songs

421. Slow West Vultures

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

We Shall All Be Healed opens with “Slow West Vultures” and gets right to the point.

Track: “Slow West Vultures”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

There’s a lot happening in “Slow West Vultures.” Someone breaks a bottle in the background. There are at least two seemingly unrelated vocal samples, a device you hear on the early albums often but not so much anymore. The backing vocals are elevated, which isn’t totally unheard of but is rarely this notable. It signals that this album isn’t quite what you’ve heard before, which is fitting. This is post Tallahassee, so the band’s sound has already changed, but it’s pre The Sunset Tree, so the honesty is new.

John Darnielle has often been accused of being the narrator of his songs, which he says he understands but disavows when he can. In the early days of writing this series I was surprised to confront how often the gender identity of the narrator is even ambiguous, suggesting that it isn’t even a male speaker. The person in We Shall All Be Healed is not explicitly John Darnielle like it is in The Sunset Tree, but if not, it’s much closer than it usually is.

The lyrics are a relatively straightforward affair for We Shall All Be Healed. Everyone does drugs, everyone understands they’re going to do more drugs. There’s some nice wordplay here, but I’m always struck by “ready for the future” because it calls back to the album title and the joke within it. There’s likely not a future and likely nobody here is going to be healed.

420. From the Lake Trials

Alex Russell From the Lake Trials , , , , , , ,

“From the Lake Trials” is unique in a lot of ways, but it serves as an example of what the earliest songs might have become.

Track: “From the Lake Trials”
Album: From the Lake Trials (2017)

The story goes that the company behind this series asked the Mountain Goats if they had a song they wanted to record live. John Darnielle found some old lyrics and asked Matt Douglas to join him. When they showed up and saw the piano, he pivoted from the song being on guitar to something entirely different. The result is something that doesn’t quite sound like anything else he’s ever done, but that does feel familiar, somehow.

The beat is more polished, obviously, but it does feel like what John Darnielle was trying to do with the very early, very weird ones. The sax is the bridge to the modern Mountain Goats, with Douglas adding even more depth and a melancholia that the lyrics suggest but don’t fully embrace. Darnielle bounces between optimism and something else in “From the Lake Trials,” which feels like an empty statement but is what I mean to say. The narrator isn’t clear here but doesn’t need to be, this song seems to be in conversation with so many other songs it would be impossible to pick one. “Make a list of things to beat the dreams back” is something so many of them would say, but “follow through, follow through” is not always the logical next step.

The beat makes this feel like something that has to come from the last few years, but think of the construction strategy. What could be more John Darnielle, and really, more Mountain Goats, than showing up and knocking it out, that day? It’s a good song, but it’s a great story.

419. Noche del Guajolote

Alex Russell Bitter Melon Farm , , , , , , ,

A one-time experience (that may have happened more than once), “Noche del Guajolote” is, of course, about a turkey.

Track: “Noche del Guajolote”
Album: Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

John Darnielle once told a crowd that he would rather not try to play “Noche del Guajolote” without the Bright Mountain Choir, the women who performed in various configurations on Mountain Goats songs in the 90s. They added the bird sounds and backing vocals that accompany the version on Bitter Melon Farm, which can also be assumed to be the only one there is. It also came out on a compilation called I Like Walt! in celebration of Walt Records, which seems to no longer exist.

The Mountain Goats Wiki posits that it was played in 2015 in Philadelphia and maybe it was. No recording of that exists, at least not one you can easily find, and I sorta like it better that way. There is a push/pull element to the desire to both want to hear everything but also leave something a mystery. John Darnielle is right, it really needs the Choir or it’s a little small as an experience. The thing is, with it, it’s something special.

There are a handful of these and you have to assume the experience of their creation was all fairly similar. This one specifically, which translates to “turkey of the night,” was supposedly created the morning it was played and does feel that way. Curiously, the aforementioned Wiki includes a note that the timeline here has inconsistencies. It’s up to you if that matters to you or not. I’ve always liked how this one ends, and I don’t need the exact history for this one for that to feel special.

418. Evening in Stalingrad

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , ,

The world constantly invades an otherwise simple love story in “Evening in Stalingrad.”

Track: “Evening in Stalingrad”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

“Evening in Stalingrad” is in many ways one of the most straightforward songs on Full Force Galesburg. You don’t really need to know that Stolypin cars are a kind of prisoner railway car designed to transport farm animals. You don’t need to have any real understanding of the Soviet Union or Russian history. You just need to picture someone who says they can feel something in their “boiling brain” who is willing to say that people need to tear them to pieces to keep them from someone they feel this way about.

It’s a love song told in great detail. So many Mountain Goats songs are about giving you just enough detail that you can make out the big picture but not enough that it can be so specific as to not describe whatever you need it to describe. That’s the power of many songs, but John Darnielle went hyperspecific with “Evening in Stalingrad,” giving you a basic life story for this couple. At nineteen they meet, at twenty-four they drink and dance, and then they hide in a room and hope their love is enough.

Given the name of the song tells us the city was still called Stalingrad, this happens somewhere between 1925 and 1961. The last verse tells us the couple is hiding, though there are so many reasons they could be hiding that doesn’t narrow it down much. It doesn’t matter. “Evening in Stalingrad” shows us love and the larger context that makes love difficult, but still worth pursing.

417. Song for the Julian Calendar

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , ,

A peculiar title and a curious meaning lie behind some powerful vocals in “Song for Julian Calendar.”

Track: “Song for the Julian Calendar”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

John Darnielle once said “Song for the Julian Calendar” was “as overtly Christian” as he once was willing to be in a song. I find that such an interesting statement given that the album that preceded Full Force Galesburg had a song on it with a series of Bible verses for a title, but that doesn’t mean that’s an incorrect statement. Just as many of the wrestling songs aren’t really about wrestling, a song’s title isn’t always as direct as it seems. The Julian calendar was the calendar the Romans forced on people before the world switched to the one we have now. Does that title go further than just being an oddity?

If I had to pull meaning out of the title, I would tell you that it refers to the phenomenon of something going away that you would assume could never leave. Picture something that feels truly beyond change to you, like the concept of how we measure temperature or time. Once upon a time, those were not as they are and presumably will remain. I choose to see it as an ode to something gone that seemed like it might never leave.

The song itself has all of these great pockets of language. It’s one person talking to another, as so many of them are, but it’s someone grounding their surprise in words that John Darnielle hits hard unexpectedly. He slams on the last word in “and I felt the shock” but also stretches the end of “wondered what it was I’d bargained for” with some unique flair. There’s a lot to love here, though you may have to dig in to start finding a deeper meaning.

416. Song for an Old Friend

Alex Russell Bitter Melon Farm , , , , , , ,

In what was supposed to be the start of something new, “Song for an Old Friend” is all strong visuals and one emotion.

Track: “Song for an Old Friend”
Album: Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

The story goes that John Darnielle wrote “Song for an Old Friend” believing it would launch a new band. They were to be The Orange Trees and they would write more accessible pop music. They played one show in Evanston, Illinois, to five people and then died that night as John Darnielle realized he was, for better or worse, the Mountain Goats.

It appeared on a compilation called The Wheel Method which apparently had individually different covers for each copy. You can buy some of them online for $12 now. The song made it to Bitter Melon Farm four years later and some time after that John Darnielle played it solo in 2006 as part of some sort of online concert for AOL. That version is really worth watching. It’s not fundamentally different from the studio version, but it’s just so passionate.

John Darnielle wrote this song right after Rachel Ware left the Mountain Goats, so people hypothesize that it’s about her. I don’t really know if that’s true and it doesn’t make much sense to me given the romantic overtones, but that depends on what kind of love you think the song is talking about. It’s funny to imagine this as a song for a more accessible band given the violence of “the day your love came screaming through me.” That line is pure Mountain Goats and I think we all owe something to the people of Evanston who didn’t go out to that Orange Trees show. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, but just for that one night, the universe told John Darnielle that he had something, it just was what he was already doing.

415. Ontario

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

A narrator feels uncomfortable but open in the very vulnerable “Ontario.”

Track: “Ontario”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

The vocals for “Ontario” on Full Force Galesburg are what will get you. It’s a good song, played well, but it’s John Darnielle front and center in a way that really cannot be ignored. The album is a treasured one for a lot of fans, and I think a lot of that is owed to the fact that the median here is so high. There are a few songs that I don’t think hold up to the rest, but on average, I think the sixteen songs all average out higher than many of the other albums from this era of the Mountain Goats. That said, if there’s a standout, it’s probably “Weekend in Western Illinois” for the rock and the emotion, “Twin Human Highway Flares” as a genuine love song, or “Ontario” as a classic Mountain Goats song that’s a little bit of everything.

The Mountain Goats don’t do “one thing” but there’s certainly a similar feel to a lot of their work. The average Mountain Goats narrator is lonely if not outright alone, and they often are stressed about their situation rather than triumphant. “I know what can hurt me real bad // and what can’t hurt me anymore” is a powerful statement read one way, but it’s more realistically someone not really being honest with themselves. By the end of the song, they’ve devolved into rapidly shouting things like “day breaking // river rolling” with some hey-heys thrown in. This is a vulnerable song, clearly, and rather than digging into the meaning you need to engage with how this person feels.

414. West Country Dream

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , ,

The tension is real in “West Country Dream” and we get to see just the first moments of the explosion by the end.

Track: “West Country Dream”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

I tend to speak in grandiose terms here and I’m sure I’ve contradicted myself many times, but I don’t think there’s a song that benefits more from the live treatment than “West Country Dream.” When you find people talking about this one, they often say you’ve just gotta hear a specific live version. I’m fond of this one from 1998. The studio version is good, but the subtle shifts in language and the not-at-all subtle shift in emotion really change the song. The final line changing from “Why’d you tell me this” to “Why did you tell me this” doesn’t seem like much when it’s written out, but say both out loud right now and you’ll see what I mean. The line may be borrowed from a Carly Simon song in the first place, but it does very different work here.

Two people are in love but they shouldn’t be, that’s the story of dozens of Mountain Goats songs and it’s the story of “West Country Dream.” The narrator even says they know who their lover is, but they couch it by saying “or who you were just an hour ago.” That shift of an hour changes their entire life, which you can hear in their voice both on the studio version’s wavering fear and the live version’s rising anger. People are in this situation often in Mountain Goats songs, but this is a very slightly different moment on the timeline. This is a moment you never want to find yourself in, especially because we know the narrator already knows the answer to their question.

413. Snow Owl

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

An early reviewer hated “Snow Owl,” but there’s a lot to learn about John Darnielle’s approach to lyrics in it.

Track: “Snow Owl”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

John Darnielle played “Snow Owl” as part of the Jordan Lake sessions recently, which is potentially only the third version of the song that exists. There’s the released version on Full Force Galesburg and exactly, probably, only one live version. In 2017 a fan asked for it at this live show in Virginia and this is absolutely the definitive version. You should listen to it to hear the full story, but John Darnielle explains that he never played it live because right after the album came out he walked into a music store in Pittsburgh and read a review that singled out the song as bad. Two years earlier he told the same story on Twitter.

That reviewer thought it was overly sweet. “Snow Owl” is a risk in that regard, with lyrics like “In your eyes were all the colors that the rainbow forgot.” It works, though, for the same reason John Darnielle was able to put the refrain from the theme from Cheers in a song a decade later. John Darnielle is unafraid to sound corny, which means it’s very hard for anything he makes to sound corny. It’s real, and you can tell that it’s real because of who is selling it to you. He was once very hard on “Going to Bridlington” for similar reasons, but I love that one, too. There are several physical descriptions of a snow owl in “Snow Owl,” but it all works because it’s so damned earnest.

412. Going to Santiago

Alex Russell Bitter Melon Farm, Transmissions to Horace , , , , , , , ,

Haunting clues are all we get in the troubling “Going to Santiago.”

Track: “Going to Santiago”
Album: Transmissions to Horace (1993) and Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

In 2014, at Bottom of the Hill, the Mountain Goats played all of Transmissions to Horace, in a row. It’s worth listening to all of it, as it is every time he’s done that with one of the early tapes. Just before “Going to Santiago” John Darnielle says he needs a cheat sheet for it. After he plays it, he jokes that the crowd was probably excited when they first figured out what was happening but surely is sick of it by now. Given the audience, this is safely a joke.

The chorus is entirely “la la la” repeated over and over. “Alpha Desperation March” devolves into sick laughter to show the narrator’s mental state, and this is likely a similar situation though not really as effective. It’s an early song, but the verses are really something. The narrator tells us they have “a pocketful of medicine to abuse myself with” and I feel like that’s just a great line. There are little pieces of the early work here, with the character telling us they’re a specific distance away from California. We could assume that from the title, but the Santiago in “Going to Santiago” is a state of mind, not a place. These songs are often about what kind of person you could be if you could get out of your current situation. The truth, of course, is you’d still be the same person.