Stars Fell on Alabama

144. Pure Money

Alex Russell Nine Black Poppies , , , , , , , ,

 

Much like the characters in “Pure Money,” you may require a few listens to get everything out of this song.

Track: “Pure Money”
Album: Nine Black Poppies (1995)

Almost all the songs on Nine Black Poppies feature two characters. Most of the tracks see one person talking to another about a turning point in their lives together. As one of the shortest songs on the album, you could miss “Pure Money” as more of an interstitial between the furious “Chanson du Bon Chose” and the lively “I Know You’ve Come to Take My Toys Away.”

The beat is extra-mechanical on purpose here, similar to “Going to Malibu” and a few other early songs. John Darnielle delivers the lyrics in a near whisper. It’s tough to tell from the surface what “Pure Money” wants us to feel. It could be described as haunting, given the fading out chorus of “I used to know you” over and over, but it isn’t quite as eerie as some other songs the Mountain Goats imbue with terror. It feels more like one narrator’s thought, delivered and then left to percolate with no more detail than necessary.

In 2007 the band played “Pure Money” live and John Darnielle said he thought it was the only live performance ever. I can only find mention of two others, both in 1997, and only at that 2007 show did he offer any context. Darnielle describes the song as a hateful message encoded so well that the person who hears it won’t understand it for some time. While on the topic of encoding, the opening sample is from a Dutch interview where the band said that they don’t consider themselves “lofi” but rather “bifi” which is apparently a joke because it’s a European brand of sausage snack. Both the sample and the song are brief looks into situations we don’t fully understand, but as is so often the case with the early Goats, that’s not the immediate point.

044. Stars Fell on Alabama

Alex Russell Nine Black Poppies , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle rewrites a traditional love song in the style of the Mountain Goats with “Stars Fell on Alabama.”

Track: “Stars Fell on Alabama”
Album: Nine Black Poppies (1995)

The original “Stars Fell on Alabama” is very sweet, and I highly suggest the Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong version before trying to approach this one. The terminology will get stretched here if we call the song by the Mountain Goats a “cover” because it appears to share little beyond a title. It’s that fact that says everything, since you have to consider why John Darnielle borrowed the title of such a sweet song to write a song that ends with someone pulling a gun on someone they love.

Darnielle says he wrote the anti-love anthem “No Children” when he heard the Lee Ann Womack song “I Hope You Dance” on the radio. I won’t link it here, but it’s so super-saturated that it’s difficult to listen to even once. What does “promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance” in a love song even mean, really? Darnielle’s catalog is designed for someone who hears that and doesn’t hear their world. “No Children” isn’t a love song for a new generation or anything, but it’s meant to sound familiar. You know “I hope you die // I hope we both die,” whether you want to or not.

The comparison here isn’t as stark, because the sweetness of the original “Stars Fell on Alabama” is far more genuine than “I Hope You Dance.” While this one isn’t an attempt to “fix” a message, it’s still a rewriting of a love song. In both songs two lovers spend time alone together, but in the Goats version it’s not “I never planned in my imagination a situation so heavenly // a fairy land where no one else could enter” it’s “and your pistol glistened.”