songs

217. Transjordanian Blues

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

A song of praise that’s filled with potential disaster, “Transjordanian Blues” fits right in with other Mountain Goats songs.

Track: “Transjordanian Blues”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

“Transjordanian Blues” has been played live more than a handful of times. In nearly all of the recorded performances, John Darnielle comments on the fact that he’s playing old songs and isn’t confident that he knows them well enough to do them justice. This isn’t uncommon for a Mountain Goats show, but it’s interesting that the sentiment combines so consistently with this specific song.

You get the sense that John Darnielle really enjoys the act of playing “Transjordanian Blues.” The liner notes call it a “sermon” but that’s also obvious just from hearing it. There are dozens of religious songs in the catalog, but few that are this direct. The strumming makes you want to clap along, campfire style, and the lyrics are infectious. By the end, he’s howling praise for the Lord and the audience, in every live version, is howling right along with him.

At a performance in 2017 in Australia, John Darnielle said that every live show in Pomona in the early days was “basically that for 20 minutes” after playing it passionately and loud as anything. It’s true, too. A lot of the early set lists are 10 furious songs played in under half an hour, with themes from the specific preparation of foods to the loneliness of the end of the world as a metaphor for a relationship ending. From the beginning, the man who would eventually write an entire album of songs with Bible versus for titles was interested in the power of things larger than oneself. It’s a song about the strength of salvation, but it’s also just a way to get yourself into the zone. It fits in with everything else not because of the subject, but because you can’t help but belt it out.

216. Bad Waves

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

A narrator considers how to get a very serious message across in “Bad Waves.”

Track: “Bad Waves”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

We have a price and a time. It’s 1972 and our narrator is staying in a twenty-dollar-a-night hotel in “Bad Waves.” The placement on On Juhu Beach tells us we’re in Asia, even if the Bangladeshi children breakdancing doesn’t. It’s a curious scene, especially with the mention of Waterford crystal in a banquet hall. We’re clearly somewhere expensive and we’re preparing for a revelation from our narrator.

The drone of the recorder really makes this one feel miserable. John Darnielle wavers his voice over the chorus of “the waves will tear us all to pieces,” sometimes pitching his voice upwards to show that this is a difficult expression to get across. The liner notes mention that this narrator wants to tell someone something, but is worried about how the message will be met.

“I will try to gather my strength // I will rest up all week,” they tell us. This is clearly complicated and it’s clearly important. In this expensive hotel with a grand setting, our narrator wants to be sure their audience considers the impact of what they are about to hear. After so much build up, the reveal of “the waves will tear us all to pieces” is shocking.

What are we supposed to make of this? The tone is despondent and the message matches. In the first verse, the narrator considers some boys dancing and says that waves will destroy them. In the second, the narrator says the same will happen to all of us. It’s a pessimistic message, to be sure, but is it what people need to hear? Our narrator seems to feel that way, but they also don’t know if this is going to go over well. Dark, brutal realism about death is not uncommon in the Mountain Goats, but it’s rarely this direct.

215. Hotel Road

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , ,

On a beach in the biggest city in India, a monk looks out over the world and reflects.

Track: “Hotel Road”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

Imagine that you are John Darnielle and it is the late 1990s. You have just written and released The Coroner’s Gambit and you are about to begin the work of All Hail West Texas. This is a big moment for you, though of course, because you exist in the present, you have no way of knowing that. In this head space, you write several songs that form small EPs. Many of them are about death, even more than usual for you.

“Hotel Road” opens the beautiful, but very different, On Juhu Beach. The album is out of print because it included intricate, handmade packaging. John Darnielle still loves complex packaging, but nothing is really close to On Juhu Beach. The songs reflect this level of craft, with an eerie specificity to them that makes you picture not just the idea of India, but a very grounded, very real part of India.

The liner notes tell us this is an old monk in a hotel room at the top of a building. The monk watches the world around them and contemplates their surroundings. The waves are clear and the children are joyful. In my reading, the ending finds the monk not embracing death, but wondering why death should be something we think about at all. “It’s hard to say why // I should come here to die” could mean any number of things, but I choose to read it as an acceptance of the passing of time, but not quite yet. Not on a day like this in a place like this.

214. Commandante

Alex Russell Devil in the Shortwave , , , , , , ,

The bouncy, exciting “Commandante” hides dark ends with one last singalong for the road.

Track: “Commandante”
Album: Devil in the Shortwave (2002)

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Mountain Goats songs about two anxious, furious people who feel that their situation is important, dire, and ending. Depending on what point in the timeline we meet those people, John Darnielle tells their story differently. By the early 2000s, the couple gained a name as The Alpha Couple. It is a point of debate, though clearly ridiculous debate, whether any two people who fight and hate as much as they love are The Alpha Couple or just two other people feeling the same way. There’s enough commentary from John Darnielle that we can infer that not every couple in every song is the same one, of course, and that the feelings are just universal enough that we think it’s the same folks going through the same pain.

These aren’t the famous ones, I don’t think. These are just two people who sound deceptively happy if you don’t listen to the lyrics. John Darnielle clearly has fun on “Commandante,” with the howling chorus and the scream-along-ready line of “I am never going back to Cincinnati,” which, incidentally, went over like gangbusters in Cincinnati in 2013. The studio version is fast and peaks in the right places, but live shows like that really sell it. You can hear the foot stomps from the crowd and the individual folks in the audience that put their own meaning into sailing through the night sky like a pair of bottle rockets.

These two are already at the end. Threats to drink more whiskey than a famous Irish alcoholics and vague mentions of grievances and great big secrets are really obvious signs that not all is well. But John Darnielle reminds us with the melody that the end sometimes feels fun, right before you get there.

 

213. Handball

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now!, Why You All So Thief? , , , , , , ,

“I did not come to play handball,” a narrator insists in “Handball,” and the menace is the point.

Track: “Handball”
Album: Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

“You’ll get nothing from me, do you hear? Nothing! Anything I know about this odd little song will go with me to the grave.” – Liner notes for “Handball” on Protein Source of the Future…Now!

John Darnielle has written hundreds of songs, but none of them like “Handball.” The first verse is four loose lines from Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The rest is the line “I did not come to play handball.” That is 100% of “Handball.”

There have been countless attempts to understand and debate the meaning of these songs. “Handball” is baffling in that the two verses aren’t connected in any obvious way, but it’s also very clear if one assumes that disconnect is the point. “I kill a man on the day his life seems sweetest to him” would be a Mountain Goats line if it weren’t something else already, so the choice to use the lines in the first verse is clear. How does that connect to any one of the multiple sports called handball?

John Darnielle wrote the lyrics down and asked a studio full of people to sing it with him on a radio performance in Chicago in 2002. At a show years later, he called that performance “creepy for the sake of being creepy.” All of this suggests that trying to dig into “Handball” may be an attempt to look for things that aren’t there.

I once made a fellow Mountain Goats fan a shirt with a clip art handball player and the phrase “I did not come to play handball” on it. The point of the shirt was that a fellow Goats fan would understand, but understand what? I can’t explain it, but I feel like once you get that, you get all of this.

211. Ox Baker Triumphant

Alex Russell Babylon Springs EP , , , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle sings a song for the bad guy in all of us in “Ox Baker Triumphant.”

Track: “Ox Baker Triumphant”
Album: Babylon Springs EP (2006)

Wrestling’s story involves the same beats as every other kind, but it benefits from more black and white narratives than other types of performance. The “heels” of wrestling often have to be very obvious to get an idea across quickly to an audience.

Ox Baker was a heel who punched people in the heart. You only need to hear one Ox Baker promo to understand him. He hates you and the goodness you represent, and he’s here to punch everyone who stands in the way of his dominance. When John Darnielle introduces “Ox Baker Triumphant” he often talks about the power of that idea. Ox Baker isn’t here to set up a complicated battle between good and evil and he isn’t here to win you over. He wants to punch your good guy in the heart. You don’t really get more to the point.

“Ox Baker Triumphant” is exactly what it says on the label. Ox Baker has been betrayed by the world he loves and he is here to get revenge on everyone and everything. Given what we know about Ox, we can assume he saw this coming. He demands that the others click their heels in a mock attempt to go home before yelling “I bet you never expected me!”

Darnielle’s soaring delivery on the studio version and the blown-out fury on most live versions accomplish the same thing. We get a sense that Ox Baker is done with all this and that his retribution is well-deserved. For all the time the good guys will get in later Goats songs, “Ox Baker Triumphant” reminds us why we love to watch the moments when people get pushed to their limits. It doesn’t really matter what he came to do in the first place, now it’s his time to shine.

206. Going to Maryland

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , , ,

One character explores craps betting as a stand-in for the difficulties of a relationship in “Going to Maryland.”

Track: “Going to Maryland”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

There are hundreds of different locations across Mountain Goats songs. The geographic mentions often ground otherwise general songs in the specific, allowing the listener to imagine themselves in the open English countryside or the mysterious political workings of an ancient civilization. How you read the location changes based on who, and where, you are. If you’re from Maryland, what does it mean to be “Going to Maryland?”

Locals apparently generally add the article “the” to Chesapeake Bay. John Darnielle isn’t from Maryland, which explains the absence of “the” in the line “and your eyes shine tonight on Chesapeake Bay.” I’m not local either and have never noticed it before, but it’s interesting what even small shifts in language tell us. Everyone’s home has those nuances, like how the contraction “ya’ll” rather than “y’all” serves as a sign that someone may not be used to using it or whether you use pop or soda to refer to a fizzy drink may identify where you were born.

This obviously isn’t central to the understanding of the song, but it serves as a springboard to talk about a live performance of “Going to Maryland” at the legendary CBGB in New York. John Darnielle changes the line that follows “five dollars says that it’s gone in a minute” from “five dollars says that your heart goes with it” to “five dollars more says my chances went with it.” The original version is slow and the gambling references through the lyrics feel sorrowful, but the live version drives much quicker and feels desperate. The shift is small, but it changes how you feel about the speaker. Are these people in love or this a different kind of relationship?

205. Song for Mark and Joel

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , ,

“Song for Mark and Joel” is for Mark and Joel, but it’s also for that creeping dread you try to avoid.

Track: “Song for Mark and Joel”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

The Mark and Joel of “Song for Mark and Joel” are Mark Givens and Joel Huschle of Wckr Spgt, a band that’s closely associated with the Mountain Goats. John Darnielle gets a specific mention on the “other artists” page of their website. It says that John Darnielle and Peter Hughes are “really doing wonders in the world of rock and roll,” which you may assume I agree with based on the whole point of this thing.

I haven’t listened to much Wckr Spgt, but it’s easy to see how John Darnielle fell in love. One of their recent albums includes a song called “Skin, the First Line of Defense.” That really says it all.

When John Darnielle plays “Song for Mark and Joel” he often says some variant of “this is a song I wrote for Mark and Joel and it is called ‘Song for Mark and Joel.'” It’s a dry comment, but it says a lot about the man that wrote a song for two friends in 1994 and may not have imagined he’d be playing it for hundreds of people night after night twenty-five years later.

The opening lyrics describe a natural setting. It’s pure early Mountain Goats: a bird (not a robin, but close) sits on a branch and a narrator feels a vaguely troubling sensation. By the second verse our narrator is in a room full of maps. Quickly, they tell us about a sense of cold and begin “pondering connections.” John Darnielle doesn’t give us enough to decipher what’s happening, but it ends up being a powerful sensation all the same. We’ve all felt that menace in the air and by leaving it general, it works for whatever causes that feeling in your bones.

204. New Star Song

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , ,

During a train delay in Redding, Washington, the narrator in “New Star Song” takes in local culture.

Track: “New Star Song”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

If you have thirty-five hours, you can get from Los Angeles to Seattle on the Coast Starlight passenger train. If you do this, you’ll make 28 stops and spend some time in Redding, California. You’ll wait in the same place that John Darnielle waited decades ago on a similar trip for a likely much different purpose.

It’s uncharacteristic that John Darnielle offered up as much as he did about “New Star Song,” but in 1998 he mentioned that it’s slightly autobiographical. “Slightly” is doing a lot of work there, but he did wait in Redding and watch four movies, seemingly waiting for his evening train. The similarities between the narrator and songwriter end there, but it’s telling that Beautiful Rat Sunset imagines a character waiting there through lightning storms, thinking about “things that I thought that I’d soon be forgetting.”

The strumming on “New Star Song” is angry, even for an early 90s Mountain Goats song. It opens with a clang and doubles down with a handful of furious beats over John Darnielle’s wailing “I thought about how cold you must be!” It lends itself to live performance, as many of the angry-without-being-violent ones do from this era, and as such has been played dozens of times over the years. Most versions stay true to the original and focus on the chorus and the delivery of those lines about someone else, far away, and how they must feel. Our narrator is in a hot, hostile place and they’re hanging pictures of someone everywhere. Typically that’s a sign that someone is lost, but it seems just as likely that this is a grand gesture that’s part of an ill-fated trip.

203. Itzcuintli-Totzli Days

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , ,

“Itzuintli-Totzli Days” spends a sing-song (possibly) happy moment with a rabbit and a dear friend.

Track: “Itzcuintli-Totzli Days”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

The Mountain Goats played “Itzcuintli-Totzli Days” at least twice in 1997. At one show, John Darnielle asked the audience to sing along with him in the spirit of the song’s intention. At the other show, John Darnielle opened the show with it and called it an “old song.”

People tape Mountain Goats shows and put them up online just like they do for so many other bands. This allows us to follow a partial history which we know is incomplete. There may be dozens of other recordings or unrecorded instances of “Itzcuintli-Totzli Days” out there, but those two sum it up perfectly. It’s a happy, bouncing song that even unfamiliar fans can sing along with by the end. “Let the big, big rabbit come out,” John Darnielle demands, and the crowd sings along.

The title comes from terms the Aztecs used for “dog” and “rabbit,” which represented specific elements of their calendar. The dog stood for death and the memory of the dead, while the rabbit stood for brighter moments of fertility and spirituality. The Mountain Goats dance between those two emotions frequently, but it’s rare that they do so gleefully. The day gets dark towards the end of “Itzcuintli-Totzli Days,” but the narrator is still thrilled to spend this time with someone. It’s more uplifting than we’ve come to expect, especially on an album that ends with the chilling “Resonant Bell World.” Your best bet is to sing along and beat back the darkness with a smile as you stave off the coming bad times, especially while you’ve got someone to hold your hand.