The Hound Chronicles

059. Going to Spain

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle calls “Going to Spain” one of the saddest songs he’s ever written, and he sells it with a pained delivery.

Track: “Going to Spain”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

There are “early” songs and then there’s The Hound Chronicles. There’s officially an album before it, but The Hound Chronicles feels like the first real complete release. Songs like “The Garden Song” and “Going to Chino” are perfect bridges between what the original sound of the Mountain Goats was and the themes that the band still loves to explore. There’s always room for the weirdest of the early songs, but it’s in the ones that would still sound reasonable now (cleaned up a little, of course) that you can hear the eternal John Darnielle. From “Going to Alaska” on the first album to Beat the Champ‘s opener “Southwestern Territory,” Darnielle’s interest in the downtrodden has never waned.

“Going to Spain” is a little more on-the-nose than the material on Get Lonely, the modern breakup album, but not by much. “You’re gonna leave me now // but I don’t care” and “go on and leave me // I don’t care anymore” are classic boasts from a hurt lover, but they hit even harder here because Darnielle delivers them full of pain rather than anger. It’s a narrator that’s trying to act tough, not someone trying to wound their partner. “I see you hold his hand // I see you wave goodbye” is sad, but “I don’t know you anymore // so I’m not going to cry now” is even sadder because it’s a lie.

With the rest of the catalog the way it is, it would be possible to wonder what this person has done to deserve this fate. With no judgement offered in the song either way, it’s not possible for us to attribute blame. That keeps this song one of the saddest in the collection, and you can feel it in how hard Darnielle tries to keep it together when he plays it.

049. Alpha Negative

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , , ,

 

The Alpha Couple considers the sweetness of evil things as they contemplate their relationship in “Alpha Negative.”

Track: “Alpha Negative”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“Ah, c’mon, nobody knows that one.” – John Darnielle at a live show, about “Alpha Negative”

After a few jokes about playing a song from 1992, John Darnielle adds that it’s not like the music he plays now, and that it was written by someone with “more death in his heart” than the current frontman of The Mountain Goats. It calls to mind the intro for “Going to Georgia” where he said that it was a song written by a very different person who had the same Social Security number.

In the original recording, there’s little better than the way Darnielle nervously delivers “cool and smooth and sweet” over and over again. Every mention of “smooth” in the song has an eeriness to it, and it forces you to consider that this person was at least partially complicit in their fate. The narrator drank poison, but they liked it, to some degree. They’re less angry than they are fascinated with their own end. That’s a recurring trait in early Goats narrators, but this one is even more dramatic than the standard fare.

The Bright Mountain Choir adds some sweetness to the whole thing, and they really bring it all together. There are angrier narrators (“Baboon” and “Poltergeist” come to mind) and there are people closer to literal death (“Sax Rohmer #1”) but there is still enough in “Alpha Negative” to think about. “I loved you, and you made me drink poison” says one Alpha to the other, but we know that’s not really the whole story. At this moment, one of them feels like they have a case against the other. They’re still blaming each other, and they’ll need to get to Florida to gain some perspective.

031. Going to Kansas

Alex Russell Nothing for Juice, The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , , , ,

 

 

A mix of cacophony and desperation, “Going to Kansas” deals with the end of the world and the end of love at the same time.

Track: “Going to Kansas”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992) and Nothing for Juice (1996)

There are two versions of “Going to Kansas.” The one from The Hound Chronicles is very slow and seems almost pleading, while the one from Nothing for Juice is frenetic and insistent. The Nothing for Juice version is the one that gets played live — even in the early 90s, before Nothing for Juice— so it can be said to be the “standard” version of “Going to Kansas.”

The slower one has its charms. There’s a partial repetition of the line “you know what I mean” where you can really hear John Darnielle getting into the song and he belts out the essential “when my head was resting on your breastbone // I could hear your beating heart” in a satisfying way, but damn does it sound strange when compared to the quicker one. In a great live performance in 2006 with original Goats bassist Rachel Ware, John describes it as a song written “by a crude guitar player, for the crude guitar.” On Nothing for Juice, it opens with a seventeen-second screech, and “crude” seems about right for the insane, end-of-the-world effect the song maintains for the entire four minutes.

Whether you can get into the dissonance of “Going to Kansas” or not, you can definitely appreciate the connection of the end of days and the tenuous way two people are often tied together. Rachel chimes in to end a few lines, and the presence of another narrator makes the song full-on heartbreaking. They’re standing on some precipice, both literal and figurative, and one can’t stop noticing basic things about another (hair, green clothes) to try to delay the inevitable. In the Goats-go-electric version, the original, or any live recording, you can always hear the stalling and the hope, and the scene never gets any easier to think about.

016. Torch Song

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , ,

In the early “Torch Song” two lovers share a moment, and in 1996 John Darnielle comments on rare music on Swedish radio.

Track: “Torch Song”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

In 1996, in between a Rickie Lee Jones cover and then-unreleased “Minnesota,” John Darnielle played “Torch Song” on a Swedish radio station. In the interview the host asks John if he will play one more, John says he will play one or two, and he plays four. He introduces “Torch Song” with “unless you have the very early tapes, you haven’t heard this one.”

The early fans collected tapes and live shows to complete collections as they sought out rarities like “Doll Song” and “You’re in Maya.” A lot of the early Goats songs are still only rumored to exist, and fans know the names of songs they’ve never heard and may never hear. There are different schools of thought on if those days were better or worse, but YouTube and Archive.org have opened up the catalog. There are still some songs with mystical names like “8 to 20 on a Weapons Charge” that will likely never see the digital light of day, but you can more or less hear everything, now.

Almost no one has a physical copy of The Hound Chronicles, but the digital world allows you to hear the tape version or the one from that Swedish interview. “Torch Song” is a frantic song about the comparison of the heat of actual light and the body heat of a lover’s fingertips “like a torch.” Like a lot of the super-early stuff, it’s here-and-gone fast, but it’s the version in that Swedish interview that’s worthy of note. The host says that even though that’s “an old one” (in 1996), he thinks he’s heard it. John is insistent that he likely hasn’t, and he was probably right. The world has changed, but to truly enjoy the very early Mountain Goats, one must remember how rare these once were.