songs

302. Spent Gladiator 2

Alex Russell Transcendental Youth , , , , , , ,

“Spent Gladiator 2” is John Darnielle’s insistent reminder that you have to hold out when it gets dark, even though that’s hard to do.

Track: “Spent Gladiator 2”
Album: Transcendental Youth (2012)

The Mountain Goats Wiki includes more than 150 live performances of “Spent Gladiator 2.” You could spend an entire day listening to all of them. I can’t recommend that, but you could. For several years in a row, “Spent Gladiator 2” was likely to be the last song the band played. It was often the conclusion of a second encore, sometimes with just Peter Hughes on bass and John Darnielle doing a slowed-down version with no mic. I once saw him wander through the crowd and sing it more or less at people, which was a truly special experience.

It’s the companion song to “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1,” which is much more triumphant and furious. The second one shows us a different type of resistance, with clenched teeth and final straws rather than burning bright. “Stay alive,” John Darnielle still says, but “maybe spit some blood at the camera.”

The message of Transcendental Youth is a consistent one. There is power in hope, even when it seems like there isn’t. The imagery in “Spent Gladiator 2” is grim, but it’s still worth standing up again. It’s always worth doing that, John Darnielle wants you to know. You’d pick up the same command from angry songs like “Up the Wolves” or frantic ones like “Dance Music” or a hundred other songs, but John Darnielle closes the show with “Spent Gladiator 2” because it’s the hardest lesson to learn. When you’re good and mad you’re likely to get back up, but you need to do it when it’s way harder than that, too.

301. For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands

Alex Russell Goths , , , , , ,

You don’t need to know much about Portuguese goth music to appreciate “For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands.”

Track: “For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands”
Album: Goths (2017)

In the leadup to the release of Goths, I remember when John Darnielle excitedly released “Andrew Eldritch is Coming Back to Leeds.” I’d never heard of Andrew Eldritch. It’s a really specific song about a topic I knew absolutely nothing about, which is not uncommon as an experience when listening to the Mountain Goats. You may or may not know the boxer Pinklon Thomas or the wrestler Ox Baker. You may not have seen The Lady from Shanghai. I don’t know that you have to be familiar with the subject matter to enjoy the song, but it helps.

I don’t listen to the kind of music John Darnielle listens to. If you follow him on any social media platform, you’ll see that he’s excited about new and old music all the time. He recommends recordings enthusiastically and seems to take in more music than anyone I know. It’s a great way to be and it’s really cool, even if it isn’t always to my tastes. I’m not a fan of any of the bands referenced on Goths and I’m not even really all that familiar with the scene. It doesn’t matter, especially for a song like “For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands.” This is so specific that most people won’t be familiar, so it has to be talked about with some universality.

It’s a song about being big in one place but still aspiring to have something else. John Darnielle says he wouldn’t expect to draw huge crowds in Japan and likens that to a band that’s enormous in some countries but might not play big rooms in America. It’s an interesting space to get lost in, even if you have no idea who Celtic Frost is.

300. Down Here

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

“Down Here” starts with a reference to Venus and only gets weirder from there.

Track: “Down Here”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

There are six annotations on “Down Here” on Kyle Barbour’s excellent site The Annotated Mountain Goats. They detail what the atmosphere of Venus is like, what a red-crowned crane is, and even what Lithuania is. Barbour’s site is instrumental to the more arcane details of Mountain Goats songs, but it’s also funny when it explains what Illinois is or what window blinds are. You get in the game to figure out what “The Monkey Song” is talking about but then you have to take that to the logical conclusion.

I am just going to say it: I have no idea what “Down Here” is talking about. I love the delivery of lines like “A telegram from Lithuania // and the news is not good” where you can hear John Darnielle snarl over the cranked-up guitar. It’s a great song and one I’ve heard dozens and dozens of times. Barbour’s annotations can unlock secrets for songs, especially the ones about myths, but sometimes there’s not enough on the page. I’ve said before that this whole exercise is an experience rather than an attempt to “solve” these songs, and I legitimately do not believe it is possible to draw a universal meaning from this one.

And that’s fine! The final verse is a construction you may have heard before, and Barbour links to this truly fascinating post where people spiral into discussions of this style through history. This may just be another story of a narrator facing doom of their own creation, but they’re talking about their end in a way that many before them did for generations. I’m not going to throw up my hands completely, but I do love that this one is just a little too weird to put a finger on entirely.

299. Woke Up New

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , ,

In one of the best-loved songs the Mountain Goats ever wrote, “Woke Up New” examines a relationship the day after the fact.

Track: “Woke Up New”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

I haven’t run the numbers, but I think it’s safe to say “Woke Up New” is the most popular song on Get Lonely. I think “Wild Sage” is the best song on the album and maybe the best song John Darnielle has ever written, but people love “Woke Up New.” Any time it’s played at a live show you will find couples embracing during it, which I really will never get used to seeing. It’s a crushing, brutal song that John Darnielle describes as being about one of the worst moments of his life, but the delivery seems to pass it off as a love song in some ways. There’s certainly a reading where these people are entranced by not the appearance of sweetness but the love they have being reflected in the fear of the loss of it, but it doesn’t really matter. A younger, angrier version of myself judged these people, but that’s the wrong way to live your life. They like the song, that’s all.

“Woke Up New” hit me immediately when I listened to Get Lonely, but as I spent more time with it I gravitated to the quieter, less accessible songs. “Woke Up New” is a phenomenal song, but it’s not one that I find puts me in the headspace that “Wild Sage” and “In the Hidden Places” do. It’s a breakup song like most of them are, but it’s one that feels like a story about a time rather than a demand for you to relive the time. John Darnielle often jokes in live shows about how he’s happily married and has all these songs about divorce, and depending on where you’re at on the timeline you may find “Woke Up New” to be exactly what you need.

298. Stars Around Her

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

We see one moment and have time to appreciate it in “Stars Around Her.”

Track: “Stars Around Her”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

There are hundreds of live Mountain Goats shows online, but I find myself getting hung up on specific ones like this show at Fletcher’s from 1996 that I’ve talked about before. Fletcher’s is gone, like a lot of places are gone, and the recording is frustrating because the audience won’t shut up. John Darnielle mentions it several times, including the introduction to “Stars Around Her” where he says it’s a quiet song that he probably shouldn’t play with a loud audience. As a much younger person I definitely talked at shows and I’ve tried to get better about that. Let people enjoy the show. You can catch up at the bar after the thing.

The Mountain Goats are never going to be a band for everyone, but they’re several magnitudes bigger now than they were in 1996. Fletcher’s seems like the kind of place where the audience might not be there because they wanted to see John Darnielle’s hyper-specific style of stomping and howling. It’s just the cost of doing business that sometimes you care about the show way more than the average person in the room. If most folks are there because the beer is cheap and the weather is nice then you might not get the best version of a song from a four-song release from forever ago.

Most of the live versions of “Stars Around Her” sound like the studio version. It appears to be a song about romantic longing that’s frozen in one image, though that may be a simplification. There are a lot of songs like this from this time period and that’s no slight to say, because this is a great one. John Darnielle’s voice is softer here than it usually is and it’s a truly nice moment. That’s enough, really.

297. Going to Wisconsin

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle delivers “Going to Wisconsin” through bared teeth, telling us this person is at the end of their rope.

Track: “Going to Wisconsin”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“You say you need me in California, but no thanks,” John Darnielle says in “Going to Wisconsin.” I can’t think of a simpler distillation of the early Mountain Goats narrator ethos. John Darnielle bites the lyrics and sounds furious, lending this narrator a sense of unhinged anger. Early Mountain Goats songs started as poems, and I don’t know if that’s true of this one or not but the alliteration in phrases like “the bottom of the boat” really pops either way.

The delivery is the point of this one. You can imagine this narrator telling everyone to go to hell and how they feel stuck on this idea. Persistence in the face of all opposition is a common idea in the early ones. “Everyone said just to sit still,” they even say, but we know you can’t stop someone like this. The chorus is an insistence that they’re headed to Wisconsin. California represents going home in a lot of Mountain Goats songs, but we don’t find out what Wisconsin means to this narrator. Is it Wisconsin just because the second verse mentions cheese? Surely not, but that’s one idea.

You can hear a live version of “Going to Wisconsin” played at Franklin Bruno’s house in 1992 on this recording, which may be the earliest Mountain Goats recording available. The anger comes through and it works just as well live as not, but it’s worth hearing both versions even though they’re similar. There may not be much to dig out of this one; sometimes it’s just about the snarl.

296. Shelved

Alex Russell Goths , , , , , ,

Peter Hughes shakes up the formula and sings a verse to remember on “Shelved.”

Track: “Shelved”
Album: Goths (2017)

Peter Hughes wrote and sang the final verse on “Shelved.” It feels so very real, with a character wondering how they get from point A to point Z and making their peace with how they’ll do it. It’s one of the stories that might have been, we’re told, and it’s not necessarily a bad one.

I think “Shelved” is the best song on Goths. The switch in vocals from John Darnielle to Peter Hughes doesn’t necessarily mean the character shifts, but I choose to believe it does. The whole song is about what happens when you can’t hack it anymore, or at least what happens when people who make decisions think you can’t. Do you compromise your integrity to keep getting on stage or do you hang it up? It’s a decision characters make all through songs on Goths, but this is the clearest the choice gets.

Much earlier in his career, John Darnielle wrote a song called “Anti-Music Song” that repeatedly slams real musicians. He said later that it doesn’t represent his actual feelings and that makes it a tough song to defend. I don’t know if “Shelved” is a character talking about Nine Inch Nails or John Darnielle talking about them, but either way this character doesn’t see themselves as that kind of artist. Goths is powerful because it goes beyond the decision to sell out and into what that actually means, but I love “Shelved” for freezing on the point you have to decide if it’s worth it. It’s easy to say that it isn’t, but what would it look like if you actually did it?

294. Against Agamemnon

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

You need to know some history to get it, but there’s a pretty weird joke in “Against Agamemnon.”

Track: “Against Agamemnon”
Album: Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

During the only live performance of “Against Agamemnon” that has an easily accessible recording, John Darnielle recounted the story of Ajax and Agamemnon. Ajax was a warrior who wanted to torture Agamemnon but went mad and tortured a sheep instead. In his shame upon realizing his mistake, he commits suicide. It’s weird, even among similar Greek myths. John Darnielle goes into great detail and it’s worth hearing his explanation. The end is interrupted by a woman in the crowd singing one line from “I Will Grab You by the Ears,” which John Darnielle is confused by. Spare a passing moment to wonder why this person’s response to a story about “Against Agamemnon” was to reference a similarly old and obscure song, but know that it is lost to time.

Ajax is the narrator and he resents the sky for reflecting his madness. He says he’s going for a walk and he’ll be right back. He won’t be right back, we know, and this dramatic irony makes it an interesting place to leave the story. John Darnielle says in the liner notes to Bitter Melon Farm that “Against Agamemnon” was one of his favorite songs at the time, but other than that show in 2008 I can’t find any record of him playing it live. That doesn’t mean anything, necessarily, but it’s interesting.

The performance is a good one, but the live version sounds just like the studio track. It was originally released on a compilation in 1994 called Howl… A Farewell Compilation Of Unreleased Songs that you can buy used for $3.01. The ending is great if you know what you’re hearing, but you do need to know the reference to understand that there’s more going on than Ajax tells you.

293. New Monster Avenue

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , , , , ,

An actual monster is different than a figurative one, and “New Monster Avenue” asks us to take the monster’s side.

Track: “New Monster Avenue”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

Get Lonely started as an album about monsters, at least more literally than it ended up being. The finished product is pretty clearly a breakup album, though you can get into some fights with folks depending on how insistently you believe that. “New Monster Avenue” was the first song written for Get Lonely and thus keeps the monster theme more directly than the rest. The character is a monster, sure, but they’re someone we’re meant to sympathize with and to feel for their plight. This isn’t an unfamiliar position for John Darnielle to take, and he frequently introduces the song by talking about how he’s pro-monster.

John Darnielle sings all of “New Monster Avenue” high, but by the final verse he’s as high as he can possibly go. The delivery of “fresh coffee at sunrise” plays with what’s a pleasant image to most of us. The narrator of “Half Dead,” the song that directly follows “New Monster Avenue,” has a cup of coffee when they wake up, too. Neither of these characters is comforted by this moment. John Darnielle wants us to feel like the monster on the outskirts of town that the townsfolk fear and want to destroy. Even the morning pleasantries we rely on aren’t a given if everyone has branded you a monster.

We leave “New Monster Avenue” at the climax. The townsfolk are there with torches, which is always the fear if you’re the monster. All of Get Lonely is about not being able to relate to people and about how that can deepen your already deep fears, but “New Monster Avenue” is from a unique perspective. This monster is just trying to live. Not every Get Lonely narrator is this unambiguously right.

292. Neon Orange Glimmer Song

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

“Neon Orange Glimmer Song” won’t tell you what happened, but it will tell you everything else.

Track: “Neon Orange Glimmer Song”
Album: Sweden (1995)

There are a dozen websites where people post lyrics and folks try to guess what they mean, but SongMeanings was the first one I found when I was younger. The page for “Neon Orange Glimmer Song” has a long, thoughtful attempt from one user who thinks it’s about someone who killed someone in self defense. It also has a much shorter one where someone says “well this song is vague but some guy made a mistake while a capsicum pepper was in the backyard.”

I love this comment. It’s a joke, for sure, but it’s also a statement about John Darnielle’s love of unrelated storytelling. The thoughtful explanation assumes the pepper plant represents a murderer trying to stay grounded to keep their story straight. The shorter one says dude, it’s a pepper plant. They’re both right. There are tons of Mountain Goats songs that use this device. Why is it a pepper plant here and why is it sometimes water boiling? Don’t worry about it. Or do, it’s your call.

Whether you think there’s a lot happening here or nothing at all, our narrator is stressed. They’ve done something, but we don’t know what it is. It’s specific with details that ground it as a real story about a real person, but the one thing we’d need to understand if they’re right or wrong is missing. John Darnielle really sells the tension and Rachel Ware’s vocals fill out the experience, but you’re always going to be missing the center. What you think happened is exactly what happened, or it can be if you need it to be.