song meanings

371. The River Song

Alex Russell Martial Arts Weekend , , , , , , , , ,

Whether you seek out the live versions or enjoy the original, “The River Song” is a highlight, especially vocally.

Track: “The River Song”
Album: Martial Arts Weekend (2002)

Eighteen years ago in Paris, John Darnielle and Peter Hughes “winged it” and played “The River Song” by request. Someone recorded, closer than you’d expect to be possible, and you can see it here. Given that it’s a song by The Extra Glenns, a band Peter Hughes isn’t in, John Darnielle initially says they can’t play it. John Darnielle, on stage, shares the chords with Peter Hughes and they go for it. This is extra notable because Peter Hughes even picks up the backing vocals. These guys have been in a band together for decades by now, but in 2003, watching them go for (and nail) a song that Peter has never played is really something.

It’s a sweet one, in tone if not entirely in message. John Darnielle hits a few high notes, as he does, but mostly speaks this one in low, gentle tones. It’s very wordy, even for an Extra Glenns song, and you get a real sense of who this character is as a result. The intro is over a minute and spreads out to set the stage. Martial Arts Weekend bounces around a few themes, but most of the songs can be read as love songs if that’s your thing. “The River Song” is the one that “feels” most like a love song, even with the mention of the water distribution plant failing. One must accept some things when one listens to The Extra Glenns.

370. Somebody Else’s Parking Lot in Sebastopol

Alex Russell Martial Arts Weekend , , , , , , , ,

“Somebody Else’s Parking Lot in Sebastopol” finds a frantic narrator wailing into the sky at a particular manic low point.

Track: “Somebody Else’s Parking Lot in Sebastopol”
Album: Martial Arts Weekend (2002)

In 1999, in Amsterdam, John Darnielle opened this show with a song that was then called “Somebody Else’s Parking Lot in Santa Cruz.” The show includes covers of Steely Dan’s “Doctor Wu” and Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy.” I encourage you to give it all a listen, but today we discuss the fact that he opened this show with a song that eventually became known as “Somebody Else’s Parking Lot in Sebastopol,” but the city in the title only changed a few years later. I’ve never been to Sebastopol, but I have seen Santa Cruz. It didn’t seem real to me, in the best way possible. I can’t speak for the city that occupies this song title now, much less why John Darnielle changed it, but someday I hope to see it to understand the comparison.

This song is decades old now and it probably wouldn’t work with the full band. Martial Arts Weekend was unique when it came out because it added a fuller sound, at least by way of electric guitar, to John Darnielle’s standard lyrical craft. This is not to diminish Franklin Bruno, an essential piece of The Extra Glenns/Lens and, honestly, the Mountain Goats overall, but people always focus on the guy singing. In this one, the narrator name drops two opera legends and calls for a swift end rather than having to face someone else. If you haven’t spent much time with John Darnielle’s side project, I think this is a good first one to try. The lyrics are top notch, both in unique description (calling to “the scale-tipper”) and typical Darnielle wordplay (“Of all the highs and lows and middle ends you brought me to // this is the worst place”).

369. Terminal Grain

Alex Russell Martial Arts Weekend , , , , , , , , ,

“Terminal Grain” gives you something to nod your head to and something to wonder about for a very brief two minutes.

Track: “Terminal Grain”
Album: Martial Arts Weekend (2002)

I am forced to use the video of a live performance for this post about “Terminal Grain,” which Spotify tells me is the least-played song from the 2002 The Extra Glenns release Martial Arts Weekend. There are no studio versions on YouTube, and the only other video at all is someone who appears to have recorded a garbled version of this live version by accident and uploaded it as a joke. Weird, huh?

I don’t know that play counts on Spotify matter much, but this is the first time in nearly 400 of these that I wasn’t able to find any version of a video of the studio version of this song. Just what to make of that is up to you, but it’s definitely a weird song. John Darnielle says at the end of the video above that he picked Sioux City, Iowa as a reference for the song because it sounded like a faraway place. At the time of that performance he lived in Iowa and it was no longer all that far away. Location seems to be about specificity and about hoping to imagine yourself somewhere else in a lot of Mountain Goats songs, so it’s not a stretch to apply that here.

I’ve always loved the studio version of this one but I am of the mind that there’s not much to unpack. It’s one of the explosion ones, over in under two minutes, and it’s as much about the feeling as the meaning. I’m overly fascinated by a lot of Mountain Goats (and Extra Glenns/Lens) details, but this one’s just a good time.

368. Maize Stalk Drinking Blood

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

“Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” eventually got a horn section and some intense drums, but it was always great.

Track: “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

There is enough time between 1997 and when I’m writing this that people have had time to come up with thoughts about “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood.” One such person seems to have tweeted something and deleted it, but we still have John Darnielle’s reply to them. In case that, too, sometime is gone, he said “MSDB is not about a romantic relationship, I hate to say, but that’s all right.” So there you go, not a love song. That only leaves all other things.

This is one of the songs that has had a resurgence recently as the Mountain Goats now have a drummer and a horn player. The full band revisits some of the older songs and really blows them out. The best version of these I’ve seen is this one, with a rocking, long outro that goes on and on, blessedly. The studio version on Full Force Galesburg takes a similar path, but the sax really adds something that just wasn’t what John Darnielle and company were doing in 1997.

1997 was just before the “modern era,” which isn’t really the right way to put it, but I guess it’ll have to do. The songs were getting more complicated, to the point where no one seems to agree what “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” even means, at least as a title if not as a whole song. The music was changing, too, but it’s only now that you can see how much more room there was in songs like these. It doesn’t diminish the originals, it just makes them hum even more.

367. Blueberry Frost

Alex Russell Nothing for Juice , , , , , , ,

“Blueberry Frost” is a short song with a simple chorus, but it really goes to a sincere place as a love song.

Track: “Blueberry Frost”
Album: Nothing for Juice (1996)

Just before playing “Blueberry Frost” in Chicago in 2006, John Darnielle said it “is a love song that I don’t think [we’ve] played together before.” He had played it solo, though fewer times than other similar songs. It’s just one of those straightforward-style love songs that can be extra beautiful on the right night where you can see yourself there, down by the water where so many Mountain Goats narrators find themselves. It’s 103 seconds long, over and done before you have a chance to think about anything more than that.

“Full moon // deep grass // cold water” is an odd chorus, even among other odd choruses at the time for the band. Contrasted with lines like “when I said your name out loud // something broke inside me,” it stands out even more. It really forces you to imagine this setting. I joked earlier about the ubiquity of water, and John Darnielle has made the same joke about his early songs, but here it occupies even more of the lyrics than usual. We aren’t just asked to picture it, we’re made to by the lack of other details. That phrasing really is the standout part, too, especially if you allow yourself to take it somewhat literally. Obviously the “broke inside me” isn’t right, but picture the mere act of saying a lover’s name out loud really knocking you emotionally down. It’s a level of seriousness and sincerity we don’t often allow ourselves outside of songs like these.

366. Heights

Alex Russell Nothing for Juice , , , , , , ,

With sinister strumming and some choice words, we get a dark vibe in “Heights.”

Track: “Heights”
Album: Nothing for Juice (1996)

If you want to hear “Heights” live, you have a single option of hearing it at this show in 2015. At another show they opened with it, but I can’t find a recording of that one. John Darnielle has said he likes to open sets with a song the audience might not know, and this definitely fits the bill. At that live show you can hear John Darnielle say he’s picking up a sheet with the lyrics on it. He says something close to “ah, right, seashells.” When you write this many songs and title them things that may or may not be in the songs themselves, sometimes you need to remember if this is the one about seashells.

“Heights” sounds like it could be a potential love song, maybe, but the delivery is so sinister. That doesn’t invalidate the “love song” descriptor, not for a Mountain Goats song, but this one is especially dark. John Darnielle almost snarls the “you were giving the game away” line one character says to the other. It always feels a little like you’re intruding on characters in songs like this, but here you feel like you really ought to be going.

Nothing for Juice ends with one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs, “Going to Scotland.” That’s another song that could be a love song but has some other things going on. You could say this about so many songs, but I like to imagine these are the same people, just a lot younger. A lot can change over time.

365. The Bad Doctor

Alex Russell Bitter Melon Farm, Songs for Petronius , , , , , , , ,

“The Bad Doctor” is not about that doctor, but it’s about a doctor, and it’ll force you to sit up and take notice.

Track: “The Bad Doctor”
Album: Songs for Petronius (1992) and Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

If you played “The Bad Doctor” for ten random people you would probably have ten confused people, but if you insisted they listen to it a few times and explain what they thought it was about, they would probably say “Jack Kevorkian.” When you say a phrase like “death-dealing physician” you run into a kind of “facial tissues” vs. “Kleenex” problem. There is only one of this thing, so people call it that thing.

John Darnielle has said a few times that it’s not about that, but it reminds me of the discussion about “Down to the Ark” which talks about political posters that are Obama’s colors during the Obama years but is not about Obama. If John Darnielle says you’re wrong you are wrong, but it’s really easy to see how people came to the conclusion they did. He specifically said “The Bad Doctor” is “about a malevolent force that runs around dispensing death in the guise of medicine — actual widespread death, not the merciful death of Jack Kevorkian.” That’s more than you’ll usually get, which he seems to have only said because he had to be insistent that it is not about what you think.

It’s a very long song, for the time, and it’s a pretty vivid story. The chorus of increasingly insistent “oh yeah” repetition further makes this a strange one, though I always remember how an old friend of mine really, really loved this one. It’s these kinds of songs that worm into your brain and why older Mountain Goats songs are so special. It’s about a magic doctor that murders people, but if that’s not enough, it’s catchy, too.

364. Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina

Alex Russell Bitter Melon Farm, Nothing for Juice, Songs for Petronius , , , , , , , , , , ,

From the perspective of the woman in the Alpha Couple, we see someone shut down in “Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina.”

Track: “Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina”
Album: Songs for Petronius (1992) and Nothing for Juice (1996) and Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

“No, I Can’t” is on three albums. Since it’s on one album with an alternate version as well as the original, it is, I believe, the “most” released Mountain Goats song. Second place goes to one of two songs that are going “Going to” somewhere and in the Alpha series, “Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina.” I’m sure all of that math is wrong, but what fun, huh?

There are two standard versions. The original is on Songs for Petronius and the re-release with Bitter Melon Farm seven years later. It’s a little slower and much more deliberate than the version on Nothing for Juice, and I think it’s not quite as good. The Nothing for Juice version has backing vocals and the character sounds less unsure. By the rising “and I see a stranger in your eyes” there’s a mix of fear and fury that really sets this version apart. The guitar, and, obviously, bass, are more in the style of the time, but I think even without those differences it’s just the better take.

In 1998, John Darnielle told a crowd in Tallahassee, years before the album named for the city, that it is unique because it is from the position of the woman in the Alpha Couple. Most of the time we don’t know, and you are reminded as always to not take one comment at one concert as gospel, even coming from John Darnielle himself. I’m most interested in the way he chose to say it, asking the crowd if they spotted it during the performance. I like imagining this as a mystery that he hoped you were able to solve.

363. Song for John Davis

Alex Russell Ghana, Songs About Fire , , , , , , , ,

“Song for John Davis” is a quick story but it will leave you wondering what these people are leaving or headed towards.

Track: “Song for John Davis”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

There are a lot of things to love about “Song for John Davis.” I love the vocal delivery of “England” and “when we landed” and the final lines with the absurd stretches. I love the unexplained, unexpected quotation of 1 Corinthians 13:11. I love the title which is both very clear but also doesn’t really tell you anything. This is a song for John Davis, you see, but how, and who is that?

John Davis is a musician and an activist who was part of the Shrimper scene when John Darnielle was there. He reviewed Transcendental Youth on his website with an insightful review that talks about what Jon Wurster brings to the Mountain Goats. Why is this short song about leaving a snowy New Hampshire to head to England by boat dedicated to him? That I don’t think anyone can say.

As far as I can tell, John Darnielle hasn’t ever played “Song for John Davis” live and there really isn’t anything that’s been said about it. It exists just as this two-minute story with a repeated line for a chorus. It’s always been a little difficult to unpack for me, but it’s for John Davis, so maybe that’s why. I do love the tone, with a longing and a sadness that you can’t quite explain but can definitely hear.

362. Papagallo

Alex Russell Ghana, Songs About Fire , , , , , , , ,

“Papagallo” showcases some specifics from John Darnielle’s writing style and ultimately drills in on a beautiful moment.

Track: “Papagallo”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

I have grown fascinated over the course of this project by the songs that no one ever mentions. “Papagallo” has never been played live, as far as I can tell, though it’s pretty difficult to prove a negative. It’s not available anywhere, at least, and even the seven-inch it was originally released on, Songs About Fire, may run you close to a hundred dollars if you want to buy your own. The entire single is a little longer than eight minutes long even with four songs on it. It’s just a really small thing and all four songs on it are small parts. The one that sticks with you is “Pure Gold,” for the fun sing-along phrases about a door burning.

You can miss “Papagallo” in that way, but you shouldn’t. In this era John Darnielle was amazingly productive, so it doesn’t mean anything that a song just got released and not revisited. This is still a time where John Darnielle thought he might hang it up eventually. There’s a confidence to this one, though. “It’s hard to grab ahold of some things sometimes // like you need me to remind you” is excellent phrasing, especially with the delivery on the second line to sell it as a joke or a weary reminder of a million shared experiences. One can even forgive the second verse’s triple rhyme of “water,” extreme even for John Darnielle, as that’s clearly a similar joke. The repetition also really sells the image. These are just two people in a singular moment, but if you listen to this one a few times, you can see it, can’t you?