The Coroner’s Gambit

313. “Bluejays and Cardinals”

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“”Bluejays and Cardinals”” offers a vision of someone gone too soon that was really extraordinary when they were here.

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

I’ve linked this before, but I need to call your attention to this interview John Darnielle did in 2004. The interview has 28 footnotes, including one explaining who Andrei Tarkovsky is. You never really know what you’re going to get from an interview with John Darnielle. He’s a really interesting guy, obviously, but he’s also just as likely to answer the question as he is to tell you a story about an obscure Roman general. This is not a complaint, but it’s a testament to how incredible this interview is that the interviewer recognized the challenge and rose to the task.

This interview explains the odd formatting for “”Bluejays and Cardinals,”” which officially has quotation marks in the song title, thus necessitating double quotation marks. The song, and several other direct songs about death on The Coroner’s Gambit, are about a friend of John Darnielle’s who passed away. The quotation marks reference an album that was in quotation marks called “Ashes” that supposedly had a not very satisfying reason for the marks. John Darnielle deliberately didn’t elaborate so I haven’t tried to crack that answer further.

“Shadow Song” is the sister song and it’s even more direct, but “this world couldn’t hold you // you slipped free” tells you what you need to know. It’s a song about death without being necessarily sad, though even that is not exactly accurate. The Coroner’s Gambit is a fairly brutal album and John Darnielle asks you to look directly at the subject matter a lot of the time, but the high moments of “”Bluejays and Cardinals”” are really something. It’s nice to think of someone who makes baseballs go further just because they rule.

152. Scotch Grove

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The furious “Scotch Grove” presents annoying pop country music as an instigator for a serious fight.

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

John Darnielle is all about extremes. The Mountain Goats consistently describe the highs and lows of the world and talk about death, love, and the things that get us through the days surrounding those things. Most albums weave their way through the things John Darnielle obsesses over and they spend so much time on the things we don’t like to think about that they become highly concentrated. This isn’t background music and it typically requires consideration. It’s very rarely light fare.

That said, The Coroner’s Gambit is heavy even for them. It’s an entire album about death. The approach varies from song to song, but the most crushing songs in the catalog live here. John Darnielle wants you to focus on your own end here as he presents the end of many characters, often in anger.

That anger is what makes the album so compelling. People die in Mountain Goats songs and John Darnielle is not afraid to confront mortality elsewhere, but he’s rarely this driven. The narrators in “Baboon” and “Jaipur” are downright mad and the person in “Family Happiness” might be the angriest Mountain Goats speaker. John Darnielle’s voice cracks and squeaks all over the album and it’s wonderfully affecting, though you need to approach the whole thing correctly.

“Scotch Grove” is right at home. It’s named for a city in Iowa, two hours east of where John Darnielle lived. One wonders where the fascination for this small town comes from, but it helps to have a setting. One character simmers towards another one, but this scene is closer to an explosion than most. With a reference to Bluebeard, we know that murder is on the table and John Darnielle’s delivery and strumming suggest that it might be imminent.

99. The Alphonse Mambo

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Tap your toe to “The Alphonse Mambo” and ponder the energy it takes to have the conversation you need (but don’t want) to have.

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

The Mountain Goats Wiki is an amazing resource of live shows. This list makes a fair case that “The Alphonse Mambo” might be the most played song from the early Goats era. There are a lot of good reasons for that, but chief among them has to be that it bridges the beginning and the current day of the Mountain Goats. John Darnielle often describes himself in the early years as one guy stomping his foot with a guitar. These days his live shows combine huge, loud performances with a full band and quiet, uneasy piano songs that highlight the beauty in the strange and lonely people of our world.

“The Alphonse Mambo” is a stomper, for sure, but it’s also about a couple in distress. The song endures because it’s thematically appropriate around whatever other song he’s playing. There are often people in distress at the center of a Goats song, but Darnielle’s confirmed that this one only features the narrator. He’s working up the courage to have a tough conversation with someone else in this 16th floor room in Tampa Bay, but he’s going to need some more painkillers and some more courage to do it.

The live versions (especially the two at Farm Sanctuary, which you should seek out) highlight the song an all-timer, but the studio version has nearly as much of the fervor. You can hear John Darnielle shake as he sings the “waiting for the other shoe to drop in Tampa Bay” ending, and that teeth-clenched delivery sells the tension our narrator is feeling. They want to believe that they can get this whole thing done, but that period of “waiting for the other shoe to drop in Tampa Bay” might be a long one.

092. Insurance Fraud #2

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The couple in “Insurance Fraud #2” go through some hypothetical solutions to money woes that turn far more real than they’d like.

Track: “Insurance Fraud #2”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

876 people live in Colo, Iowa. Many years ago John and Lalitree Darnielle also lived there while John wrote The Coroner’s Gambit. It’s a sad album about loneliness and death. That may be calling water “wet,” but this specific album is more about those things than the other ones.

Often at live shows John describes his time in Colo with alternating descriptions. Sometimes he talks about how quaint the tiny house in the middle of nowhere was and sometimes he calls his landlord a slumlord and says it was depressing. We all have those feelings about old houses we used to live in, and the disparity between those feelings is all over The Coroner’s Gambit. “There Will Be No Divorce” is one of his best love songs. “Elijah” and “Shadow Song” are sad, but they’re a kind of productive sad that allows you to process feelings about dead friends and family members.

Then there’s “Insurance Fraud #2.”

A few songs in the catalog are numbered. There are many “Standard Bitter Love Song(s)” and “Heel Turn 2” is #2 because the first one only gets played live. This one is unique because #1 is just the first take of #2. John Darnielle says he rerecorded it because he had to rerecord a ton of songs in Iowa that were ruined by a nearby train. He left the train sounds in this one and the result is haunting and fascinating.

The song itself is direct. It’s the kind of extreme darkness that most of us never consider, but it’s par for the course for one of Darnielle’s couples. The song features a few examples of insurance fraud, but the creepiest part is the ending where one of them realizes that a person capable of such evil will come for them next.

 

083. Onions

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“Onions” is an ode to a beautiful spring morning and the things that come with the end of the coldest season.

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

John Darnielle doesn’t eat meat. He wrote that the original liner notes for Full Force Galesburg were “a militant vegetarian rant which, among other things, described the lives of meat-eaters as “meaningless.” He’s done benefit shows for the animal protection agency Farm Sanctuary. It would be difficult to miss this element of his personal politics, but just in case he’s got dozens of lyrical references to the beauty of the simple cow to remind you.

“Onions” paints a beautiful picture. The narrator informs us that it’s late-winter/early-spring both directly and indirectly. “Springtime’s coming,” they say, but they also watch migrations and other animal behaviors that mirror the seasonal change. It’s easy to feel a little joy yourself as you picture the cows picking up speed as they realize the world is no longer cold and is inviting to the touch again. On a surface level, it’s a sweet image that gets coupled with new onions growing to show how wonderful the world becomes and how great everyone feels when winter thaws.

It may seem a strange song for The Coroner’s Gambit, then, since the rest of the album mostly covers loss, death, and divorce. One explanation is that it’s the glimmer of hope among all the sorrow, but it may be that our narrator doesn’t have all the facts yet. “Springtime’s coming, that means you’ll be coming back around” can be read as an assumption that may not turn out to be true. The world is new again in spring and that usually means the return of this character for our narrator, but we’ll have to see if this year goes the same as years past.

060. Horseradish Road

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“Horseradish Road” features two lovers who can’t quite end their story without a last moment of reflection.

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

The Coroner’s Gambit is aptly named. It’s one of the heaviest Mountain Goats albums, even though that feels like a big claim to lay on it. Songs like “Baboon” and “Family Happiness” are contenders for the angriest moments in Goats history and “Shadow Song” and “Elijah” speak directly with death. Even the love song references darkness in its title: “There Will Be No Divorce.” On such an album, what would you expect John Darnielle to say in his song about two lovers?

“Horseradish Road” is complex. I’ll confess that I had to look up both pop culture references in the song: the beleaguered, depressed opera singer Maria Callas and the musical cryptogram Enigma Variations. You can go down a big information hole and read about them online, but their use in this song is very simple. Callas had an impossible life and was driven to be the greatest of her time and Variations contains an unsolvable puzzle. They are both beautiful and impossible. The couple in “Horseradish Road” is surrounding themselves with lovely things that they deliberately can’t fix.

“You’ve done something awful // I’ve done something worse” is a solid Goats lyric, and it largely sums up the ethos of John Darnielle’s lovers who are past the point of no return. It’s rare that lovers assign blame in both directions, but the Goats are always careful to mention that neither person can be fully blamed for any demise. It’s always a joint decision, and despite the beautiful violin and the high-minded cultural references, “Horseradish Road” boils down to one seething person looking at another reprehensible one. They aren’t quite finished, but every Goats song is about that very long moment where it’s too late, but it’s not quite over.