the admonishing song

147. Pure Sound

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , , , ,

 

A chance meeting on Taylor Street tells us everything about one person and nothing about the other in “Pure Sound.”

Track: “Pure Sound”
Album: Ghana (1999)

“Pure Sound” was released in 1995 on Goar Magazine #11. Just about any search for more details becomes recursive. You will only find Goar Magazine #11 mentioned in relation to the two Mountain Goats songs on it (“Pure Sound” and “Creature Song”) and vice versa. 1995 was 22 years ago at the time of this writing, but it may as well be totally lost to time for all the good research will do you.

Both songs live forever on Ghana, the compilation of many loose tracks up to 1999. Ghana spans a lot of time and even more distance thematically, which makes it difficult to approach as one work. Rather than thinking of “Pure Sound” as an oddity, you can consider it as one of the “pure” songs, which are grouped as intense, brief looks at conversations.

“Pure Sound” never made the rotation. You won’t find it on fan lists of their favorite songs and you won’t hear it at live shows. It doesn’t have room for the full band to blow it up into an experience but it also doesn’t seem like it would benefit from the intense, three-song guitar solo sets that John Darnielle does now. It seems right at home in the mid-to-late 90s version of the Mountain Goats, where sad narrators realize their fate too late.

The narrator meets with someone, but the meeting is accidental. John Darnielle delivers “I was in between times” with his trademark whine and the desperation of the moment becomes apparent. So often we don’t get any window into the other character and “Pure Sound” is no different. The narrator is smitten, so much so that they hope they can halt time to extend the experience of an accidental meeting on Taylor Street, but of course, they can’t.

128. The Admonishing Song

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , , ,

 

“The Admonishing Song” exists largely for one weird line, but it offers a glimpse at a very strange argument.

Track: “The Admonishing Song”
Album: Ghana (1999)

“The Admonishing Song” was originally released on a compilation called Corkscrewed by Theme Park Records in 1995. The company either doesn’t exist anymore or has changed their name to be more Google-friendly, as now they are buried under pages of actual records set at or by theme parks. It exists on Ghana as one of the “funny” songs like “Golden Boy” or “The Anglo-Saxons.”

In the liner notes on Ghana, John Darnielle supplies explanatory notes for many of the songs. For “Flight 717: Going to Denmark” and “The Admonishing Song” he says that he was tricked by a “tongueless horde” of unspeakable beasts and that both songs are actually hiding a delicious salad dressing recipe in their digital code. Darnielle often distances himself from the early “funny” songs, but his sense of humor still shines through more than two decades after “The Admonishing Song.” There is more going on in “Foreign Object,” but John Darnielle still loves a joke.

In 1995 he was willing to go a much longer way for a joke. The chorus of “The Admonishing Song” sees the narrator wailing versions of “tell me why // you lied” again and again. They literally admonish the person they’re speaking to by telling them over and over that it was “not a nice thing to do.” The payoff is the bitter “tell me why you made threats against the life of the Prime Minister of Canada.” It’s a weird song, even in an era with the occasional weird song, but the line is memorable. You can choose to imagine the conversation these characters had before that line or you can just enjoy the strangeness. For me, that line is enough to make me wonder about these characters even though “The Admonishing Song” offers nothing else to go on.