the mountain goats

308. Maybe Sprout Wings

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , ,

Few Mountain Goats characters let themselves soak in the darkness as much as the narrator in “Maybe Sprout Wings.”

Track: “Maybe Sprout Wings”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

Get Lonely is undeniably a “breakup record,” but that tends to diminish the fullness of what it also is. Just as “Wild Sage” isn’t necessarily about someone who is just out of a relationship, “Maybe Sprout Wings” is about a larger loneliness than just losing a loved one in some way. This is about a more cosmic sense of being alone, removed from humanity rather than just one particular human. There are dozens of songs about quiet loneliness, but few dare to tread the space of “Maybe Sprout Wings.” The lines “I thought of old friends // the ones who’d gone missing” stare directly at the abyss with no metaphor to cloak them. This is about the tough times and how they never end, once they happen. If it was bad, it will always be bad in the past, with ghosts and clouds and “nameless things” to haunt you when you go back to those moments.

I don’t know if all of Get Lonely has the same narrator or not. John Darnielle has both emphatically said that it is and isn’t a “breakup record,” but he’s also said that interpretations of his music are open-ended. Other than the obvious The Sunset Tree where the narrator is usually John Darnielle himself, I think this is the album most likely to all come from the same perspective. If we assume that, we’re at the lowest point of the journey during “Maybe Sprout Wings.” It starts with introspection in “Wild Sage” and ends with an emphatic rejection of hope in “In Corolla,” but this is the moment that foretells that ending. It is the right song for some moments, but may your life have few of them.

307. Letter from Belgium

Alex Russell Palmcorder Yajna, We Shall All Be Healed , , , , , , ,

“Letter from Belgium” is a song for lockdown that wasn’t intended to be that originally, but now can be your COVID-19 jam.

Track: “Letter from Belgium”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004) and Letter from Belgium (2004)

At the start of quarantine in 2020, John Darnielle tweeted that “Letter from Belgium” is the “quarantine deep cut” among Mountain Goats songs. I’d heard the song hundreds of times before that moment and never connected it to the experience of the moment. It’s impossible not to hear it, though, when you’re listening for it: “We’ve been past the point of help since early April.” Depending on where you live, COVID-19 became a reality in your world around then. A weird line, especially in a song about “waiting for the fever to break.”

“Letter from Belgium” is about a different cause for alarm, but the panic is similar. These characters are locked in rooms with other substances they need, to the point where they reject the world. They obsess over stage makeup and odd, disconnected artwork. They express fear of neighbors and outsiders. It’s very much in line with the We Shall All Be Healed character study.

It doesn’t matter if you read it through a modern lens or through the album’s. This is a song for when you can’t go outside, whether there’s an external reason for that or not. Sometimes you’re just in there because you have to be in there, John Darnielle tells us, and you’ll make do with what you have. The items are only connected if you get in the right headspace, which is hopefully not a place you find yourself for an extended period of time.

306. San Bernardino

Alex Russell Heretic Pride , , , ,

“San Bernardino” feels very personal, but one excellent performance shows how even the personal can be shared.

Track: “San Bernardino”
Album: Heretic Pride (2008)

We could talk about how John Darnielle once said the characters in “San Bernardino” were some of his favorite characters. We could talk about the track placement, between two fairly explosive songs on Heretic Pride that feel much more connected, somehow, and what it means for this to be between them. We could talk about how this happens in an actual, real place, in a way that even the most specific Mountain Goats songs don’t usually happen in a real place.

That stuff is cool, but I want to talk about this specific performance of “San Bernardino” in May of 2011. I think it’s tough to adhere to John Darnielle’s sometimes-stated-sometimes-not desire that live shows are live shows and if you aren’t there, that specific one wasn’t for you. I doubt he’d feel that way about this one, but whatever the case you really owe it to yourself to see it. John Darnielle gets a few moments in and realizes the crowd is overwhelming. This happens, but the venue and the song mix perfectly here and the crowd reflects back at him so loud that he abandons the mic. He lets the song be the moment they’re all having and says, simply, “awesome.”

I write this in a time when no one has seen the Mountain Goats in person for a very long time because no one can see anyone in person right now. When that time ends, let this performance and this song be the strongest advertisement possible to see John Darnielle and company in person. They aren’t all like this, but when they are and you’re there with other people who took their own journey with “San Bernardino,” enough to even surprise the man who wrote it, you want to be in the room.

305. In the Craters on the Moon

Alex Russell Heretic Pride , , , , , , ,

“In the Craters on the Moon” builds to one explosive moment and then is willing to show you the explosion.

Track: “In the Craters on the Moon”
Album: Heretic Pride (2008)

The first Mountain Goats show I went to was at The Empty Bottle in Chicago in 2007. The good folks at the Mountain Goats wiki have a setlist here and you can even go to Archive.org can listen to it. The most memorable things, now almost fourteen years later, are the multiple versions of “We Bite” and the songs I’d never heard before. Heretic Pride came out a few months later. It was probably possible, through some means, to have heard it by then, but I hadn’t. It was a different time.

“In the Craters on the Moon” is a heavy song. It’s about people who hide from the world and reject help. It’s a common theme in a Goats song, but it usually comes through differently. This one rises until John Darnielle literally yells, as loud as he possibly can. This isn’t totally unheard of, but I think this is probably the go-to version for me. Seeing it live was something else. I don’t want to break the spell of this half-memory by listening to the real thing he said, but he had something at that show in Chicago about going somewhere else during the peak and how you can’t do that on stage.

The Empty Bottle is a weird place. I’ve never seen a show there where the audience was quiet, this one included, but it’s also a place you go to see something you’re passionate about. There are a few hundred live performances of this one and I’m sure most of them involve some form of “going somewhere else.” The lyrics are solid and the beat is great, but it’s all about that yell. It’s terrifying, because that’s how you’d react if someone broke into your stronghold through all your resistances.

304. Birth of Serpents

Alex Russell All Eternals Deck , , , , , , ,

“Birth of Serpents” finds John Darnielle in several places but having one single experience.

Track: “Birth of Serpents”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

John Darnielle has said a lot of things that stick with me, but I think a lot about a comment he made many years ago that “Waving at You” was a song he felt really close to. He said that the quiet ones were the close ones, even though most people thought it was when he was screaming. That answer probably has changed somewhat, especially as he’s written more about his own life in recent times. The last handful of albums have more songs about the real-deal John Darnielle than the first ten.

“Birth of Serpents” is only nominally about snakes. The chorus tells us to picture snakes under heat lamps, but really we’re in Oregon with John Darnielle. He never sings like this, with the last verse almost entirely pitched as high as he can go. So much of what makes the Mountain Goats great is the poetry and narrative, but the performance is central to “Birth of Serpents.” John Darnielle is feeling this one, which he probably always is, but he’s letting it show more here than usual.

He says that it’s about an experience in Portland where a friend told him another person they both used to know was working down the way. John Darnielle went to say hi, but found that they died a year earlier in a car accident. To understand the Mountain Goats is to understand this journey through Oregon and Iowa and California, but it’s also to picture this moment where you almost get to have an experience you thought impossible only to realize that actually, yeah, it’s as done as you feared it might be.

303. The House That Dripped Blood

Alex Russell Tallahassee , , , , , , , ,

Sinister vibes abound on “The House That Dripped Blood” as the Alpha Couple descends into the worst parts of their journey together.

Track: “The House That Dripped Blood”
Album: Tallahassee (2002)

“The House That Dripped Blood” could be a book report. The title is from a horror movie. The harmonica at the end is several parts laid on top of each other. The story is about the Alpha Couple and what dark things they get up to in the middle of Tallahassee when it’s all broken bad but every card isn’t on the table yet. Listen to it five times but not six because this is dangerous headspace to hang out in.

But that’s all the basics. Tallahassee is the best Mountain Goats album, though I’m sure John Darnielle would argue with that and most people reading this probably have fierce opinions, as well. It’s the best “album,” I’d say, because it tells a cohesive story and it works front to back. It’s one premise that is explored fully. At this point in the narrative, this is the drinking. “The cellar door is an open throat,” one Alpha tells the other, and we can picture them drinking and wandering around too-dark rooms. It’s horrible and it doesn’t have the hope of the opening songs or the resolve of the final ones.

The last live performance, as far as the Wiki is concerned, was in 2008. The final show opened with “Have to Explode,” one of the best Goats songs to open with, and closed with “Houseguest” into “No Children” into “Wild Sage” into “Palmcorder Yajna,” which is a pretty wild order to do that in. “The House That Dripped Blood” is a vital part of the album, but it feels a little weird to take as a set piece. It’s important as a means to get you from hope to despair, but be careful spending too much time on this part of the journey.

302. Spent Gladiator 2

Alex Russell Transcendental Youth , , , , , , ,

“Spent Gladiator 2” is John Darnielle’s insistent reminder that you have to hold out when it gets dark, even though that’s hard to do.

Track: “Spent Gladiator 2”
Album: Transcendental Youth (2012)

The Mountain Goats Wiki includes more than 150 live performances of “Spent Gladiator 2.” You could spend an entire day listening to all of them. I can’t recommend that, but you could. For several years in a row, “Spent Gladiator 2” was likely to be the last song the band played. It was often the conclusion of a second encore, sometimes with just Peter Hughes on bass and John Darnielle doing a slowed-down version with no mic. I once saw him wander through the crowd and sing it more or less at people, which was a truly special experience.

It’s the companion song to “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1,” which is much more triumphant and furious. The second one shows us a different type of resistance, with clenched teeth and final straws rather than burning bright. “Stay alive,” John Darnielle still says, but “maybe spit some blood at the camera.”

The message of Transcendental Youth is a consistent one. There is power in hope, even when it seems like there isn’t. The imagery in “Spent Gladiator 2” is grim, but it’s still worth standing up again. It’s always worth doing that, John Darnielle wants you to know. You’d pick up the same command from angry songs like “Up the Wolves” or frantic ones like “Dance Music” or a hundred other songs, but John Darnielle closes the show with “Spent Gladiator 2” because it’s the hardest lesson to learn. When you’re good and mad you’re likely to get back up, but you need to do it when it’s way harder than that, too.

300. Down Here

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

“Down Here” starts with a reference to Venus and only gets weirder from there.

Track: “Down Here”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

There are six annotations on “Down Here” on Kyle Barbour’s excellent site The Annotated Mountain Goats. They detail what the atmosphere of Venus is like, what a red-crowned crane is, and even what Lithuania is. Barbour’s site is instrumental to the more arcane details of Mountain Goats songs, but it’s also funny when it explains what Illinois is or what window blinds are. You get in the game to figure out what “The Monkey Song” is talking about but then you have to take that to the logical conclusion.

I am just going to say it: I have no idea what “Down Here” is talking about. I love the delivery of lines like “A telegram from Lithuania // and the news is not good” where you can hear John Darnielle snarl over the cranked-up guitar. It’s a great song and one I’ve heard dozens and dozens of times. Barbour’s annotations can unlock secrets for songs, especially the ones about myths, but sometimes there’s not enough on the page. I’ve said before that this whole exercise is an experience rather than an attempt to “solve” these songs, and I legitimately do not believe it is possible to draw a universal meaning from this one.

And that’s fine! The final verse is a construction you may have heard before, and Barbour links to this truly fascinating post where people spiral into discussions of this style through history. This may just be another story of a narrator facing doom of their own creation, but they’re talking about their end in a way that many before them did for generations. I’m not going to throw up my hands completely, but I do love that this one is just a little too weird to put a finger on entirely.

299. Woke Up New

Alex Russell Get Lonely , , , , , , ,

In one of the best-loved songs the Mountain Goats ever wrote, “Woke Up New” examines a relationship the day after the fact.

Track: “Woke Up New”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

I haven’t run the numbers, but I think it’s safe to say “Woke Up New” is the most popular song on Get Lonely. I think “Wild Sage” is the best song on the album and maybe the best song John Darnielle has ever written, but people love “Woke Up New.” Any time it’s played at a live show you will find couples embracing during it, which I really will never get used to seeing. It’s a crushing, brutal song that John Darnielle describes as being about one of the worst moments of his life, but the delivery seems to pass it off as a love song in some ways. There’s certainly a reading where these people are entranced by not the appearance of sweetness but the love they have being reflected in the fear of the loss of it, but it doesn’t really matter. A younger, angrier version of myself judged these people, but that’s the wrong way to live your life. They like the song, that’s all.

“Woke Up New” hit me immediately when I listened to Get Lonely, but as I spent more time with it I gravitated to the quieter, less accessible songs. “Woke Up New” is a phenomenal song, but it’s not one that I find puts me in the headspace that “Wild Sage” and “In the Hidden Places” do. It’s a breakup song like most of them are, but it’s one that feels like a story about a time rather than a demand for you to relive the time. John Darnielle often jokes in live shows about how he’s happily married and has all these songs about divorce, and depending on where you’re at on the timeline you may find “Woke Up New” to be exactly what you need.

298. Stars Around Her

Alex Russell Ghana, Songs About Fire , , , , , , , ,

We see one moment and have time to appreciate it in “Stars Around Her.”

Track: “Stars Around Her”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

There are hundreds of live Mountain Goats shows online, but I find myself getting hung up on specific ones like this show at Fletcher’s from 1996 that I’ve talked about before. Fletcher’s is gone, like a lot of places are gone, and the recording is frustrating because the audience won’t shut up. John Darnielle mentions it several times, including the introduction to “Stars Around Her” where he says it’s a quiet song that he probably shouldn’t play with a loud audience. As a much younger person I definitely talked at shows and I’ve tried to get better about that. Let people enjoy the show. You can catch up at the bar after the thing.

The Mountain Goats are never going to be a band for everyone, but they’re several magnitudes bigger now than they were in 1996. Fletcher’s seems like the kind of place where the audience might not be there because they wanted to see John Darnielle’s hyper-specific style of stomping and howling. It’s just the cost of doing business that sometimes you care about the show way more than the average person in the room. If most folks are there because the beer is cheap and the weather is nice then you might not get the best version of a song from a four-song release from forever ago.

Most of the live versions of “Stars Around Her” sound like the studio version. It appears to be a song about romantic longing that’s frozen in one image, though that may be a simplification. There are a lot of songs like this from this time period and that’s no slight to say, because this is a great one. John Darnielle’s voice is softer here than it usually is and it’s a truly nice moment. That’s enough, really.