songs

117. Standard Bitter Love Song #7

Alex Russell Zopilote Machine , , , , , ,

“Standard Bitter Love Song #7” reminds us of a time we couldn’t leave a relationship without saying one last horrible thing.

Track: “Standard Bitter Love Song #7”
Album: Zopilote Machine (1994)

There are six songs with “Standard Bitter Love Song” in the title, so far as anyone seems to know. #4, #7, and #8 are on albums, #5 and #6 exist in the corners of the Internet, and #1 is a screaming, stomping fan-favorite that’s seen a revival in the last few years after John Darnielle played it at Farm Sanctuary in 2007. #2 and #3 likely exist, if for no other reason than it’s more likely that they’re real than not, but you never know. Maybe it’s better and stranger if they never turn up.

They’re angry, bitter songs sung from one lover to another. The Alpha Couple songs do a lot of the heavy lifting regarding “bitter” in the Goats catalog, but these seem more like a place for John Darnielle to try out a deeper anger. The title is so on-the-nose that he can get away with being direct. In most of them, the narrator either talks about violence and there’s lots of blood and gnashing of teeth. They’re songs for the specific set of emotions that boil up when you feel like a “standard bitter love song” is exactly what you need.

In #7 the narrator imagines themselves as a fly on the wall earlier, likely in the hopes of seeing what caused “that innocent look” the other lover displays. The love is totally gone here, and it’s summed up best with the most brutal lyric: “I know you’d kill me if you could stand the sight of blood.” The guitar behind it all feels tense and John Darnielle’s snarl persists through both verses. When you’ve made up your mind like this it’s time to leave a relationship, but the standard bitter love songs exist for those final jabs you can’t help but get in first.

111. Proverbs 6:27

Alex Russell The Life of the World to Come , , , , , , , , ,

 

“Proverbs 6:27” applies a verse about adultery to the power of memory and how we deal with those we’ve lost.

Track: “Proverbs 6:27”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009)

The title verse is simple: “Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?” It’s evocative and clear. The proverb means you will be burned if you play with fire, but it also means that everyone will know it. Your clothes are burned, but not destroyed. It seems like the suggestion is that you aren’t consumed immediately by fire, but rather that people see your singed clothes and know what happened.

The preceding verses in the Bible explain the context of adultery, but the Goats song allows for wider interpretation. The character waits in an old home and does mundane tasks to pass the time and ignore the nagging thought of someone long gone. It’s another version of the emotions in “Half Dead,” though less directly about a breakup. In “Proverbs 6:27” our hero wears their heart on their sleeve, but it could be a death instead of a temporary loss and it could be a friend instead of a lover. Whatever the characters, you can insert yourself and imagine the time spent “as day gives way to day gives way to day gives way to day.”

The chorus is simple like the verse, but it’s prime John Darnielle. “I treat each crushing moment like a gift” shows that the character is wallowing in difficult head space across Betamax tapes and old memories, but “and wait for the fog to lift” means that they expect this to have an end. You can be scarred by loss, the Mountain Goats remind you, but you’re gonna get out of that house eventually and it’ll pass. It isn’t purely hopeful, but the conclusion suggests that since singed clothes won’t kill you, the fire is fine.

110. The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , , ,

“The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” muses on he meaning of big things for other people versus small things for ourselves.

Track: “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life”
Album: Ghana (1999)

So many Mountain Goats songs suggest an interpretation but stop short of insisting upon one. It’s easy to infer what songs about the folly of insurance fraud or the risks of selling drugs are supposed to make us feel, but rarely does John Darnielle directly say “this song is about this thing.”

Darnielle himself responded to a comment on his Tumblr and told a fan that “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” is “essentially a riff on ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’,” which is a poem by W. H. Auden. The fan asked why the song ends before it discusses Jimi Hendrix’s death, but Darnielle insists that’s the whole idea. He said that it would “lose whatever power it has” if it devolved into drugs and death.

The song is quiet, even for an early Goats song. You can picture Jimi Hendrix waking up and performing the basic tasks described in the lyrics. Darnielle highlights relatable things for a reason. His Jimi Hendrix is about to die, but today he’s just having a normal morning. If you’re lucky, you’ll have thousands and thousands of mornings like this and the last one you have will look a lot like the others.

Auden’s poem examines a classic painting: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Icarus is shown in the sea after burning his wings, but none of the other people seem to care. They have their own lives, so even the remarkable story of the fall of Icarus means very little. Darnielle doesn’t tell us how to feel about it, but he echoes Auden’s notion that we must be who we are and live in our experiences, even when circumstances seem like they deserve more attention and pause.

109. Michael Myers Resplendent

Alex Russell Heretic Pride , , , , , , ,

The Mountain Goats consider the man himself and the man playing him in “Michael Myers Resplendent.”

Track: “Michael Myers Resplendent”
Album: Heretic Pride (2008)

John Darnielle’s personal interests are varied. He loves boxing, professional wrestling, and metal. He’s done a wrestling album and there are a half-dozen songs in the catalog that are directly about boxing. The metal influences can be harder to spot. The trappings of metal (darkness, macabre elements, horror, etc.) are certainly present, but my knowledge of that world only goes so far. I’m not a horror fan and as much as I love the Goats, I can’t get into everything John Darnielle loves the way he can.

The thing is: that’s okay. You don’t need to love wrestling to listen to Beat the Champ. You don’t even need to have seen Halloween II to appreciate “Michael Myers Resplendent.” You just need to know that the slasher gets burned in a house fire. You can handle the rest in your mind.

“Resplendent” means “attractive or impressive through being richly colorful or sumptuous.” It comes from the Latin verb for “to shine” and shares space in our language with “splendid.” It’s a truly fantastic word that doesn’t get used very often. It’s rare that “resplendent” is the exact word you need. It is the exact word for a man ablaze not emerging victorious from something. He’s a force of nature, less a man than an idea, and he’s not the “winner.” John Darnielle wants you to consider the monster in its final moments. Even if you can’t pity this character, you can appreciate that the victory for the other characters has another side.

Darnielle includes enough detail in the song that you can tell it’s about the actor portraying Michael Myers. The song works when just describing the character, but it adds an extra element of sadness given the preparation it takes just to play the doomed monster’s role.

108. High Hawk Season

Alex Russell All Eternals Deck , , , , , , , ,

 

“High Hawk Season” examines the cast of the cult classic The Warriors as Mountain Goats characters.

Track: “High Hawk Season”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

All Eternals Deck is about a fictional set of tarot cards and each song represents a card. The conceit is easy to identify in songs like “Birth of Serpents” and “Damn These Vampires,” but it’s murky in more direct songs like “Sourdoire Valley Song” and “Liza Forever Minnelli.”

John Darnielle says that “High Hawk Season” is about the plot of the cult-classic film The Warriors. In the film, nine Warriors must escape dozens (and potentially hundreds) of other gangs after someone shoots another gang leader in Van Cortlandt Park and pins it on the Warriors. It’s campy as hell, but it holds up as exciting and filled with machismo. The characterization is thin and your mileage may vary for the narrative, but the drama of the chase in the film is infectious.

The song’s parallels with the movie are obvious. The Warriors in “High Hawk Season” are “young supernovas” and they travel all night towards their own version of happiness. In the film it’s Coney Island, but really it’s a sense of home. The characters are lost through the rest of their journey in New York, often literally as much as metaphorically. There are small moments where you remember that these are kids, despite all the fight scenes and big talk, when they have trouble reading the map and get scared.

Darnielle uses that fear to make the characters his own. “Rise if you’re sleeping, stay awake” became a tagline for the All Eternals Deck tour, and the motto is easy to apply to Darnielle’s world. They see these Warriors who run through the night as their people, isolated and in need of consideration. The harmony and vocals may be unique for the Mountain Goats, but the sense that “the heat’s about to break” sure isn’t.

107. Fall of the Star High School Running Back

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle laments the reality of drug laws in “Fall of the Star High School Running Back.”

Track: “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

All Hail West Texas is about specific people. They aren’t all real, but they are specific in the sense that they have names and personalities. John Darnielle’s early work features characters that speak in first person and often talk about the same themes (love, desperation, longing, and the like) so the first album with a full cast is a big departure.

Jenny from “Jenny” shows up in other songs and Jeff and Cyrus from “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” live again every time the band closes a live show. William Staniforth Donahue is a different sort of character, but still specific. His name changes in live shows, but he’s always the same person. He always plays football well and he always goes to jail. He lives a short life in the two-minute song.

John Darnielle says the song is about mandatory sentencing. The character is based on a person who did time in a Dutch prison for drug possession, ostensibly with the intent to distribute. The real guy was another young person who probably didn’t fit the intent of a mandatory 10+ year sentence for peddling hard drugs.

He refers to the song as “a protest song” which makes sense. It’s also the story of a troubled person who chooses temporary happiness at the risk of all else. That’s a very familiar idea. More of Donahue’s character comes out in the line “people you used to look down on” about the drug dealers he hangs with after he loses his football career. He changes his perspective about the lower social strata, which would be the start of something if it weren’t connected with the end of everything else.

106. Original Air-Blue Gown

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

 

John Darnielle writes his own version of a Thomas Hardy poem in the ode “Original Air-Blue Gown.”

Track: “Original Air-Blue Gown”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice” includes the lines “Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then // Even to the original air-blue gown!” The rest of the poem talks about Hardy waiting for a woman’s return, though he slowly begins to realize that she cannot return. He thinks he hears her voice but also worries that she is a ghost. We get the sensation that his fears are founded.

The narrator in “Original Air-Blue Gown” waits for a similar return with similar fears. They describe colorful surroundings: green horseflies, plums, and red air. All of that color leads to “dark blue shapes” that they can just make out through their eyelids and the statement “I am not afraid of death.”

When a character says that we generally think they’re talking about their own mortality, but we need to look deeper here. Hardy was describing his wife in “The Voice” and Darnielle’s narrator is definitely describing someone else’s passing. They obsess over a black-and-white boxing match and the youth and power of Cassius Clay, which shows that they’re tied up in the past. The repetition of “my God, my God, my God // he was something” helps lock the image in the listener’s mind. You can’t breeze past it any more than the narrator can.

At the end of “The Voice” Hardy’s character attempts to come to terms with reality. Darnielle’s believes that the target of his affection has returned. The backing strings intensify and lend bonus eeriness to the scene. As a callback to the earlier repetition, the narrator looks out into the clearing where either a ghost or a loved one is and says “it’s you, it’s you, it’s you.”

105. Chinese House Flowers

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

 

The fierce “Chinese House Flowers” is suspiciously absent from live shows, but the one instance is magical. 

Track: “Chinese House Flowers”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

On September 11, 1996, John Darnielle played “Chinese House Flowers” at a concert venue called The Argo in Denton, Texas. It’s probably not the only time, but it’s the only time the good people at the Mountain Goats wiki list.

In various cars, apartments, backyards, and stranger venues I’ve played just about every song in the catalog for different people over the last decade. Just about everything — even the strangest of the strange — works for someone. “Chinese House Flowers” seems to work differently on me. People like it, but it doesn’t seem to get the same love as other fierce songs about love.

Chinese houses are purple and native to California. You can imagine mid-90s John Darnielle thinking of those flowers and home as he wrote Full Force Galesburg in Iowa. The album version features some trademark frantic strumming, but the selling point is the wavering, almost-terrified vocal track. His voice cracks over and over again and it drives home that this narrator is terrified. “I used to love you so much that I was sure it would kill me” could be a corny line in less deft hands, but it fits perfectly after “And just then the gleam in your eye // made my blood freeze” and other such expressions of fear.

Darnielle’s thoughts on the song aren’t obvious, though we can infer some things from the possible 20-year absence at live shows. If you’re like me and it works for you, I urge you to go check out that Denton recording. That venue’s long gone and Denton became immortalized far more famously by the Goats a few years later, but you should still go hear John Darnielle lose his mind over the chorus of “I want you more than I want anything // I want you the way you were.”

103. Straight Six

Alex Russell Jam Eater Blues , , , , , ,

 

Jenny shows up in “Straight Six” but the narrator has only the moon and their thoughts to help on a late drive.

Track: “Straight Six”
Album: Jam Eater Blues (2001)

Jenny can be a blessing or a curse in a Mountain Goats song. In “Jenny” she’s a symbol of tremendous hope for the narrator. That character and Jenny ride away from their troubles on a motorcycle and seemingly get away with it, at least in the moment. In “Night Light” she’s the lifeline that a terrified narrator needs to keep their sanity. They’re being pursued by external or internal demons and they get calls from Jenny that keeps them tethered to the real world.

The Jenny of “Straight Six” doesn’t seem to be as much help as her “Night Light” counterpart. In “Straight Six” she serves the same function as a proposed savior for the narrator, but she’s not likely to be as successful given that “Jenny’s on the cellular // high as a kite.” Considering how rarely characters in Goats songs actually get names it’s safe to assume that all three are the same Jenny and to view her as functionally the same character with the same purpose through the catalog.

“Straight Six” is the third and final song on Jam Eater Blues. The title track is, well, a blues song about making the most out of life’s simple pleasures. The middle track is a brutal look at specific, violent death and how it impacts us. The through line here is tough to find, but all three songs feature some form of introspection in a dark time. The trick is that they all find different outcomes. The narrator in “Straight Six” offers both possible outcomes to introspection on the single as they consider their troubles: “sometimes the moon shines like a beacon to the weary and the sick in spirit // and sometimes, sometimes it’s dark.”

102. The Lady from Shanghai

Alex Russell Bitter Melon Farm, Songs for Petronius , , , , , , , , , , ,

Named for an equally creepy Orson Welles movie, “The Lady from Shanghai” is unsettling in the best way possible.

Track: “The Lady from Shanghai”
Album: Songs for Petronius (1992) and Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

“‘The Lady from Shanghai,’ though — when I hear that comparatively young man get all breathy there, I see what he means, and I feel like he was onto something.” – John Darnielle, liner notes for Bitter Melon Farm

In 1947, Orson Welles wrote and directed a movie called The Lady from Shanghai. It occupies two places in cultural history. It’s either a masterpiece of noir or a tangled mess of indulgent Orson Welles stuff. Your perspective is your own, but it’s a classic and it’s one of the strangest experiences available on screen.

It’s strange to the point that some people seem to argue that it doesn’t make sense or flow as a narrative, but the basic points are pretty easy to follow. Orson Welles plays an Irish sailor who rescues Rita Hayworth during an attack in a park. Welles then discovers she’s married, but her husband hires him to man his yacht during a long, bizarre cruise that involves his lawyer and other strange figures who might not be what they seem. Everyone gets tangled in a plot and everyone has a secret motive, but can Welles untangle them all and save his life?

The song is breathy, as Darnielle notes, and it’s sung directly to someone. The film features frequent turns to camera where characters cackle or speak ominously. These are ostensibly to other characters, but they are directed straight at the audience. Both the song and the film create an eerie mood that will unsettle anyone who consumes either. The film really needs to be seen, but without viewing it you can still appreciate the state of mind of Darnielle’s characters. They’re wrapped up in something and all they can do now is walk towards their destiny.