the mountain goats

214. Commandante

Alex Russell Devil in the Shortwave , , , , , , ,

The bouncy, exciting “Commandante” hides dark ends with one last singalong for the road.

Track: “Commandante”
Album: Devil in the Shortwave (2002)

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Mountain Goats songs about two anxious, furious people who feel that their situation is important, dire, and ending. Depending on what point in the timeline we meet those people, John Darnielle tells their story differently. By the early 2000s, the couple gained a name as The Alpha Couple. It is a point of debate, though clearly ridiculous debate, whether any two people who fight and hate as much as they love are The Alpha Couple or just two other people feeling the same way. There’s enough commentary from John Darnielle that we can infer that not every couple in every song is the same one, of course, and that the feelings are just universal enough that we think it’s the same folks going through the same pain.

These aren’t the famous ones, I don’t think. These are just two people who sound deceptively happy if you don’t listen to the lyrics. John Darnielle clearly has fun on “Commandante,” with the howling chorus and the scream-along-ready line of “I am never going back to Cincinnati,” which, incidentally, went over like gangbusters in Cincinnati in 2013. The studio version is fast and peaks in the right places, but live shows like that really sell it. You can hear the foot stomps from the crowd and the individual folks in the audience that put their own meaning into sailing through the night sky like a pair of bottle rockets.

These two are already at the end. Threats to drink more whiskey than a famous Irish alcoholics and vague mentions of grievances and great big secrets are really obvious signs that not all is well. But John Darnielle reminds us with the melody that the end sometimes feels fun, right before you get there.

 

213. Handball

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now!, Why You All So Thief? , , , , , , ,

“I did not come to play handball,” a narrator insists in “Handball,” and the menace is the point.

Track: “Handball”
Album: Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

“You’ll get nothing from me, do you hear? Nothing! Anything I know about this odd little song will go with me to the grave.” – Liner notes for “Handball” on Protein Source of the Future…Now!

John Darnielle has written hundreds of songs, but none of them like “Handball.” The first verse is four loose lines from Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The rest is the line “I did not come to play handball.” That is 100% of “Handball.”

There have been countless attempts to understand and debate the meaning of these songs. “Handball” is baffling in that the two verses aren’t connected in any obvious way, but it’s also very clear if one assumes that disconnect is the point. “I kill a man on the day his life seems sweetest to him” would be a Mountain Goats line if it weren’t something else already, so the choice to use the lines in the first verse is clear. How does that connect to any one of the multiple sports called handball?

John Darnielle wrote the lyrics down and asked a studio full of people to sing it with him on a radio performance in Chicago in 2002. At a show years later, he called that performance “creepy for the sake of being creepy.” All of this suggests that trying to dig into “Handball” may be an attempt to look for things that aren’t there.

I once made a fellow Mountain Goats fan a shirt with a clip art handball player and the phrase “I did not come to play handball” on it. The point of the shirt was that a fellow Goats fan would understand, but understand what? I can’t explain it, but I feel like once you get that, you get all of this.

211. Ox Baker Triumphant

Alex Russell Babylon Springs EP , , , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle sings a song for the bad guy in all of us in “Ox Baker Triumphant.”

Track: “Ox Baker Triumphant”
Album: Babylon Springs EP (2006)

Wrestling’s story involves the same beats as every other kind, but it benefits from more black and white narratives than other types of performance. The “heels” of wrestling often have to be very obvious to get an idea across quickly to an audience.

Ox Baker was a heel who punched people in the heart. You only need to hear one Ox Baker promo to understand him. He hates you and the goodness you represent, and he’s here to punch everyone who stands in the way of his dominance. When John Darnielle introduces “Ox Baker Triumphant” he often talks about the power of that idea. Ox Baker isn’t here to set up a complicated battle between good and evil and he isn’t here to win you over. He wants to punch your good guy in the heart. You don’t really get more to the point.

“Ox Baker Triumphant” is exactly what it says on the label. Ox Baker has been betrayed by the world he loves and he is here to get revenge on everyone and everything. Given what we know about Ox, we can assume he saw this coming. He demands that the others click their heels in a mock attempt to go home before yelling “I bet you never expected me!”

Darnielle’s soaring delivery on the studio version and the blown-out fury on most live versions accomplish the same thing. We get a sense that Ox Baker is done with all this and that his retribution is well-deserved. For all the time the good guys will get in later Goats songs, “Ox Baker Triumphant” reminds us why we love to watch the moments when people get pushed to their limits. It doesn’t really matter what he came to do in the first place, now it’s his time to shine.

206. Going to Maryland

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , , ,

One character explores craps betting as a stand-in for the difficulties of a relationship in “Going to Maryland.”

Track: “Going to Maryland”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

There are hundreds of different locations across Mountain Goats songs. The geographic mentions often ground otherwise general songs in the specific, allowing the listener to imagine themselves in the open English countryside or the mysterious political workings of an ancient civilization. How you read the location changes based on who, and where, you are. If you’re from Maryland, what does it mean to be “Going to Maryland?”

Locals apparently generally add the article “the” to Chesapeake Bay. John Darnielle isn’t from Maryland, which explains the absence of “the” in the line “and your eyes shine tonight on Chesapeake Bay.” I’m not local either and have never noticed it before, but it’s interesting what even small shifts in language tell us. Everyone’s home has those nuances, like how the contraction “ya’ll” rather than “y’all” serves as a sign that someone may not be used to using it or whether you use pop or soda to refer to a fizzy drink may identify where you were born.

This obviously isn’t central to the understanding of the song, but it serves as a springboard to talk about a live performance of “Going to Maryland” at the legendary CBGB in New York. John Darnielle changes the line that follows “five dollars says that it’s gone in a minute” from “five dollars says that your heart goes with it” to “five dollars more says my chances went with it.” The original version is slow and the gambling references through the lyrics feel sorrowful, but the live version drives much quicker and feels desperate. The shift is small, but it changes how you feel about the speaker. Are these people in love or this a different kind of relationship?

205. Song for Mark and Joel

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , ,

“Song for Mark and Joel” is for Mark and Joel, but it’s also for that creeping dread you try to avoid.

Track: “Song for Mark and Joel”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

The Mark and Joel of “Song for Mark and Joel” are Mark Givens and Joel Huschle of Wckr Spgt, a band that’s closely associated with the Mountain Goats. John Darnielle gets a specific mention on the “other artists” page of their website. It says that John Darnielle and Peter Hughes are “really doing wonders in the world of rock and roll,” which you may assume I agree with based on the whole point of this thing.

I haven’t listened to much Wckr Spgt, but it’s easy to see how John Darnielle fell in love. One of their recent albums includes a song called “Skin, the First Line of Defense.” That really says it all.

When John Darnielle plays “Song for Mark and Joel” he often says some variant of “this is a song I wrote for Mark and Joel and it is called ‘Song for Mark and Joel.'” It’s a dry comment, but it says a lot about the man that wrote a song for two friends in 1994 and may not have imagined he’d be playing it for hundreds of people night after night twenty-five years later.

The opening lyrics describe a natural setting. It’s pure early Mountain Goats: a bird (not a robin, but close) sits on a branch and a narrator feels a vaguely troubling sensation. By the second verse our narrator is in a room full of maps. Quickly, they tell us about a sense of cold and begin “pondering connections.” John Darnielle doesn’t give us enough to decipher what’s happening, but it ends up being a powerful sensation all the same. We’ve all felt that menace in the air and by leaving it general, it works for whatever causes that feeling in your bones.

204. New Star Song

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , ,

During a train delay in Redding, Washington, the narrator in “New Star Song” takes in local culture.

Track: “New Star Song”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

If you have thirty-five hours, you can get from Los Angeles to Seattle on the Coast Starlight passenger train. If you do this, you’ll make 28 stops and spend some time in Redding, California. You’ll wait in the same place that John Darnielle waited decades ago on a similar trip for a likely much different purpose.

It’s uncharacteristic that John Darnielle offered up as much as he did about “New Star Song,” but in 1998 he mentioned that it’s slightly autobiographical. “Slightly” is doing a lot of work there, but he did wait in Redding and watch four movies, seemingly waiting for his evening train. The similarities between the narrator and songwriter end there, but it’s telling that Beautiful Rat Sunset imagines a character waiting there through lightning storms, thinking about “things that I thought that I’d soon be forgetting.”

The strumming on “New Star Song” is angry, even for an early 90s Mountain Goats song. It opens with a clang and doubles down with a handful of furious beats over John Darnielle’s wailing “I thought about how cold you must be!” It lends itself to live performance, as many of the angry-without-being-violent ones do from this era, and as such has been played dozens of times over the years. Most versions stay true to the original and focus on the chorus and the delivery of those lines about someone else, far away, and how they must feel. Our narrator is in a hot, hostile place and they’re hanging pictures of someone everywhere. Typically that’s a sign that someone is lost, but it seems just as likely that this is a grand gesture that’s part of an ill-fated trip.

203. Itzcuintli-Totzli Days

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , ,

“Itzuintli-Totzli Days” spends a sing-song (possibly) happy moment with a rabbit and a dear friend.

Track: “Itzcuintli-Totzli Days”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

The Mountain Goats played “Itzcuintli-Totzli Days” at least twice in 1997. At one show, John Darnielle asked the audience to sing along with him in the spirit of the song’s intention. At the other show, John Darnielle opened the show with it and called it an “old song.”

People tape Mountain Goats shows and put them up online just like they do for so many other bands. This allows us to follow a partial history which we know is incomplete. There may be dozens of other recordings or unrecorded instances of “Itzcuintli-Totzli Days” out there, but those two sum it up perfectly. It’s a happy, bouncing song that even unfamiliar fans can sing along with by the end. “Let the big, big rabbit come out,” John Darnielle demands, and the crowd sings along.

The title comes from terms the Aztecs used for “dog” and “rabbit,” which represented specific elements of their calendar. The dog stood for death and the memory of the dead, while the rabbit stood for brighter moments of fertility and spirituality. The Mountain Goats dance between those two emotions frequently, but it’s rare that they do so gleefully. The day gets dark towards the end of “Itzcuintli-Totzli Days,” but the narrator is still thrilled to spend this time with someone. It’s more uplifting than we’ve come to expect, especially on an album that ends with the chilling “Resonant Bell World.” Your best bet is to sing along and beat back the darkness with a smile as you stave off the coming bad times, especially while you’ve got someone to hold your hand.

202. Song for Cleomenes

Alex Russell Beautiful Rat Sunset , , , , , ,

John Darnielle goes deep into history to tell the story of a very specific, very evil trick in “Song for Cleomenes.”

Track: “Song for Cleomenes”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

In San Francisco in 2001, John Darnielle played his cover of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” He ended the song and the crowd shouted requests from all across the catalog. Darnielle told the crowd to keep the requests coming, as he wasn’t confident about any of the remaining songs on his set list.

He played nine more songs, most of them safe picks that you might still hear at a show today. He started that list, however, with the ultra rare “Song for Cleomenes.” I can’t find any other recordings of it, though it seems he’s played it other times. This rendition is only vaguely like the studio version on Beautiful Rat Sunset, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the same driving, terrifying guitar, punctuated by screams as the crowd learns the story of Gaius Verres.

The song tells you all you need to know: Gaius Verres was a horrible criminal who abused his civic power for his own gain. Cicero destroyed him in court and he had to leave town, largely on the testimony of the boat-burning trickery in the song.

People seem to delight in finding inaccuracies in the historical songs, but that seems to miss the point. The live version is slightly clearer than the studio version about what happens in the end and editorializes more about Cicero’s prose, but the differences don’t matter. It’s about the joy John Darnielle clearly finds in telling a story that most people won’t know, but ultimately relating it. Two characters, you and the narrator, end up on a beach watching boats on fire. It’s surprising to find yourself in the song, and it makes you wonder what you were doing in 73 BC.

201. Design Your Own Container Garden

Alex Russell See America Right , , , , , , , , ,

One half of the Alpha Couple reflects on different, if not happier times, in “Design Your Own Container Garden.”

Track: “Design Your Own Container Garden”
Album: See America Right (2002)

A container garden is any garden in a pot or a container. It’s a way to describe anywhere a plant could be grown other than the ground. It’s a stretch, but the phrase “Design Your Own Container Garden” might refer to the Alpha Couple, who have uprooted themselves from the west coast and relocated to their miserable future in Florida. It might also just be a phrase John Darnielle saw in a catalog, thus a similar play on “See America Right,” the title of the single the song exists on.

The narrator drives out to a specific intersection in Los Angeles. As of this writing, it features a fried chicken chain restaurant, a check cashing place, and a storage center. The details don’t matter, but the specificity helps us picture that this corner matters. We have those in our lives, too. This member of the Alpha Couple doesn’t care about LA, they care about what happened when they were in this spot.

They mention “old friends, old friends” and later call them “here ghosts, old ghosts.” You can’t go home again, John Darnielle tells us again and again, but you can wander around where home used to be and feel the feelings that are left behind. “Design Your Own Container Garden” is filled with death imagery, as the narrator talks about feeling like a buzzard and walking through wreckage. It’s the “space we left behind” to this character, and it’s clearly not something they view positively now. It makes sense to be a b-side because it doesn’t fit tonally with Tallahassee, but it’s also interesting to wonder when in the timeline we are. Is this after everything, or does this character already feel sad even though they don’t know the worst of what’s to come?

199. Night of the Mules

Alex Russell Chile de Árbol, Protein Source of the Future...Now! , , , , , , ,

Vague religious references and a group of foreboding animals populate “Night of the Mules.”

Track: “Night of the Mules”
Album: Chile de Árbol (1993) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

Chile de Árbol is a strange collection. One song is about the end of the world and the Easter Bunny, another is about Billy the Kid, and the other three are challenging to approach even at a basic level. “Night of the Mules” seems to be about generalized menace, with only the title to suggest where the source of said menace lies.

A few years ago John Darnielle opened a concert with “Night of the Mules.” He’s said recently that he likes to open shows with old or rare songs so few people in the crowd will know the first one. It’s a powerful effect, and it usually quiets the crowd as people try to figure out what they’re listening to or if they’ve heard it before. “Night of the Mules” doesn’t need much updating to fit in with a modern Mountain Goats show. It’s all fierce guitar and sneers, so it’s a perfect wake-the-crowd-up jam to hear up top.

The only commentary I can find is one quote where John Darnielle says the song is about an ending that will come for everyone. Kyle Barbour, author of The Annotated Mountain Goats, suggests that it’s a Biblical song because of the presence of kings, holly, and mistletoe, but he also hears “praying” in the second verse where I hear “braying.” That’s as good of an answer as anything I can come up with, but I’m more comfortable calling this a generalized view of an end times. The religious reading is backed up by the opening sample from Genesis about Abraham’s attempt to save the city of Sodom if ten good men exist there, but mules coming to destroy everything seems more like a John Darnielle original idea to me.