songs

434. Elijah

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

The quiet “Elijah” finds someone promising to come home to take their place at the table, but who can say if they will?

Track: “Elijah”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

John Darnielle is willing to go deep on album construction when he’s asked to do so specifically. I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, the podcast series from a few years ago about individual albums, was a great resource for this. You have to assume every song choice and every order is deliberate for every artist, but you don’t need to make that assumption here. There is a reason John Darnielle wanted “Elijah” to follow “Jaipur.” I can’t tell you what that reason is, however. I love The Coroner’s Gambit, which feels raw and personal even on songs that are clearly not actually personal like “Insurance Fraud #2,” but I am always astounded at the change in gear between the furious “Jaipur” and the quiet “Elijah.” The best answer I can give you is that it’s abrupt on purpose, as it tells you the kind of album you’re listening to by grinding your expectations down.

There are many stories about Elijah, notably that you are intended to leave a place empty for him at the table. This is referenced in “Elijah,” though many of the specific references beyond this are deeply obscure or potentially unknowable. Kyle Barbour of The Annotated Mountain Goats threw his hands up at “smear the walls with coconut oil” but I chalk this up to John Darnielle’s love of specific references rather than their purpose. This one isn’t really a puzzle box, I don’t think, or at least it primarily isn’t one. It’s a delivery system for a sentiment and one you need to open your heart to before you dig into the rest of The Coroner’s Gambit.

433. Jaipur

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

The furious “Jaipur” engages with the question of if you can go home again, but also if you really want to or not.

Track: “Jaipur”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

“Jaipur” is the perfect song to open The Coroner’s Gambit. It sets the tone early, as this is a difficult album and the things it forces you to confront are uncomfortable. No disrespect intended to classics like Sweden or Full Force Galesburg, but John Darnielle considers 2000 the year his songwriting changed and when the stories got more complex. This one is about death, it’s right there in the title, but it’s about your relationship to death, as well.

Darnielle says “Jaipur” is about not really being able to go home again. He once introduced the song with a classic line that he recently repurposed for “Rain in Soho” as he said that you cannot cross the same river twice. This refers to the Heraclitus line that the river and the person stepping into it both differ, which we can tell from “Jaipur.” What’s interesting is that this is usually presented in somber tones, with reflection on how the world changes around you as you also change, but here we’re closer to the vibe in “Quito.” This is fury, where you realize you thought you wanted to go home but you’re too angry and everything feels too wrong to call it home.

There are dozens of references here and we don’t have the space to get into all of them. I’ll close by mentioning the delivery here, as this is one of my favorite Darnielle vocal performances from the era. You can hear how mad this person is as they build towards confrontation. They’re mad at everyone else but also themselves and that kind of rage spills out in every direction.

429. Love Love Love

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

Through several painful references, “Love Love Love” tells a story about the complex ways we react to loss.

Track: “Love Love Love”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to The Sunset Tree (2005)

You do not get what you’re probably expecting with a song called “Love Love Love.” Love is a very complicated emotion that’s often made simple through artistic expression. John Darnielle is not interested in this approach, thus you have “Love Love Love.” The song is a dozen references, all difficult and painful, tied together as a story about John Darnielle’s own life. He’s said that it’s about feeling good when his abuser passed away. It calls to mind the “you died at last // at last?” question from “Pale Green Things” on the same album. You might want to be a person who can rise above, but it’s, as always, more complicated than that. Is it even wrong to take joy in a moment like that? Your experience may vary.

The Mountain Goats have played “Love Love Love” hundreds of times. I always wonder, when I scroll through a list like this of so many shows in so many cities over so many years, if John Darnielle thinks about the origins of songs like this when he sings them. You can tell when you see a song like “Spent Gladiator 2” that he’s in the moment every time. The Come, Come to The Sunset Tree version of “Lion’s Teeth” opens with Darnielle saying it’s a hard song for him to play. I hope, to some degree, that isn’t the case with this one. I don’t have the life experience Darnielle does, so my connection isn’t the same as his, but “Love Love Love” is a beautiful song all the same. It’s just one best enjoyed with a little distance.

428. Song for Dennis Brown

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

“Song for Dennis Brown” isn’t really about Dennis Brown, but it references him to make a point.

Track: “Song for Dennis Brown”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to The Sunset Tree (2005)

The choice to pitch “Song for Dennis Brown” so high has always been an interesting one to me. I don’t think there’s anything to this, but the longest songs on The Sunset Tree are all ones that John Darnielle sings much higher than the others. You get a chance to sit with a song like “Song for Dennis Brown” in a way you do not sit with “Magpie” or “Dance Music.” There’s a lot of room to breathe here, despite the subject matter of a death from a collapsed lung.

Dennis Brown was a reggae singer who was held in high esteem. Bob Marley loved him. He was a legend, though I’ll admit I’m going on some recent research here and I’m not all that familiar with the genre. It’s easy enough to hear what people love, though. Brown’s voice is incredible. He died of an overdose that collapsed his lung, but you can hear that in the lyrics. There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs about famous people who died tragically and unexpectedly and you might just say this is one more of them. You might say that, though the self-insert asks you to go a little deeper than that. We’re in similar space to “Dilaudid” here or even “This Year,” though we’re asked to draw a slightly different conclusion. “We’ll see just how much it takes” is a threat, read one way, and you realize this isn’t about Dennis Brown as much as it is about what might happen if you lean into your worst impulses.

427. Lion’s Teeth

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

“Lion’s Teeth” serves as a revenge fantasy for people who know that it will have to remain a fantasy.

Track: “Lion’s Teeth”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to The Sunset Tree (2005)

The version on Come, Come to The Sunset Tree opens with John Darnielle saying “this is a hard song for John to play.” You can hear it in his voice when he says it, but you can also hear it in the song. I don’t find myself coming back to “Lion’s Teeth” as much as I do most of the rest of the album. One of my five favorite Mountain Goats songs opens The Sunset Tree, “You or Your Memory,” and it’s largely about the same thing, if through a different lens and at a different time. The song that closes the album, “Pale Green Things,” is even closer to the subject matter, but it looks back at abuse rather than living within it.

I have to assume The Sunset Tree means a lot more to a survivor of abuse. Much of the album feels universal even though it’s written from a specific perspective. The songs of triumph could be about generic triumph even though they stem from one explicit place. The songs of despair, like the revenge fantasy “Lion’s Teeth,” don’t always need to be about what they are actually about. This is why you see couples swaying tenderly to “Woke Up New.” It’s what it is to you, not what it actually is. I find it harder to abstract “Lion’s Teeth” because it’s so explicit. That’s fine, of course, and it makes it stronger for what it is. As with many songs like this I hope that you never need this one, but I am glad it is here if you do.

426. Magpie

Alex Russell The Sunset Tree , , , , , , ,

An intense metaphor consumes “Magpie,” a story about something bad on the horizon.

Track: “Magpie”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

I must thank the people at the Mountain Goats Wiki, who I thank often but should thank even more, for finding this article from Willamette Week. The conceit is that the interview asks questions about every song on The Sunset Tree in haiku form and John Darnielle was asked to respond. The questions find romance in “You or Your Memory” and John Darnielle asks, essentially, how they got that out of that song. In response to a question about if the narrator of “Lion’s Teeth” really pulled the tooth, John Darnielle tells them he learned to drive stick in a parking lot. The responses are genuine, but they are very John Darnielle. They also show how difficult it is to get off of “your” version of a song, which always reminds me of an old friend’s insistence that the cannibalism in “Golden Jackal Song” was literal. Maybe it is!

For “Magpie,” the question asks directly what the meaning of the magpie is, and John Darnielle says “only a traitor // undresses his metaphors // as if they were whores.” This speaks to a few things, but mostly it suggests to me that the point is that you figure it out yourself. Magpies, as far as I’ve ever heard, supposedly like shiny things and are easily distracted into thievery. I doubt that’s true, but it suggests a reference to someone that steals indiscriminately. There are some jumping off points there for The Sunset Tree that make sense to me, but I refer you back to the songwriter on this one.

425. Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod

Alex Russell The Sunset Tree , , , , , , ,

The heavy punctuation in the vocals of “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod” forcefully demands your attention.

Track: “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’d heard “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod” hundreds of times before the first time I considered the title. I originally wrote “there’s something about it,” but it’s that there are so many things about it. The balance is incredible, with thunderous percussion and guitar that would ordinarily feel too loud except that John Darnielle’s vocals are especially piercing. I’m sure there are people who don’t like that whine over “deep in the dream chamber” but I can’t imagine them. I think there’s a case to be made that this is his best vocal performance.

It’s easy to speak in hyperbole with the Mountain Goats. A few years back they released a shirt and series of stickers that said “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats,” which gave way to the podcast of the same name. It’s a joke, but is it a joke? Hyperbole aside, I make the case for this as the strongest vocal performance not because it’s the best empirical performance, but because it’s so well suited to what’s happening. He grits his teeth and overemphasizes for impact. It feels like a series of gut punches, with that percussion like a tense heartbeat in the background. I’ve never been able to listen to it casually, it draws me out of whatever I’m doing. It’s really worth seeing live, as well. The studio performance here is crisp, but it gains another level with the drawn out last line as it bleeds into exuberant dance music. It’s the moment that you allow yourself to hope it can get better when all evidence points to the contrary.

424. Dilaudid

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

Over a haunting cello, the story of hard drugs and running away mentally plays out in “Dilaudid.”

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

Dilaudid is technically the marketing name for hydromorphone, an opiate that’s typically used to treat intense pain. I’ve only personally come across it once, when a friend in college scratched his eye so badly they gave it to him alongside several serious warnings. He turned out fine, but as I listened to a public radio report this morning about the ongoing opiate crisis I thought about that moment and how it could have gone both ways.

John Darnielle has played “Dilaudid” hundreds of times. It’s one of the most popular songs from The Sunset Tree and it does an incredible job of conveying the intensity of the moment but also the seriousness of what lies underneath. A fan went even deeper some years ago and asked John Darnielle on Tumblr if this character is the same one from “Attention All Pickpockets,” which Darnielle confirmed and commended their “sleuthing.”

If you are into “sleuthing” like that, which I assume you must be if you’re reading this, I encourage you to dig into live performances of “Dilaudid.” The screams at the end really pop with an audience, but the banter shines here, as well. Dilaudid is serious stuff, which Darnielle mentions trying recreationally at a very young age. Obviously you would not assume from The Sunset Tree anything else, but it helps sometimes to remember how old these characters really are. None of that is to say that there is an age where these things become better, but The Sunset Tree feels familiar to an adult, but really try to remember that these people are kids.

423. Your Belgian Things

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

“Your Belgian Things” pictures loss as something that someone can actually take away rather than the ghost of something else.

Track: “Your Belgian Things”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

I think it’s somewhat fair to say “Your Belgian Things” is the love song from We Shall All Be Healed. As with many other “love songs” that John Darnielle has written, that needs some explaining. The entire album is about doing drugs and the experiences that brings you, but “Your Belgian Things” focuses on the experiences it takes from you.

At a show in 2012, Darnielle said that the things being referenced are “opaque, unreadable symbols to everybody else.” What he means, as I take it, isn’t so much that the specific things like the actual trunks and suitcases of items are mysterious, but that the things you hold onto are your things alone. When you think of dark moments in your life there are probably unreadable symbols of your own. I still remember a specific red lighter and a specific tiny MP3 player from decades ago on a particular night where I’d have identified with this song directly, but also the loss of odds and ends that only upset me when I realized I couldn’t find them later from times I wanted to stay within.

These things being physical or not doesn’t really matter. I’m sure they’re not even intended to be, though I do like the summation of these feelings as something a moving company could come grab and take away. It does feel that way, sometimes. The love here is in the distance, way too far to even say it’s in the background, but there’s enough to know there’s a loss being experienced.

422. Linda Blair Was Born Innocent

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

The title references a movie about how bad things happen to good people, but “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent” isn’t focused on morality.

Track: “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

The title of “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent” refers to a TV movie from the 70s called Born Innocent where Linda Blair played an abused teen whose life was destroyed by said abuse and a system that was indifferent to her suffering. It’s somewhat famous for how unexpectedly extreme it was for viewers and for the aftermath of a copycat crime. I’d heard this song hundreds of times before I was ever curious about what it meant beyond a reference to Linda Blair and what I assumed was The Exorcist. I guess it still could be, but the more direct, obvious one is really the point.

It’s not hard to see how John Darnielle could relate to Born Innocent. Whether he saw himself in it or not, it fits the mold of young characters being impacted by forces they couldn’t control. I don’t want to analyze this too much more because the obvious connection is just that, but if you make assumptions beyond it I don’t think that’s really appropriate or the point. It’s just an interesting starting point.

This was one of the first songs written for We Shall All Be Healed, but more than that it’s become emblematic because of how it starts. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like every press video and interview for the album started with that bit. It’s memorable, as is the surprise rhyme that ends the chorus. Even after you’ve heard it a few times you’ll expect the rhyme with “drown” to be “we’re going down,” but there’s a much different, and potentially darker, meaning behind “we’re going downtown.” I think it means the start of another shopping trip.