standard bitter love songs

514. Standard Bitter Love Song #1

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , , ,

The original in a series, “Standard Bitter Love Song #1” is very silly, very extreme, and very relatable.

Track: “Standard Bitter Love Song #1”
Album: Unreleased

There are a few “official” songs released in the Standard Bitter Love Song list, but the first one never officially came out. You can only hear it on live recordings and I simply insist your first one be this performance in 2007 at Zoop, a benefit event for Farm Sanctuary in New York. The two Zoop recordings are, I think, the best live Mountain Goats recordings, and the crowd really stomps their way through this one on the recording of “Standard Bitter Love Song #1.”

The title’s a joke, but it’s also not. These are songs from the heart of an angry person, made ridiculous by being someone other than them. There’s a lyric in this song about shooting a kite with a shotgun. That’s an image you conjure up when you’re real-deal mad, but also part of you understands that eventually you will not feel this way. It’s extreme, but this is an extreme feeling. Belting it out in a barn with hardcore fans willing to go to a request show? That’s a once (or twice, there are two Zoops) in a lifetime thing.

On that note, because there’s nowhere else to put it, a friend of mine from college went to Zoop II and asked if I wanted to ride with him. I turned it down for something frivolous and friends, let me tell you, if there’s a Zoop III, sell the clothes off your back to get there. Listen to the guy wolf howl in the second chorus of this performance. You can tell it’s special.

194. Standard Bitter Love Song #8

Alex Russell Ghana, Taking the Dative , , , , , , , , ,

“Standard Bitter Love Song #8” borrows a threat from an accused witch to talk about teenage love.

Track: “Standard Bitter Love Song #8”
Album: Taking the Dative (1994), Ghana (1999)

Lloyd Center is a three-story mall in Portland, Oregon. It’s an odd blend of ideas: the skating rink where Tonya Harding learned to skate, a for-profit college, a defunct Sears, and professional offices. It’s also a mall in Portland, which seems like an impossibility based on what we all think of when we think of Portland. Its Wikipedia article has a section titled “Crime,” though, so it makes sense as a location in a Mountain Goats song.

There are a few songs that share the “Standard Bitter Love Song” title, though there may not be eight. That doesn’t stop the existence of “Standard Bitter Love Song #8,” where one character pines over another at Lloyd Center. Most of the songs with this title structure are even angrier than normal Goats songs in this vein, and this one is no exception. Our narrator has “a mouth full of anger” and curses the couple with the damning “God will give them blood to drink.”

The refrain appears to come from The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, where a character who is sentenced to death for witchcraft condemns their accuser with a similar line. It’s a gallows threat designed to leave those who will survive you with a chilling fear, which makes it perfect for the overblown emotions of a young person who feels spurned at the skating rink.

The song holds on this image. The narrator sees them leave and looks over the railing. The power of the standard bitter love songs is their ability to make dramatic images seem so perfect for mundane problems. Someone shoots a kite with a shotgun in one of them, but we get why. You grow out of these emotions, but when you’re skating-rink age, what’s more relatable than a lonely Friday night?

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.