The Coroner’s Gambit

441. Family Happiness

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

“Family Happiness” uses Russian literature as a jumping off point for a very familiar Mountain Goats situation.

Track: “Family Happiness”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

“Family Happiness” is linked in my mind to “Waving at You.” They aren’t necessarily really connected, but whenever I hear one of the loud, screaming ones I think about how John Darnielle once said that people think those are the ones he really feels, but he thinks it’s more the quiet ones like “Waving at You.” There may be an exception to be found to that rule and it may very well be this one.

John Darnielle’s voice cracks during the scream at the end, but all through “Family Happiness” you can hear the strain. This one is loud, fast, and both definitions of “furious.” These two people share a car and a relationship, but not much else. “When I mouth my silent curses at you // I can see my breath” would be an all-time barb except for what immediately follows and slams home the hate with “I hope the stars don’t even come out tonight // I hope we both freeze to death.”

The title comes from Tolstoy, who is also referenced in the text, but the narrative here is recognizable in other Mountain Goats songs. What maybe sets this one apart is the repeated phrase “you can’t make me go to war.” At the end of the first verse, this seems to be the narrator insisting that no matter how bitter their lover becomes they will not give in and give them the satisfaction. By the end, we see that was never an option and it becomes less effective as a supposed defense. We only have one side of this argument, but it’s safe to say no one here is blameless in how we got here.

440. We Were Patriots

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

In a panic hidden in plain sight, two people refuse to face their fear in “We Were Patriots.”

Track: “We Were Patriots”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

The best live version of “We Were Patriots” is this one, which Jon Nall himself taped in Tallahassee, Florida in 1998. The studio version is good, but that live one really unlocked this song for me. I can’t quite pin down what it is about the studio version, but John Darnielle sometimes introduces it as “a quiet song” when he plays it live and those versions feel the same to me. That one night in Florida in 1998 is different. The song explodes the way the characters in it seem to be exploding. After finishing it, John Darnielle mentions that these are the Alpha Couple, more or less, though that is up for debate and isn’t really the point, anyway.

You can experience “We Were Patriots” without paying too much attention. If you do that, it may not really click. Much of this song is a sing-song “la la la” repetition that could be read as filler to be replaced later. It’s deliberate here, or at least I choose to read it as a deliberate space for the listener to imagine what is intended to take its place. These people are in danger. They are not really contending with that danger. La, la, la.

What makes that live performance work for me is the passion, but you may not need that for it to work for you. Probably you can engage with it as intended and find that same creeping dread and that same staving off of the inevitable. I am going to admit that I couldn’t, but now I hear it there in the source material. I suggest you try both, but, as always, don’t stay too long in this space.

439. There Will Be No Divorce

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

“There Will Be No Divorce” is the only Mountain Goats song that uses the word “divorce” in the title, and not how you’d expect.

Track: “There Will Be No Divorce”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

“There Will Be No Divorce” is a love song for John Darnielle wrote for his wife. He introduces it as such at live shows, though the specific dedication changes a little bit each time. There’s something wonderful about a love song in the Mountain Goats catalog where you often have to stretch the definition a little bit to make it work, but here you do not. This is a beautiful series of images and the delivery and mood firmly tell you this narrator loves this recipient. You could leave it there. That’s really all you need.

To go deeper, this is the only Mountain Goats song with the word “divorce” in the title. It’s a joke, of sorts, and I take it to be one on the rest of John Darnielle’s songs. What better joke could there be from the man that eventually wrote “No Children” than to write a love song that seemingly calls out that it’s a surprise that two Mountain Goats characters aren’t facing down the end of a relationship?

All that said, a lot of fans interpret this differently. I was surprised in reading about this to see that people seem to view this as another unreliable narrator and read the title’s joke in a much darker way. I don’t see it, but I don’t want to rob anyone of their take on a great song. If you think John Darnielle is being coy here, who am I to stop you? I just think “like God was going to catch you by the ponytail” is a lyric you deserve to hear, regardless of what you think it means.

438. Shadow Song

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

“Shadow Song” was written for one person who is no longer here, but for you, it can be for anyone.

Track: “Shadow Song”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

I have to be careful with “Shadow Song.” If you know yourself well, you can understand what I mean if you think about what your version of this is. When I sit down to write these, I do my research and I sit with the song itself, even if it’s one I’ve heard a million times. I do not need to listen to “Shadow Song” again, but I honor my process and I do the thing. “Shadow Song” is about death, but it’s also about talking to someone that you think probably can’t hear you anymore. Like much of The Coroner’s Gambit, it is directly speaking to Rozz Williams, a musician and a friend of John Darnielle who passed on. It does not need to be that for you. It should be, I feel, at least a little bit, to respect the intention and the dedication, but it is probably about someone else for you.

There are other, more specific songs in the Mountain Goats catalog that fill similar space. The generality of “Shadow Song” is what really does it for me, though, and that’s not something I would say for a lot of John Darnielle’s music. I had a good relationship with my own father, so “Pale Green Things” does not make me think of him. He did pass on at a time in my life that was a crossroads, so “You or Your Memory,” however, does. “Shadow Song” is not, for me, about one person, but it’s a constant symbol of whoever is on my mind most recently. It’s a beautiful song, but it’s also so clearly about what it is about that it forces you to pay attention and to insert someone. Spend a few minutes with them, whether they can hear you or not.

437. The Coroner’s Gambit

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , ,

The title track “The Coroner’s Gambit” is right at home on an album about death and memory.

Track: “The Coroner’s Gambit”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

I suggest that you look up the liner notes for The Coroner’s Gambit. The liner notes are always worth reading for a Mountain Goats album, but in this case specifically they include a direct address to Rozz Williams, who has passed on and is honored by several Mountain Goats songs. I think a few years ago I would have spent this space discussing Williams and the details of that further, but now I think it’s best to leave it at the liner notes themselves. John Darnielle says that if Williams is a ghost now, they should find him in Iowa and help themselves to everything in the fridge and the booze on top.

The album is about death and the title track is no exception. The placement of the title track directly after “Island Garden Song,” a thoughtful, solitary experience, and directly before “Baboon,” an angry, insistent one, is a mystery to me. I suppose you can’t go straight from this to “Shadow Song,” though I am going to do exactly that in this series. “The Coroner’s Gambit” is about Death, the figure, as well as death, the experience, and the personification has always made this a less emotionally challenging song in my eyes. It’s not lesser, by any means, but it doesn’t aim for the gut the way so many songs about death do. You are left with that repetition, though, and you are left wondering how attractive the offer would have to be for you to be unable to turn down someone you know to be the reaper.

436. Island Garden Song

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

The surface of “Island Garden Song” is a sad moment, but it asks you to consider what you get out of the experience.

Track: “Island Garden Song”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

John Darnielle once said that “Island Garden Song” is about finding something useful in isolation. Obviously, from where I sit in 2021, this idea means something different now than it did when he wrote it decades ago. We are isolated now. We are less so than we were a few months ago, but we are still very isolated. It feels like this may be permanent, in some ways, and it is difficult to imagine finding the strength to be excited in the ways we let ourselves be excited before.

That feels grim, but “Island Garden Song” penetrates through. The narrator here is not hopeful, necessarily, but they are dedicated. That dedication is important. “My garden will grow so high” is an insistent phrase and one that we are given to assume is positive. However, the narrator follows this with “that I will be completely hidden.” This is productive in ways we recognize and then destructive in surprising ways.

The Mountain Goats have spent decades writing music that a new listener might find sad. Themes of divorce, loneliness, pain, and disconnection run through most of the albums. This is not music for your best moments. But is that really all of it? “Island Garden Song” is a song for a dark day, maybe, but it’s for a day that you absolutely need to meet with the right energy for it to be useful. You may need to hide, but that’s just because you’re charging up.

435. Trick Mirror

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

“Trick Mirror” finds Seneca recording the violence of Nero but offers little hope for a resolution.

Track: “Trick Mirror”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

It is tempting sometimes to just tell stories about these songs. “Trick Mirror” is sometimes called “Seneca’s Trick Mirror” because Mountain Goats historian and super-fan Jon Nall listed it as such on his website. The distinction isn’t really important, as it’s clearly from the perspective of Seneca, tutor to the Roman emperor Nero. The song details Nero’s anger and madness as they consume him and Seneca fails to intervene. Interesting, Seneca seems to view himself as somewhat complicit, at least through inaction, as he mentions that no one stopped him.

Seneca was ordered to kill himself after he was found to be guilty of being part of a plot to kill Nero. History believes that he wasn’t guilty of it. It’s pretty hard to say, and given the time period and the temperament of Nero, maybe it doesn’t even matter. We don’t get much from Seneca here other than a detailing of events, and this one hasn’t been played live or discussed that I can find record of anywhere. John Darnielle has always been fascinated by true stories and it’s easy to see why this one is interesting. What are we to make of how Seneca leaves this story, detailing the violence but with no way out? Seneca just had to hope that someone after him would fix all this, which is truly a difficult way to leave this world.

434. Elijah

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

The quiet “Elijah” finds someone promising to come home to take their place at the table, but who can say if they will?

Track: “Elijah”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

John Darnielle is willing to go deep on album construction when he’s asked to do so specifically. I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, the podcast series from a few years ago about individual albums, was a great resource for this. You have to assume every song choice and every order is deliberate for every artist, but you don’t need to make that assumption here. There is a reason John Darnielle wanted “Elijah” to follow “Jaipur.” I can’t tell you what that reason is, however. I love The Coroner’s Gambit, which feels raw and personal even on songs that are clearly not actually personal like “Insurance Fraud #2,” but I am always astounded at the change in gear between the furious “Jaipur” and the quiet “Elijah.” The best answer I can give you is that it’s abrupt on purpose, as it tells you the kind of album you’re listening to by grinding your expectations down.

There are many stories about Elijah, notably that you are intended to leave a place empty for him at the table. This is referenced in “Elijah,” though many of the specific references beyond this are deeply obscure or potentially unknowable. Kyle Barbour of The Annotated Mountain Goats threw his hands up at “smear the walls with coconut oil” but I chalk this up to John Darnielle’s love of specific references rather than their purpose. This one isn’t really a puzzle box, I don’t think, or at least it primarily isn’t one. It’s a delivery system for a sentiment and one you need to open your heart to before you dig into the rest of The Coroner’s Gambit.

433. Jaipur

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

The furious “Jaipur” engages with the question of if you can go home again, but also if you really want to or not.

Track: “Jaipur”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

“Jaipur” is the perfect song to open The Coroner’s Gambit. It sets the tone early, as this is a difficult album and the things it forces you to confront are uncomfortable. No disrespect intended to classics like Sweden or Full Force Galesburg, but John Darnielle considers 2000 the year his songwriting changed and when the stories got more complex. This one is about death, it’s right there in the title, but it’s about your relationship to death, as well.

Darnielle says “Jaipur” is about not really being able to go home again. He once introduced the song with a classic line that he recently repurposed for “Rain in Soho” as he said that you cannot cross the same river twice. This refers to the Heraclitus line that the river and the person stepping into it both differ, which we can tell from “Jaipur.” What’s interesting is that this is usually presented in somber tones, with reflection on how the world changes around you as you also change, but here we’re closer to the vibe in “Quito.” This is fury, where you realize you thought you wanted to go home but you’re too angry and everything feels too wrong to call it home.

There are dozens of references here and we don’t have the space to get into all of them. I’ll close by mentioning the delivery here, as this is one of my favorite Darnielle vocal performances from the era. You can hear how mad this person is as they build towards confrontation. They’re mad at everyone else but also themselves and that kind of rage spills out in every direction.

320. Baboon

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

The furious “Baboon” is there for you when you need it, but here’s to hoping you never feel like you need it.

Track: “Baboon”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

On March 1, 1997, John Darnielle played “Baboon” at Replay Lounge in Lawrence, Kansas. That show may have been recorded, but if so, I can’t find it. Later in March he played it at NYU, which you can hear here. The recording is a little muddled and the first verse sounds recorded underwater, but it’s hard to be too mad at a recording of a song three years before release. It’s remarkable that it exists at all. Replay Lounge is still there (as is NYU, if you were wondering) and still open. It’s fun to picture younger John Darnielle belting this song out for a much smaller crowd than he’d play today.

There was a time when a lot of Mountain Goats songs sounded like “Baboon.” These days even the angry songs don’t sound much like this. Maybe it’s because John Darnielle is less interested in writing about angry lovers or maybe it’s because everything is more complex and hidden now, but “Baboon” is unmistakable. This is one person furious at another and they are willing to unload both barrels. You’d never talk to someone you love like this, or you wouldn’t if you still loved them. That’s what “Baboon” is, it’s the moment you don’t love them anymore. “Black Molly” and “Oceanographer’s Choice” feel like cousin songs. These aren’t on the same album, but all three explore the same feeling and the same rage. I think “Baboon” is the best of this group.

John Darnielle put a scan of the original lyrics online here, including the verse he cut with the annotation “no good.” Interestingly, I feel like the lines he cut would feel at home in other songs of the era. “Baboon,” however, just has to show up, explode, and be done.