the mountain goats

624. Scavenger Babies

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Scavenger Babies” is a great one to holler along to, but you can also follow the history of it.

Track: “Scavenger Babies”
Album: Unreleased

Digital preservation is a wonderful thing. The folks who contribute to the Mountain Goats Wiki do great work and you can read the entire story of not just the origin of “Scavenger Babies,” but the reason it was on John Darnielle’s mind years later. He wrote it as part of a larger songwriting group effort in Paris in 2003 and you can watch him play it at the end of said effort here, with Lisa Li-Lund on supporting vocals. She’s still out there making music and it’s awesome, but I love the snapshot moment of her just singing along with Darnielle for one song about Norwalk.

In 2019 Darnielle played it and uploaded it to Facebook, which is the version you hear above. That’s from the same week he told a story too long to replicate here about that writing process. “Scavenger Babies” is a great song and works as a sort of bridge between the early Mountain Goats and the more modern stuff, but I just can’t get over how complete the “story” is, here. There are so many of these unreleased ones where the story is “I have no idea what this one means and no one has ever said a word about it” and then there’s this one, where you can go watch remarkably sharp footage from 21 years ago and see the thing basically be born in front of you.

623. Sure Do Love You Baby, But I Can’t Do 60 No More

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

Revenge is realized in the scream-along “Sure Do Love You Baby, But I Can’t Do 60 No More.”

Track: “Sure Do Love You Baby, But I Can’t Do 60 No More”
Album: Unreleased

There are two recordings of “Sure Do Love You Baby, But I Can’t Do 60 No More” and they are almost two decades apart. The first is embedded above and is from The Press in Claremont, which did not survive the pandemic but seems to have been a lovely place to see live music once upon a time. The second is here, in Baltimore in 2019. The two performances are both manic and explosive in that way that only the angry ones from an angry young narrator could be and they’re remarkably similar, with one important difference. The crowd obviously is much more tolerant and excited at the second one, but the bigger difference is swapping out the first word.

In what we must consider the “original” version, our narrator tells us someone moved down to Florida. In the more recent one, as a YouTube commenter suggests and I have to agree with, they tell us Dave moved down there. It’s a story of jealousy and a story that ends with a light “flickering out for the last time.” There are a lot of revenge fantasies and stories of jealously across the early years of Mountain Goats songs, but it’s rare we see someone with the follow-through to actually go down to the beach and do the thing.

622. Like a Bullet

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Like a Bullet” finds someone on the side of a road somewhere out there, much like you have been somewhere out there.

Track: “Like a Bullet”
Album: Unreleased

There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs about walking around specific geography. Over the years I’ve made this point a lot and I don’t really know why I keep coming back to it. The narrator of “Like a Bullet” says they “headed out Arrow towards Western Rock” and I have no doubt a more diligent person than I could find that exact place. It feels like an intersection to me, but Western Rock could be anything. I’ll repeat myself yet again to say that it doesn’t matter so much where that is, precisely, as it does matter that it is one precise place. You don’t need to picture the motel in West Texas or the neighborhood in California or the house in Florida. You just see someone walking around and imagining a tractor telling them things.

“Like a Bullet” only exists because someone who goes by doctorsinatra on YouTube uploaded it in 2011 from a tape they had. Someone asked John Darnielle about the song on Twitter and he said he didn’t remember the history but it was from when he was sending songs out for compilations. To return to another oft-mentioned concept from this series, both of these details really do work as representations of a different world of musical discovery. Part of why I wanted to do this in the first place is some of my absolute favorite Mountain Goats songs are just out there on YouTube channels that also upload Final Fantasy VII videos and I want those people to be celebrated.

621. Real Good Girlfriend

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle says “Real Good Girlfriend” is sappy and maybe it is, but can’t we accept some sap?

Track: “Real Good Girlfriend”
Album: Unreleased

There are two versions of “Real Good Girlfriend.” There’s the live one linked above and there’s this performance at a German radio station in 1996. He sounds so young and is pitched so high, but part of that has to be that he’s singing a true song about a woman he’d marry and spend his life with. I should say it’s an assumption this is about her, but that feels like a safe one. It’s pretty insane to hear the man who wrote “No Children” sing “I had enough loose ends to get a brand new sweater // but in the whole Midwest, there ain’t a single woman better,” but I think that’s an easy take. John Darnielle is not the Alpha Couple and never was. The early Mountain Goats songs often feature tales of woe, but they’re generally from narrators we can imagine pieces of ourselves in rather than entire portraits. Even in those stories, there is love, and in John Darnielle’s life at that time and now, there is love.

Darnielle calls “Real Good Girlfriend” both “a fairly new song” and “really sappy, but all true” during that performance. I said similar things when I wrote about “02-75,” another love song directed at the same very real woman. It is sappy, sure, but it’s a song about the #66 in Chicago and waiting in the cold with someone you love. It’s easily as relatable as “I hope you die // I hope we both die.” At least, for your sake, I hope it is.

620. Oslo 1888

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Oslo 1888” is not here, or now, but it’s about how both of those things don’t really change that much.

Track: “Oslo 1888”
Album: Unreleased

John Darnielle played “Oslo 1888” in Belgium in 1996. He got a minute into it and apologized to the crowd for missing a line, said he knew no one would have noticed because they don’t know the song, and started over anyway. This explains his “compensation” line as he kicks into a louder, furious version of it that you can hear from a recorded version of that same show. You have to respect that dedication to fidelity, even in a world where not a single person could even say if you had dropped a stitch or not.

What is the significance of 1888? Almost certainly a year, but why that year? You could guess, sure, and you could do some rudimentary research on the history of Norway, but I think it’s safe to assume it’s just designed to get you thinking about some other time. That show was in Belgium, but most of Darnielle’s audience was in the States. Most of the location-specific Mountain Goats songs aren’t so much about where you are as they are about being somewhere different. You’ve never pictured Scandinavia in the late 1880s. Why would you? But you have felt some of these emotions. This unites the two people, you and this centuries-old stranger, and it makes you think about another time.

619. Going to Dade County

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

A rare combination of a travel song and an Alpha Couple song, “Going to Dade County” offers little hope.

Track: “Going to Dade County”
Album: Unreleased

There are so many songs about the Alpha Couple. If you listen to every Mountain Goats song you’ll hear dozens and dozens of versions of their trek across the country and their miserable end in Florida. As a younger guy, “a much younger man who had the same Social Security number” as John Darnielle once described it, I found their story romantic. I understood the people who Darnielle said would ask him to play “No Children” at their wedding. There is a certain ability to sneer at the worst fears of the future that comes with being in your young twenties and it paints how you view these songs.

I’m older and married now and I still love the Alpha Couple, but for different reasons. I hear a song like “Going to Dade County” where one of them tells outrageous, supernatural stories about the other and I hear someone who cannot process what has become of their life. They insist they are not cracking up and they envision a salvation in Miami, a place different enough from Tallahassee but not somewhere they will actually be a different person. We’re outside the story and we know they aren’t going to Miami, but also that they wouldn’t really find anything if they did.

618. Calcutta

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Calcutta” is really just a snippet, but it’s got some fantastic imagery and leaves you wanting more.

Track: “Calcutta”
Album: Unreleased

Three years before The Coroner’s Gambit released, John Darnielle played “Baboon” at NYU. It was May of 1997, according to the live recording posted to the Wiki, and as Darnielle led into a second song he said “here’s another one you don’t know.” It’s true that the crowd probably wouldn’t know “Baboon” yet, but they certainly would down the line, but this appears to be the only night you could have ever heard that second song. If he ever played “Calcutta” again, history does not record it. I love these moments because, sure, that’s two “obscure” songs to open with in a show that ended with two heaters the crowd almost certainly knew, but they became very different levels of “famous” in the catalog.

Like a lot of those once-only live songs, “Calcutta” feels unfinished. The images we have are incredible, where our narrator details someone saying the sight of donkeys kicking and braying stirs their own fury and the nearby flowing water has a similar rushing effect. The ending especially doubles down on both sensations. A line like “your eyes were pure poison, but your skin was sweet” is a wild final line, but it’s truly wild to say it’s being sung in the streets by prophetic figures. There’s seeds here of what is to come, but I think the pieces of this one stand up on their own.

617. New World Emerging Blues

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The ominous possibilities of what comes next are on everyone’s mind in “New World Emerging Blues.”

Track: “New World Emerging Blues”
Album: Unreleased

“New World Emerging Blues” goes with We Shall All Be Healed in that John Darnielle wrote it during the time he was writing those songs, but it was part of a “release” of two other songs in 2008 as an apology for having to cancel some tour dates in Australia. It’s really just a seed of an idea even though it is by no means the shortest Mountain Goats song (lyrically or by actual running time). It’s haunting, sure, and it’s eerie, sure, but it feels like something that would have needed to expand to be on the actual album.

It’s right at home with the themes, though. My favorite element is the juxtaposition of the title, where one imagines a new world as a positive thing even with the curious “blues” term, and the lyrics, where a long-dormant Mount Fuji threatens an eventual eruption and the oceans rise as part of global peril. There’s nothing inherent about a new world emerging that’s a good thing, when you really think about it. Mount Fuji hasn’t erupted in over 300 years, but our narrator reminds us that just because something bad hasn’t happened recently does not mean the conditions don’t exist for today, or tomorrow, or whenever you run out of whatever caused you to hole up in that hotel room in the first place.

616. Let the Dogs Come Out

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The very early “Let the Dogs Come Out” shows how impressive a songwriter John Darnielle already was.

Track: “Let the Dogs Come Out”
Album: Unreleased

A lot of what I love about John Darnielle as a songwriter can be found in the very brief outtake “Let the Dogs Come Out.” It’s pretty playful for a song about embracing a terrible fate. You can imagine Darnielle making fun of some other writer with the opening of “new rivers forming on the surface of the world” and flipping it immediately with “I mean to say that it’s raining.” I’m just guessing, here, but it feels the same to me as the joke of several songs referencing the silly description of the sun as an “orange ball.” 

There’s not really much to it, but I submit that is part of the point. The entire second verse is a play on the same idea over and over again, turning “And I remember where I was the last time that it rained like this” to “And I know that you remember where we were last time it rained like this.” That can seem like placeholder text and Darnielle has talked before about a lot of these songs being one-take recordings and a product of the idea that if the idea doesn’t flow right out of you immediately you should discard it and start over. So, functionally, songs like this exist because of that process and not always an intentional choice, but both can be true as a result. The second verse here isn’t one I’d play for someone on day one of their Mountain Goats experience, but it’s beautiful in context. The listener has to create almost everything about this scene and these people. I could tell you anything, but why disrupt your mental image?

615. New Matha

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“New Matha” is a user manual for people who need to be reminded it’s all worth it.

Track: “New Matha”
Album: Unreleased

If you were in St. Louis in 1998, you could have seen John Darnielle play “New Matha” at The Rocket Bar. He also played “The Doll Song” that night. As near as I can tell, that was (maybe) your only chance to hear “New Matha” and it was (definitely) very near to your last chance to go to the The Rocket Bar, which closed about six years later and seemingly never became anything else.

That night at The Rocket Bar people talked through the set. I have sometimes talked through parts of the set. You shouldn’t do this, but sometimes you’re in the back of the bar (or, nowadays, bigger venue than a bar) and you see someone you haven’t seen since the last Goats show. You shouldn’t do it, but I get how it happens. You wouldn’t have had any way of knowing you were seeing something unique. “New Matha” is a song about making art because you love to make art. The irony of the only recording of it being in front of a crowd in St. Louis that had to be hushed is too obvious to really go deep on, but I had to at least mention it. It’s a beautiful little song that really stuck with an old friend of mine that loved the band as much as I do. “If you ever get money, print books” is about as sincere and as sweet an opening line as exists. May we all aspire to be worthy of it, even if we sometimes talk through the quiet parts.