song meanings

330. Flight 717: Going to Denmark

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , ,

Two characters imagine a life in another country and what the feeling of that imagining does to them in “Flight 717: Going to Denmark.”

Track: “Flight 717: Going to Denmark”
Album: Ghana (1999)

When I was in graduate school, one of my assignments was to go through one hundred years of yearbooks to piece together a narrative of the athletics department for a larger history. Ultimately the things people care about are things they already know, so it’s not likely I was going to find anything that people found all that interesting. The search, still, was worth doing. There is something to be said for the hunt.

I feel similarly about this story. Theme Park Records released one 7-inch for the Mountain Goats and two compilations with Mountain Goats songs on them. In 1995, they released Corkscrewed, which includes both “The Admonishing Song” and “Flight 717: Going to Denmark.” It is difficult to find information beyond this because “Theme Park Records” generally shows up records of things happening at theme parks, but label owner Russell Hill confirmed the details about why this exists at all in this funny thread.

It is interesting that you can find this stuff today. This is a great song, but it’s also just one of those songs from the early days. Twenty years ago this kind of information would be unthinkable, and even if you heard from a guy that it was true you might not believe it. In this modern era, John Darnielle follows this account, replied to the Tweet, and thanked someone named “Russell Hill” on the 7-inch they released. There are still mysteries in this world, but I pick this song to demonstrate how complete a picture it’s possible to create, even if that won’t tell you everything.

329. Going to Maine

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , ,

The bouncy, fun song about failing marriage that is “Going to Maine” could only be written by John Darnielle.

Track: “Going to Maine”
Album: Ghana (1999)

“Going to Maine” was recorded live and released on Hardcore Acoustic, a tape put out by Shrimper Records in 1993. You can buy a copy for about $30 if you can find someone to sell you one. It has a few other songs, including a Franklin Bruno song and a song from Peter Hughes’ solo project.

This is a “funny” song, but that may be oversimplifying it. John Darnielle said it was “one of those songs that you think is funny, and people who like Mountain Goats songs think is funny, but everybody else wonders what on Earth you’re talking about.” This is as good a summation as any.

You can picture a time when this would have been a “hit.” That term doesn’t really work for the kind of music the Mountain Goats make, but there are a lot of songs from just a few years later that were big among “college rock” fans that sound a lot like this. It’s catchy, you pick it up quickly, and it’s funny, even if it’s about a divorce. The subject matter is probably too weird for some, but “your husband // my wife // my marriage // your life” as a four-line verse-ender is about as clear as you can get.

John Darnielle says he wrote “Going to Maine” with an image of Maine as a magical, distant place. A lot of the “Going to…” songs have this vibe to them, where the location doesn’t matter except that it’s far away. Don’t look for the significance of Maine in this one, it’s just about getting far, far away from California and, in this case, far away from a love that’s over without being done.

328. The Anglo-Saxons

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , ,

“The Anglo-Saxons” may be one of the “funny” ones, but it’s gained a lot of character even beyond that.

Track: “The Anglo-Saxons”
Album: Ghana (1999)

In the past 25 years or so, John Darnielle has played “The Anglo-Saxons” just a few times. I’m fascinated by songs like this, not just in their rarity, but in the fact that they exist at all. In Portland in 2017 he played it and commented on the fact that it’s largely inaccurate as a history and ends with a big explosion the way all old Mountain Goats songs end. This is just one of those songs from some of those days and that may or may not be all you need to know.

It was originally released as part of a compilation called Basement Tapes, a set of live recordings that the radio station KSPC put out in 1995. You can buy one used for about twenty-five bucks. Mountain Goats fans will know it from Ghana a few years later and will appreciate the young John Darnielle vocals and the high pitch. It’s one of the “funny” ones like “Going to Maine” or “The Monkey Song” but it’s also a history, like “Song for Cleomenes.”

The rhymes are tight and the delivery suggests a sort of morning cartoon about this ancient group of people. You can imagine this coming on after The Flintstones. John Darnielle contains multitudes, and it’s great that the same guy who ended an album with “In Corolla” once wrote a funny story about some facts about the people who lived in England before the English did.

327. California Song

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

As good as anthem as any Mountain Goats song, “California Song” shows us a frozen moment in time.

Track: “California Song”
Album: Sweden (1995)

The version of “California Song” on Sweden is pretty, but it requires you to look past the era-appropriate digital preset background. Maybe that part is charming to you the way it is on excellent preset songs like “Going to Malibu.” It’s a nice beat behind a sweet song and that is good enough. It should be good enough, at least, but that’s if you haven’t heard it any other way.

For a time, “California Song” was a closer. You can see the best version of that at this show in California in 2008. Peter Hughes plays the bassline and John Darnielle whispers the first verse before eschewing the mic and singing the rest into the crowd as they softly sing it back to him. The entire room knows this song, as he predicts by telling them they all know it. Some of that’s the location and some of that’s the venue and some of that’s the song, but all of it is the recognition that the room is going to know a song that’s this central to the experience.

I don’t think this one “unlocked” for me until I saw that performance. The original is truly beautiful, but there’s something about the passion from the show that brings a line like “as white as household bleach” to life. It all ends up with a reference to another song, which wasn’t uncommon at the time for John Darnielle, but the overall feeling being conveyed is 100% Mountain Goats.

326. Emerging

Alex Russell Moon Colony Bloodbath , , , , , , ,

Moon Colony Bloodbath ends with the haunting “Emerging,” which tells us directly what we’ve been half-told for the whole album.

Track: “Emerging”
Album: Moon Colony Bloodbath (2009)

All of Moon Colony Bloodbath is about building to the revelation in “Emerging.” The album is cryptic but suggests a dark turn and then pays it off shockingly with an extremely clear, extremely direct description of a person eating bodies. This person is in charge of harvesting bodies on the Moon. They harvest them as they’re supposed to, but then they eat some of them. They’ve lost their mind and their humanity and now it’s all about the “sweet things inside.”

John Darnielle has called it a “love song” from the narrator to the bodies and that comes through. This person knows this is “dreadful,” but they also know they’re going to do this thing. There are a few Mountain Goats songs that explore this space of compulsion and how even the worst actions can be done in a loving way. It’s an extreme degree of difficulty to apply this to cannibalism, but a story about bodies in a lunar colony gives you some space to explore.

What’s especially haunting is that the cannibalism reveal should be the end of it, but it isn’t. After we find out this person is eating people, we find out they’re going to get away with it. “I will sail home again // concealed among the upright walking men,” they tell us, which leaves us with the idea that in this world, everyone you see on the street might be a secret cannibal. There’s a clear metaphor there but there’s also the literal piece, which is the perfect final note for Moon Colony Bloodbath to end on.

325. Sudden Oak Death

Alex Russell Moon Colony Bloodbath , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle references a particularly grim disease found in trees to tell us how miserable the narrator is in “Sudden Oak Death.”

Track: “Sudden Oak Death”
Album: Moon Colony Bloodbath (2009)

John Darnielle sings “Sudden Oak Death,” and calls it “emo” when talking about it. Given the style of song John Darnielle usually writes, it’s telling when he’s even willing to call one of his compositions “emo.” It does fit here in this song about a man unravelling completely and likening the experience to a disease that kills oak trees.

John Darnielle also says it doesn’t fit on the album, which makes a certain sense but also isn’t a big problem. Most of Moon Colony Bloodbath is about someone losing touch with humanity and deciding if that’s something they care about fixing or not. At this point they still do, but they’re coming to terms with their trajectory. John Darnielle’s characters sometimes deal with this on the way down, but with rare exceptions we don’t usually find out if they hit the bottom or not. Most of them feel like they might, but the camera pans away.

Moon Colony Bloodbath is different. This is one cohesive story with one person descending into monstrosity. They don’t even fear what might happen at this point, they just want to explain the impact it has on them. “Lose a little feeling in my fingers // gain an edge of panic in my face,” they tell us, but they really drill it home with several more descriptors. Darnielle wants us to understand how distant this person feels from their fellow man because that sets us up for what they’ll do when they feel all the way gone.

324. Scorpio Rising

Alex Russell Moon Colony Bloodbath , , , , , , ,

With a reference to the Manson Family, John Vanderslice makes it clear where the character in “Scorpio Rising” is mentally.

Track: “Scorpio Rising”
Album: Moon Colony Bloodbath (2009)

Like “Lucifer Rising,” the song “Scorpio Rising” takes a title directly from a Kenneth Anger short film. This one is much more direct and follows a character looking for the footprints and buried footage of Bobby Beausoleil, famous murderer and Manson Family member, who supposedly stole some of Anger’s film. The references may be direct, but they don’t relate to the core story of Moon Colony Bloodbath. “Scorpio Rising” seems to be about the mental state of our main character as they wander around trying to hide something no one should find.

We know from the rest of the album that there are many things people shouldn’t know happening. The character has been on a lunar base and seen unspeakable things and they haven’t resettled well back on Earth. These references are all “out there” in a similar way, especially Bobby Beausoleil. The way I take it, our narrator is trying to relate their own experience to the similarly unrelatable Manson story. When you read about Manson and his crew, it seems unimaginable that someone could fall into that company or that anyone could go down that path. You feel that way because you haven’t had this person’s experience and because you aren’t a murderous cannibal. Well, I hope you aren’t, at least.

John Vanderslice, even more than John Darnielle, writes about outsiders and characters who don’t relate to the world around them. It makes sense that his contributions to Moon Colony Bloodbath explore this space, but these references drive this person all the way away from our understanding. There are few references in modern American crime that call to mind “madness” more directly than Manson, so the shorthand here gets you where Vanderslice wants you to be as quickly as possible.

323. Lucifer Rising

Alex Russell Moon Colony Bloodbath , , , , , , ,

The character in Moon Colony Bloodbath shows us we’re in for a dark journey in “Lucifer Rising.”

Track: “Lucifer Rising”
Album: Moon Colony Bloodbath (2009)

Calling John Vanderslice obtuse is a bit like saying water is wet, but it comes through in his approach to his songs on Moon Colony Bloodbath and is worth mentioning specifically. I love Vanderslice, both on this album and for his solo work, but it can be a struggle to crack through what he’s saying. In many cases I’m of the mind that it doesn’t matter and maybe can’t be solved. Kyle Barbour, my personal favorite Mountain Goats “researcher,” has a record number of annotations for this album that essentially say “this is what this says, but I have no idea why it says this.”

“Lucifer Rising” is Vanderslice’s first song on Moon Colony Bloodbath and it finds our main character wandering around Colorado alone, surrounded by bodies and filled with grim thoughts. They call themselves many dark names, including John the Ripper but inexplicably not Jack the Ripper. Is there significance here? Is this a self-reference from the two Johns that made this? If so, what would that mean? You could reach way out there and assume this is a John, not one of those Johns, and they’re being funny by slightly altering another butcher’s name to foreshadow their own actions, but there’s nothing else to support that theory.

This is the first sign we get that things are going to get really bad. “One day I’ll pay for this, but now, just let me in,” our main character pleads, but we don’t know to who. I don’t know what to make of the title’s reference to Kenneth Anger’s 1972 film, either, but Vanderslice would be pleased at how it all combines to form a story you can almost, but not quite, put your finger on.

322. Collapsing Stars

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree , , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle shows us two young warriors ready for blood but not sure if they’re going to go through with it in “Collapsing Stars.”

Track: “Collapsing Stars”
Album: Come, Come to the Sunset Tree (2005) and Dilaudid EP (2005)

“Collapsing Stars” isn’t on The Sunset Tree. It’s one of the three unique songs to the companion album Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, along with “High Doses #2” and “The Day the Aliens Came (Hawaiian Feeling).” They all share some DNA with the album and they wouldn’t feel weird to be on the main tracklist, but they are left off for a reason. My best guess with “Collapsing Stars” is that it’s a direct revenge fantasy and you already have “Lion’s Teeth,” which fits more thematically with the rest of the record.

All that said, “Collapsing Stars” is fantastic. John Darnielle’s delivery is sharp and crisp as he hits lines like “the grim particulars of poisoning the swimming pool.” These characters, who we know from other adventures on The Sunset Tree, are steeled to go through with a grim act. We have to infer why, but we know enough of this story to have a pretty good picture of it. The most interesting part of the song to me has always been the reveal at the end that they don’t go through with it. So many Mountain Goats songs hold the camera on the boats burning or the screaming argument or the dark revelation at the end, but here our young characters decide the best revenge is living well. That may explain why it doesn’t fit on the album, as that revelation would be doubled up with more space and a different sense of remorse in “Pale Green Things.”

321. Twin Human Highway Flares

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

An actual love song told with Mountain Goats lyrics is a powerful thing in “Twin Human Highway Flares.”

Track: “Twin Human Highway Flares”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

It is easy to make a mistake with the Mountain Goats and assume every song is about John Darnielle. Most of it, especially the early stuff, is written in first person. It’s easy to imagine a lot of it coming from the same person. It’s really tidy to say that it’s all one person and that person is John Darnielle and to build a mythos from there. Most of it isn’t, though, and most of it isn’t even gendered. With very rare exceptions, most Mountain Goats songs are deliberate in their ambiguity. Most of them find one person telling one other person something, but you can’t quite tell what.

“Twin Human Highway Flares” is a love song John Darnielle wrote for the woman that would become his wife. It’s extreme in the way that a lot of Mountain Goats songs are, with “I hope my heart explodes” as a finisher and a declaration of love. That violence is what makes it stick in your mind. “I will burn all the calendars that counted the years down to such a worthless day” is pure Darnielle, in a way that you know exactly what I mean if you’ve heard a single other Mountain Goats song. You need the quotes around “love song” for most Mountain Goats “love songs,” but this one is brutal and honest and straightforward. The guitar leads you to expect something sad and distant and the language is destructive, but this is John Darnielle at his clearest and most hopeful. This is a song about telling someone that this moment signifies a future with both of you in it, which very few Mountain Goats narrators would recognize.