songs

041. Tallahassee

Alex Russell Tallahassee , , , , , , ,

The title track on Tallahassee opens the album with a mournful look at a love that won’t save two people.

Track: “Tallahassee”
Album: Tallahassee (2002)

“In the case of “Tallahassee” it seemed like a scene-setting song: it introduced the principal characters, established that there’s been a movement from the other side of the country to here, and took one last look in the rear view at the thing they once had that’s now in collapse.” – John Darnielle, on why the title track is first on Tallahassee.

The only part of Tallahassee that doesn’t happen in Florida happens in Nevada. The Alpha Couple (the common term for the couple on the album) is leaving their home and headed to the place where what’s already fallen apart will finally become impossible to deny. By verse three, the couple admits “there is no deadline // there is no schedule // there is no plan we can fall back on,” but we know they’re wrong about the next line: “the road this far can’t be retraced.” It can be retraced through dozens of other Alpha Couple songs, but they aren’t ready to do that. Not yet.

There is an inevitability to the sadness in both of them. Most Alpha Couple songs are bathed in descriptions of a dark future, so they never really seem to doubt how it will all end. That said, there’s more tied up in why these are “love songs” in “Tallahassee” than so many other places. The verse-ending “And you // you” is delivered with as much love as John Darnielle can muster. Even though you know how the story will end — it’s never a good sign when you say “prayers to summon the destroying angel” on the way to your new home — you have to understand the love these people once shared. It’s easy to see Tallahassee as an angry record, but its title track acts as a dirge for the best parts of The Alpha Couple.

040. Gojam Province 1968

Alex Russell Satanic Messiah , , , , , , , , ,

In the history of “Gojam Province 1968” people solve one problem only to find they can only do so much.

Track: “Gojam Province 1968”
Album: Satanic Messiah (2008)

Satanic Messiah is a four-song EP that contains a song called “Wizard Buys a Hat.” When he introduces the song live, John Darnielle sometimes mentions that he felt uniquely compelled to come up with something worthy of that title. It’s a great joke, but it doesn’t really prepare you for the rest of the EP. The albums are mostly thematic, but I haven’t found that the EPs follow anything like that. One of my favorites, Babylon Springs, has one song about a wrestler getting his righteous revenge on a world that has no use for him (“Ox Baker Triumphant”) and another about the sweetness of the “good” parts of infidelity (“Alibi”). The result is a bunch of great songs, but a puzzler when looking for a thread.

When you have a song like “Gojam Province 1968” you need no theme. It doesn’t go with “Wizard Buys a Hat” but it doesn’t really need to go with anything. In 1968, and, yes, in Gojam, the populace rose up against excessive taxes they were unable to afford. The government heard their pleas and met the resistance with reform. It’s a small victory in history, but a very big one for people who were “bashing in the heads of tax collectors.”

John Darnielle sings it softly and lightly plays a beautiful piano tune. For the last few years the band has been adding more and more quiet piano, which can sometimes feel at odds with the original one-man-stomping-and-destroying-a-guitar John Darnielle that many fans love. The best of the piano songs wouldn’t work any other way, though, and “Gojam Province 1968” needs to be this delicate. The end of the song leaves you with a “where do we go from here” feeling, and that’s the real point of this pretty song about ugliness.

039. Minnesota

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

Two oddly romantic images in “Minnesota” briefly obscure a tale about how we can forget how to love each other.

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

“A little angrier and a little less easy to sympathize with.” – John Darnielle, comparing the couple in Full Force Galesburg to people on other Mountain Goats albums.

For an album that ends with a repetition of “it’s all coming apart again,” there’s a lot of sweet-sounding stuff on Full Force Galesburg. It’s a tough album to break down in a lot of respects. John Darnielle mostly describes it as an album about two desperate people who aren’t in a healthy relationship with each other anymore, but that can very loosely be layered onto many, many Goats albums. These two specifically are going through something else.

“Minnesota” stretches the definition of “love song.” One character surrounds their house with Dutch seeds while the other sings an old song. While those are nice images, they are surrounded by suggestions of something very grisly. Both verses talk about an unrelenting heat, and in the heat our guide through this romance is drinking and staring at his wife. He’s only drinking and staring at her.

If you are given to hope, it may be difficult to pull out the darkness in a song that’s this sweet on the surface. Full Force Galesburg has much angrier guitar on it elsewhere and the lyrics of “Chinese House Flowers” speak much more directly to the end of love (“I want you the way you were”), but “Minnesota” is just as grim about the chances of these two working out. These two are sharing some strangely intimate moments, but they aren’t really communicating. This is not The Alpha Couple, but it’s certainly people who could appreciate their method of “dealing” with problems.

038. Estate Sale Sign

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

After unexplained events, two people have to sell off the stuff of their life in “Estate Sale Sign.”

Track: “Estate Sale Sign”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

The conceit of All Eternals Deck is that it’s a collection of lost, original tarot cards that has been presented now as an album with each song representing a card. You don’t need to think too hard about that, but it does say a lot about the kind of guy John Darnielle is. It’s a loose idea for an album that infuses a little weirdness and mysticism into even straightforward songs.

“Estate Sale Sign” is about a couple that has to get rid of most of their possessions in an estate sale, but it’s also about the general sense of melancholy associated with losing the trappings of your life. These two people don’t necessarily know how they feel about this sale or how they feel about the things in it. The narrator calls various items “crude little wooden idols,” “trinkets,” “treasures,” and “unloved icons.” The broad sense is something we can all understand, because we’ve all had to get rid of things and we’ve all felt the emotional loss connected to physical loss.

The specific, however, is what makes this a Mountain Goats song. “Stock shots, stupid stock shots from the Pomona mall // set up like unloved icons gathering dust up on the wall” tells you exactly what you need to know about the kind of things they’re selling. When the narrator throws in that the stock footage they’re trying to sell is from “films no one remembers” but that they remember “when their names were dear to you and me” we learn about the couple’s relationship.

Popular culture has given us many versions of couples dividing up their stuff after a breakup, but in the world of the Mountain Goats, when something goes badly in your love life you need to sell everything you own in dramatic, infuriating fashion.

037. Alpha Incipiens

Alex Russell Zopilote Machine , , , , , , , , ,

The first song about The Alpha Couple shows that the iconic lovers weren’t ever all that great for each other.

Track: “Alpha Incipiens”
Album: Zopilote Machine (1994)

Every song about The Alpha Couple is fascinating. The timeline is fun to try to figure out, but you can’t do it for certain. You can figure out that some have to happen before others based on geography — they start on the west coast and end in Florida — but beyond that it’s all conjecture. In that way The Alpha Couple is less a story to be uncovered and labelled and more the ultimate idea of two people crashing and burning when combined.

When you listen to the spite on “Oceanographer’s Choice” you feel like the hate is so bitter and so real that the love must have been some serious business. Anyone who learns to hate that hard has to have loved even harder, right? Well, the timeline may be up for debate, but The Alpha Series has a definite start and a definite end. Their final song (chronologically) is “Alpha Omega,” and by then they’re down to just one of them. Their first song is “Alpha Incipiens” from Zopilote Machine, and that’s been confirmed. That much, John Darnielle says, he’ll give you.

Are they in love in “Alpha Incipiens?” The fast-paced, screaming song tells the drunken tale of one of them trying to understand the other as the drinks begin to flow. They will get drunk and they will get desperate as their story unfolds, but it starts with simple, ice-cold vodka and “the only thing I know is that I love you // and I’m holding on.”

It really foretells Tallahassee and the oncoming trainwreck very well. Even on one of their first mornings — and in their first tale — the couple gets drunk and has trouble talking to each other. Communication will become the least of their problems.

036. The Young Thousands

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

On an album full of the “after” of drugs, “The Young Thousands” looks at the “before” right after the point of no return.

Track: “The Young Thousands”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

“I have this sick feeling there’s something really great past the point of no return.” – the liner notes of We Shall All Be Healed

We Shall All Be Healed may be all about one thing, but it doesn’t have one just one way of talking about it. Songs like “Mole and “All Up the Seething Coast” are entirely low points. “Quito” and “Palmcorder Yajna” are less low, though in the grand scene of addiction terms like “low” really become complex.

“The Young Thousands” is without mood, because it is about inevitability. You live in a nightmarish building, haunted by your friends who are hardly your friends, and you are consumed like the others like you. You don’t feel good or bad about your choices. You don’t think of previous or post. You exist in this moment, you and the other young thousands.

Looked at specifically among the other tracks on We Shall All Be Healed, “The Young Thousands” hints hardest at some of the darker choices. “The things that you’ve got coming will do things that you’re afraid to,” John Darnielle insists, and it drives home the album’s message that it doesn’t really matter what you’re interested in doing or not doing when you’re hooked. “Mole” may be the result of decisions made in the depths of addiction, but “The Young Thousands” is the defense that those aren’t even “decisions.” When he talks about addiction and his youth, John Darnielle always speaks very sadly of some of the choices he made. The narrator in “The Young Thousands” wouldn’t even understand that that is a place you can even end up.

035. Crows

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

 

John Darnielle strains his voice in a graveyard in “Crows,” but he also asks us to consider what the scene means to us.

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

Devil in the Shortwave clocks in at twelve minutes long. Over two-and-a-half decades and likely a thousand songs, it’s very easy to lose track of twelve minutes. “Yoga” and “Genesis 19:1-2” still get a little play live now and they’re both excellent representations of the group’s earlier style. “Dirty Old Town” is a cover and “Comandante” is one of the all-time screamers; it’ll never fall all the way out of any fan’s rotation. Any song that starts with “I’m gonna drink more whiskey than Brendan Behan!” will always have a place in a certain mood.

That leaves the fifth song: “Crows.” Our narrator visits their great-grandmother’s grave in North Carolina only to find that a construction crew is destroying the headstones to raze the site for “graduate-student housing.” The specificity there is wonderful. Whatever you think of higher learning and its purpose, the idea of turning over a site of what may be century-old graves for dorms for twenty-somethings is striking.

For a group so obsessed with location, it’s interesting that “Crows” considers if the central location in the song really matters or not. The narrator says they “stood by a nameless hole in the ground” and that “maybe it was the right grave // maybe not.” We put our own feelings on those statements and realize how sad this tableau is, but our narrator doesn’t actually say it. They may be transcending the experience and considering that whether or not they can find her exact grave or not, they’ve still got this feeling. John Darnielle speeds through the song and while the delivery conveys a real sadness, it’s open-ended enough that you can draw your own conclusion about what the narrator finds in themselves.

034. Omega Blaster

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now!, Yam, the King of Crops , , , , , , , , ,

In “Omega Blaster” the problems of two people feel enormous despite the lack of their ultimate impact on the world.

Track: “Omega Blaster”
Album: Yam, the King of Crops (1994) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

It would have been much harder to get a handle on this whole catalog in the mid 90s. The first releases date back to 1991, but aside from the first album itself, most of the early stuff has been re-released on compilations like Protein Source of the Future….Now! which has selections from eight different releases. All of Yam, the King of Crops is on Protein Source, and since John Darnielle once said Yam, the King of Crops was his favorite album of his (that may or may not have changed by now, but it was at least once true) it is worth digging up if only for that reason.

“Omega Blaster” is a quiet song, sung almost in a whisper. John sounds far away in the recording, and it imbues the narrator with a kind of distant sadness about the divorce/breakup the song foretells. In the liner notes on Protein Source, John says “the narrators of these songs seem often to give near-apocalyptic weight to their petty grievances, and I am quite sure that some of them would gladly trade the fate of the world for a few hours of relative happiness.” What better summary of the end of a relationship is there?

“And I am leaving you // and I am sorry” is a very simple refrain for a song about the end of love, but in that sense it’s very malleable. Whatever experience you want to drape “Omega Blaster” over will conform to be covered by it. If you are the hurt one or not — or if it’s not really clear which you are — you can whisper along with the character as they feel the heat of an unreturned smile and the sadness of thoughtful gifts, given too late.

033. Southwood Plantation Road

Alex Russell Tallahassee , , , , , , , ,

 

“Southwood Plantation Road” sees The Alpha Couple’s defiant, giggling last attempt at love when it’s already far too late.

Track: “Southwood Plantation Road”
Album: Tallahassee (2002)

Geography is extremely important to the Mountain Goats, but whether that’s literal geography or not, well, that’s another matter. “California” means the actual state of California as often as it means “something generally good.” “Florida” generally means an unpleasant end.

The most important piece of mythology in the catalog is The Alpha Couple. The Annotated Mountain Goats has done all the work for you, but at the most basic level they are two people who used to love each other and are now together through hate, inertia, alcohol, and a love of self-destruction. Most people don’t realize a relationship was destructive until they get out of it, but both the Alpha Male and Alpha Female (they are never named, and those distinctions are as lovely as they are ironic) know it’s horrible and they don’t want to stop.

Tallahassee isn’t the full story (there are dozens of other Alpha songs) but it’s the story of their end in a decaying house in Florida. The house was inspired by the name of a real street — Southwood Plantation Road, which is an uninteresting stretch of wooded backroad — and an actual house (on a different road) that John Darnielle saw on a visit to Florida. In “Southwood Plantation Road,” the Alphas move into the house that would be the tomb of their love if it hadn’t died long ago. They make claims they can’t believe. One of the only truths they actually share is “I am not going to lose you // we are gonna stay married.” Are they “in love?” It’s really impossible to define what it is at this point, and their emotions for each other mean different things to different listeners. In this house, in this song, though, they are drunk and they are giggling and they are going to stay.

032. Store

Alex Russell Jam Eater Blues , , , , , , , ,

“Store” is a violent, expressive song about the only thing scarier than death in the abstract: death right in front of you.

Track: “Store” (also called “Aisle”)
Album: Jam Eater Blues (2001)

“It’s called ‘Aisle’ but I always want to call it ‘Store’ but I might have that backwards. You can call it whatever you want, because generally speaking if you’re requesting it, I won’t play it anyway.” – John Darnielle, on “Store.” (Which, obviously, you can also call “Aisle”)

There are a lot of songs from the catalog of roughly 25 years that don’t get played a lot these days. Some of them are for obvious reasons — I’ve already expressed my love for “Beach House” but it’s a lengthy diatribe about seals, so, okay, might not fit in with the divorce album and the meth album and so on — but some of them just don’t exactly represent where the band is at anymore. See: “Going to Georgia,” a longer conversation for a later time.

“Store” is one of the “songs about dead friends” in the catalog. The narrator walks in a store and has a painful experience (John sometimes calls it “a vision” but you can read it as literal or metaphorical pain and it works the same) and passes out for a moment in the middle of the aisle. They experience the memory of the sight of a dead friend with a head wound and exclaim “ah, the blood! all of that blood!” over and over and over.

When we think about a death we often think about the loss of a person moving forward more than actual, literal death. The reason the exclamations of “ah, the blood!” and the screams and the hard strums here work so well is because they force us to look at the same thing our hero is seeing. They force us to consider something even more extreme than a representation of loss, and that’s “the sight of the hole in the side of your skull.”