it didn’t go all that well in Portland.

I’ve listened to “Cotton” countless times. It is one of those songs. It’s catchy, in the way that songs like this are catchy, but it also rewards deeper study. You’ll get most of the context the first time through, presuming you pick up on what “the stick pins and the cottons” in the drawer of that same desk are used for in this apartment in Portland. You don’t necessarily need to know that it was his father’s desk and that there are complex emotions as something goes from being a childhood memory into a place where you keep your drugs. The strength of We Shall All Be Healed and the best songs on it, like “Cotton,” is that you do not need to be exactly there to be close enough to count. Maybe you did not have a difficult time with specific drugs in specific Portland, but I would bet that there was something you once had that you no longer have. Now, you know.

390. Thanks for the Dress

Alex Russell Hot Garden Stomp , , , , ,

“Thanks for the Dress” is pretty straightforward, but only after you learn what you’re looking at.

Track: “Thanks for the Dress”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

I am truly amazed sometimes at the detail you can find online. Before you read further, especially if you don’t already know, listen to “Thanks for the Dress” and guess at the meaning first. I spent plenty of time studying the humanities and I really love ancient mythology, but I would not have been able to pick out the story of Medea, who married Jason but was betrayed and later gave Jason’s new wife a cursed dress. I can’t imagine John Darnielle thought people who listened to Hot Garden Stomp would get it, but someone left an uncited notation on the Mountain Goats Wiki that explains the reference. This seems to refer to this screening of a film in 2015. Mystery solved, if that’s what you’re in it for.

The sound quality is especially rough on this one, with the samples that open the song very loud and shocking. This does work with the song and it puts you in the right headspace, but still, your experience may be impacted. I started this project years ago primarily motivated by a desire to go through every song, even the ones I didn’t spend much time with during normal listening. One such song was always “Thanks for the Dress.” I can see both sides of the argument about researching meaning in that it is less mysterious now that I see the code but also that it takes on so much more meaning. I’d never say anyone who held either position was wrong, but the title is so much more delicious when you imagine the shift in meaning just a little while later.

389. 15-1

Alex Russell Hot Garden Stomp , , , , ,

Two people take a trip down the highway, or at least hope to do just that, in “15-1.”

Track: “15-1”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

There exists a “15-2” that we won’t really talk about much, but I encourage you to hear it and contrast it with “15-1.” The naming convention is obviously a connection and it may go deeper, but I think the one actually released on Hot Garden Stomp is the better song. I’m surprised to hear a much younger John Darnielle internally rhyme “moonbeams” with “sweet cream” but you have to appreciate it within the context. This feels like a song about young love, about a time when thirty dollars and another night or two with someone is just about as big as you’ll let yourself dream. That never really goes away, but it feels like such a young narrator to me. I’m sure I’m falling prey to the problem of picturing John Darnielle as the narrator, which we must never do, but the high pitch and 1993 just sorta does the lifting for you.

I think this is in the top half of Hot Garden Stomp, but I can understand why it never found that sweet spot of songs that show up in the solo set every now and again. This one is pretty directly about romantic love, and it’s a little more physical than a lot of them ever got. “Just an old sweet song made new by your body” is not especially explicit, but it takes you to a more specific place than some of the grander emotional directions from some of the other songs. There’s something intimate here that mixes so well with the guitar and the word choice. You could miss this one, but I encourage you to close your eyes and listen again.

388. Feed This End

Alex Russell Hot Garden Stomp , , , , ,

A sweet, complex love song, “Feed This End” stands out among the early tracks of the Mountain Goats.

Track: “Feed This End”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

Every now and again, John Darnielle talks about the times that he thought the Mountain Goats were coming to an end. He references those times to talk about when the band was a hobby and nowhere near a profession. It’s weird to talk about fame or success in a world that’s so bifurcated, but the Mountain Goats of today are unquestionably, wildly successful compared to their earlier versions. The band now is a four-piece, at least the touring version is, and they play rooms much larger than The Duke Coffeehouse where you would have found John Darnielle in 1997. At that show, John Darnielle thanked “Johnny Nall,” known to most fans as Jon Nall, arguably the most “famous” Mountain Goats fan who set up a quasi-official website and transcribed so much of what we have to go on from the early days. It was a different time, is what I’m getting at.

The recording from that night in the coffee shop includes one of the only recordings of “Feed This End” you can find easily online. John Darnielle introduces the song as “a very old love song,” which makes it now a very, very old love song. The recording on Hot Garden Stomp is a little difficult to listen to, as is that live version. This is just the cost of reaching back three decades to listen to where it all began. The sound quality may suffer, but the message absolutely does not. A lot of the early songs can feel slight compared to the recent output, but this one is undeniably sweet. I encourage you to push through and to sit with it until it gets inside your bones.

387. Fresh Cherries in Trinidad

Alex Russell Hot Garden Stomp , , , , ,

“Fresh Cherries in Trinidad” may not be coming to a live show near you, but it’s an interesting sign of the times.

Track: “Fresh Cherries in Trinidad”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

A few years ago, John Darnielle stopped posting on Tumblr. I get the sense that most people did at about the same time. I was never a heavy user, I used it for a writing project for a year and abandoned mine. It’s a quirky platform, with timestamps stored on the archive page but not available on individual pages. This is a long introduction just for one word, but I encourage everyone with an interest in the band to dig through more than this page, where John Darnielle said a little bit about every song on Hot Garden Stomp and if he’d play them again. About “Fresh Cherries in Trinidad” he just said “nope.”

The arc of the Mountain Goats is long at this point. You can trace the emotional intensity from the very first songs to the most recent ones but the music itself is radically different. I think you could find a way to say “Fresh Cherries in Trinidad” is the logical predecessor, but I think you’d be reaching. The early keyboard preset songs are part of the journey, to be sure, but they’re out of place even sometimes on the old albums.

John Darnielle dismissed it with one word, but that’s just in reference to if he would play it at a live show. I don’t think you could do this one justice outside of the style it’s presented it, but there are elements that would work. I like the phrasing of “I feel things occasionally like this.” You can see the songwriter that would emerge, but you should also enjoy what he was doing at the time.

386. Ice Blue

Alex Russell Hot Garden Stomp , , , , ,

“Ice Blue” does a whole lot with very little language.

Track: “Ice Blue”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

It is not strictly correct to say that the Mountain Goats don’t write love songs, but your definition of a love song must bend a little bit for a lot of them. John Darnielle has a habit of saying “this is a love song” before playing something that may or may not be a love song as I understand the term. You can’t really be right or wrong about this sort of thing, but it’s all part of the game. This becomes less true the further back you go, with “Ice Blue” as a prime example.

There are 40 words in “Ice Blue” and that includes a repeated line. My word counter tool estimates the speaking time at 14 seconds. I don’t have the stats on this because even I’m not this crazy, but this might be the least amount of words in a Mountain Goats song. Up against “Going to Japan” from the same album, it sounds like an entirely different band wrote this one. Even with those limitations, you have the perfect choice of a line, the fourth line’s “ha ha ha // ha ha ha.” You might call that lazy, but an extreme pivot to mania in a love song is pretty appropriate, I’d say.

It all culminates in an expression of pure love: “thought that I knew what colors were // before I saw you // ice blue.” It’s simple, really, but when you’re in that moment looking into someone’s eyes, this is how you feel. The songs become much more complex than “Ice Blue” but the thing is, I don’t think you can improve on this if you want someone to picture this exact moment.

385. Going to Japan

Alex Russell Hot Garden Stomp , , , , , ,

With a long outro and a lot of words for two minutes, John Darnielle shows us the explosion in “Going to Japan.”

Track: “Going to Japan”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

John Darnielle once said of “Going to Japan” that it was one of his better songs from the era. He also said he doubted he’d ever play it live, which seems to be true as far as the usual sources are concerned. The thing about those sources is that they’ll never be 100% accurate, but I think it’s a safe bet this one hasn’t seen the light of day at least in the last two decades. It really is one of the better ones from the early period, but more than that it serves as a sampler of John Darnielle’s early tactics. It opens with repetition that breaks your concentration and forces you to focus despite the recording quality. It uses strong imagery (“a sweet metallic taste in my mouth”) but also bizarre wordplay (“there’s life and liberty on my tongue”). There’s at least one phrase to hold on to (“there’s a coat on my shoulders, midnight connections”) and it all devolves into mad strumming. I don’t think it’s the best song from the era (or on the album) but it’s quite the combination of so many early Mountain Goats elements.

The ending is long enough that it lets you sit with the song’s themes. “There’s a one-way ticket in my hot little hand // and I’m kissing your eyelids and I’m going to Japan” is just enough information to know this is all about to blow up, and we’re left to assume that strumming is the sound of it actually blowing up. We usually don’t get to hear the climax, so it’s an interesting choice to hold the camera here for this long.

384. Love Hymn to Aphrodite

Alex Russell Hot Garden Stomp , , , , , ,

A narrator describes quite the sight on a very specific day in July in “Love Hymn to Aphrodite.”

Track: “Love Hymn to Aphrodite”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

There are a handful of songs from the original cassettes where John Darnielle recites the date before the song. “Love Hymn to Aphrodite” is one such song, where he says “the actual date is the 17th of April.” He has to say “the actual date” to differentiate from the song, where the narrator says “it’s the 18th of July.” What is the significance of this date? Is this a reference to the Battle of the Allia, where invading forces started a sack of Rome? The Romans called Aphrodite Venus, so probably not, but is it still important that we marvel at the fact that Tacitus listed the exact date in his history? It was 2,400 years ago, but we can tell you it was also on a Sunday, assuming Tacitus got it right. Assuming, very broadly and probably incorrectly, that this was the 18th of July in 1992, that was also the date of the very first photo ever uploaded online. An auspicious day!

More likely, this is a date chosen to add some specificity, much like a lot of the locations in the “Going to…” series. You need that for this one because there isn’t much, otherwise. The narrator tells us someone is floating and spinning in perfect circles, then asks “what, what are you doing?” The ending is curious and then devolves into rapid bongos or other drums played by hand. This is a weird one, and a tough one to relate to the title, but I love the choice to pick a date for a song like this. It makes you wonder why that one, when in reality you know that question is unanswerable.

383. Dogs of Clinic 17

Alex Russell Undercard , , , , , , , ,

Whether you think “Dogs of Clinic 17” is about real dogs or not, it is undeniably a song about how far hope can take you.

Track: “Dogs of Clinic 17”
Album: Undercard (2010)

The good folks at the Mountain Goats Wiki excerpted some stage banter between Franklin Bruno and John Darnielle during a performance of “Dogs of Clinic 17” in New York in 2010. John Darnielle says he doesn’t know how to introduce it and then both members of the Extra Lens explicitly say it is actually about the dogs in the title. After some discussion about how that could be true, given the back-and-forth between a dog and a scientist about how many dogs you need for this experiment, John Darnielle says “Franklin, to that I would ask you, what is reality?” I mention all of this not to elucidate what is going on here, because I think you really have to take this one at face value, but to make a case for you to go see John Darnielle live whenever you can. What is reality, indeed.

Undercard closes with “Dogs of Clinic 17,” which we have to assume is really about a group of the five remaining dogs from a group of twenty. The language is more powerful individually than it is when you try to construct a narrative for this one. You really focus in on that lyric that led to the stage banter there and the somewhat chilling notion of a scientist responding to a dog that notices that three-fourths of them are gone by saying “five is plenty.” That said, the verses don’t necessarily connect the way they do on a lot of the rest of Undercard. I don’t think that’s a problem, especially because it allows for the powerful offramp of the last verse. It feels positive and rising, but the final words tell a true tale of what’s coming next.

382. Rockin’ Rockin’ Twilight of the Gods

Alex Russell Undercard , , , , , , , ,

“Rockin’ Rockin’ Twilight of the Gods” shows us one way to respond to a world as it falls apart.

Track: “Rockin’ Rockin’ Twilight of the Gods”
Album: Undercard (2010)

There’s a good video of “Rockin’ Rockin’ Twilight of the Gods” here, where John Darnielle played it as part of a cruise that Barenaked Ladies did called Ships and Dip. We lack the space to unpack that, but what a detail. It was originally a Mountain Goats song and was played a few times before becoming an Extra Lens song and appearing on Undercard decades later. There are no huge differences between the two versions, which is notable mostly because John Darnielle kept the lyric about the “Financial News Network,” which existed when he wrote the song but was a long-distant memory when it came out on Undercard in 2010. The Extra Lens version has a fuller sound, as with most of their music, and that may be a plus or a minus depending on the kind of thing you’re looking for.

Why “Rockin’ Rockin’ Twilight of the Gods?” I couldn’t tell you, but the naming convention shows up again in “Rockin’ Rockin’ Pet Store,” which is at least about a pet store. It’s an interesting song to hear in 2021, as the character hears increasingly dire financial news of the world but clings to the idea that their world is actually blossoming in unrealistic, magical ways. Given the other narrators in this world we can assume the “unrealistic” part, but what a headspace to vacation in for just a moment.