the mountain goats

115. Tahitian Ambrosia Maker

Alex Russell Sweden , , , ,

 

The most important moment in “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker” is slight enough that you might miss it in your real life.

Track: “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker”
Album: Sweden (1995)

As far as the usual sources are aware, “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker” has never been played live and John Darnielle isn’t on the record about it. It’s on Sweden, which many fans count among the greatest records the band has produced, but Sweden has nineteen tracks.

The liner notes on Sweden contain, appropriately, Swedish subtitles for each song. Some of them are cryptic with lines like “the coldest winter” and “those who escaped were innocent,” but the subtitle for this song is just “he’s recognized you.” That might imply that the characters are pursued by someone they’re trying to lose or it might mean something else entirely. It might even refer to the speaker, from the perspective of the other character. It deepens the mystery of what’s going on here without expressly revealing it, which is fitting for a Swedish subtitle on a Mountain Goats record.

With a lack of primary and secondary sources, we are left with the text itself. Two characters are hungry and one offers bread to the other. John Darnielle’s “moments of grace like this being wholly unmerited” is beautiful, but it also says something about the state of these two. The final verse is all about a familiar moment in a Goats song: one character touches the other one gently and the recipient imbues it with powerful meaning. It happens in a number of Goats songs, but it’s a useful device because we’ve all had that experience. The speaker devolves and screams “pure gold, nothing but gold” and is driven to promise a coconut cream pie, but the reasoning is open to interpretation. “Because I saw the sky coming down to meet you,” like any good Goats lyric, is malleable enough to be sweet or foreboding, depending on your current feelings towards love.

114. Attention All Pickpockets

Alex Russell Letter From Belgium , , , ,

“Attention All Pickpockets” is about trying to keep it all together and the hope that someone else might help you do it.

Track: “Attention All Pickpockets”
Album: Letter From Belgium (2004)

John Darnielle generally prefers to be vague about song meanings. That’s part of what makes the journey through the catalog so interesting, because it’s less about trying to find the right answers and more about making connections that work for you. If you want to think “The Monkey Song” isn’t about a monkey, well, go for it. There’s no primary text to stop you.

“Attention All Pickpockets” is different. It’s indisputably about the same characters that show up in “Dilaudid” on The Sunset Tree, as John Darnielle has confirmed. He calls this song from the three-song EP Letter From Belgium a “study” for developing the characters. In “Broom People” they deal with their teenage years and take solace in sex. By “Dilaudid” they’re into hard drugs and the things that go along with them. “Attention All Pickpockets” is a kind of middle point between the two.

The title comes from a deliberate misinterpretation of a sign John Darnielle saw in Paris that warned him about pickpockets. He recorded this song at a festival there and you can hear the joy in the other musicians as they chime in for the chorus. It sounds exuberant at first, but the lyrics reveal the transition. The characters are “not the same people that our old friends knew” but what are they now? “Broom People” ends with a primal scream and the statement that one person can be enough to save you, but “Attention All Pickpockets” sounds more like a desperate plea from one person to another in the hopes that they continue their saving. Since “Dilaudid” follows this we know they stay together, but is that really the best outcome for everyone involved?

113. The Window Song

Alex Russell Protein Source of the Future...Now! , , , ,

 

“The Window Song” could have been lost to time, but now persists to express one truly great image.

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

Protein Source of the Future…Now! is a collection of four early Mountain Goats albums and a handful of songs released on other compilations. “The Window Song” is originally from Pawnshop Reverb, a 22-song collection released by Shrimper in 1992. If you want the original, it’ll run you $40 and you’ll have to find a way to play a cassette.

The truly early stuff in the catalog is full of oddities, but “The Window Song” is a standout. 1992 is the second year of the Mountain Goats and this is the first song that features the Bright Mountain Choir, the all-female backing vocalists that includes original bassist Rachel Ware. It’s an essential part of Goats history, but it would be lost to time without the reissue. Nowadays you can find just about anything from the Goats online, but I think to appreciate this one to the fullest you have to imagine someone trying to order Pawnshop Reverb in 1997. I don’t know that music was better when it was harder to find, but there’s a romanticism to that chase.

No matter how you find it, “The Window Song” is a beautifully sad one. The chorus of “I know you, you’re the one // I’ve spent three seasons trying // to pretend that I never knew” repeats four times as it grows in intensity, but it’s the second verse that always gets me. “I moved toward your voice and my body got so light I could have walked on eggs right then and not broken a one of them” is a classic Goats line. It’s crammed full of words and yet only expresses one idea. Economy of language is usually about expressing an image quickly, but here the specificity helps you think of someone who has this impact on you.

112. So Desperate

Alex Russell Heretic Pride , , , , , , ,

“So Desperate” freezes the frame on two people doing something taboo without calling it right or wrong.

Track: “So Desperate”
Album: Heretic Pride (2008)

“So Desperate” is about an affair. There are lots of songs in the catalog that are open for debate, but this one is so direct that you can’t miss the subject matter. When introducing songs about infidelity, John Darnielle often makes an appeal to the people in the crowd to think about the situations featured in the song and their personal experience. He doubles down on this in the press kit for Heretic Pride: “Odds are that somebody reading this knows exactly what I mean and feels a little uncomfortable reading about it: 2:1.”

Infidelity is a favorite topic of the Goats, but it’s interesting to see how it’s used. Storytelling across film and literature and everything else uses infidelity as a signal that characters are bad (only bad people cheat) or that love between two people is forbidden and true (they love each other so much they have to cheat) and it’s usually up to the storyteller which of the two motivations is at play. Darnielle doesn’t want to weigh in. These people might feel what they’re doing is wrong, but our only clues in the lyrics are feelings of sadness and the title/chorus: “I felt so desperate in your arms.”

Desperation, like infidelity, seems to be a solely negative thing until you break it down. Darnielle isn’t arguing that this is actually a good situation and that this is love, he’s just asking you to look at a time when you were in this space and see what you think of it. Mountain Goats characters often act selfishly or impulsively, but they aren’t cruel. These lovers are just out here in a car, for now, and whatever else that means back home is for another day.

111. Proverbs 6:27

Alex Russell The Life of the World to Come , , , , , , , , ,

 

“Proverbs 6:27” applies a verse about adultery to the power of memory and how we deal with those we’ve lost.

Track: “Proverbs 6:27”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009)

The title verse is simple: “Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?” It’s evocative and clear. The proverb means you will be burned if you play with fire, but it also means that everyone will know it. Your clothes are burned, but not destroyed. It seems like the suggestion is that you aren’t consumed immediately by fire, but rather that people see your singed clothes and know what happened.

The preceding verses in the Bible explain the context of adultery, but the Goats song allows for wider interpretation. The character waits in an old home and does mundane tasks to pass the time and ignore the nagging thought of someone long gone. It’s another version of the emotions in “Half Dead,” though less directly about a breakup. In “Proverbs 6:27” our hero wears their heart on their sleeve, but it could be a death instead of a temporary loss and it could be a friend instead of a lover. Whatever the characters, you can insert yourself and imagine the time spent “as day gives way to day gives way to day gives way to day.”

The chorus is simple like the verse, but it’s prime John Darnielle. “I treat each crushing moment like a gift” shows that the character is wallowing in difficult head space across Betamax tapes and old memories, but “and wait for the fog to lift” means that they expect this to have an end. You can be scarred by loss, the Mountain Goats remind you, but you’re gonna get out of that house eventually and it’ll pass. It isn’t purely hopeful, but the conclusion suggests that since singed clothes won’t kill you, the fire is fine.

110. The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , , ,

“The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” muses on he meaning of big things for other people versus small things for ourselves.

Track: “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life”
Album: Ghana (1999)

So many Mountain Goats songs suggest an interpretation but stop short of insisting upon one. It’s easy to infer what songs about the folly of insurance fraud or the risks of selling drugs are supposed to make us feel, but rarely does John Darnielle directly say “this song is about this thing.”

Darnielle himself responded to a comment on his Tumblr and told a fan that “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” is “essentially a riff on ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’,” which is a poem by W. H. Auden. The fan asked why the song ends before it discusses Jimi Hendrix’s death, but Darnielle insists that’s the whole idea. He said that it would “lose whatever power it has” if it devolved into drugs and death.

The song is quiet, even for an early Goats song. You can picture Jimi Hendrix waking up and performing the basic tasks described in the lyrics. Darnielle highlights relatable things for a reason. His Jimi Hendrix is about to die, but today he’s just having a normal morning. If you’re lucky, you’ll have thousands and thousands of mornings like this and the last one you have will look a lot like the others.

Auden’s poem examines a classic painting: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Icarus is shown in the sea after burning his wings, but none of the other people seem to care. They have their own lives, so even the remarkable story of the fall of Icarus means very little. Darnielle doesn’t tell us how to feel about it, but he echoes Auden’s notion that we must be who we are and live in our experiences, even when circumstances seem like they deserve more attention and pause.

109. Michael Myers Resplendent

Alex Russell Heretic Pride , , , , , , ,

The Mountain Goats consider the man himself and the man playing him in “Michael Myers Resplendent.”

Track: “Michael Myers Resplendent”
Album: Heretic Pride (2008)

John Darnielle’s personal interests are varied. He loves boxing, professional wrestling, and metal. He’s done a wrestling album and there are a half-dozen songs in the catalog that are directly about boxing. The metal influences can be harder to spot. The trappings of metal (darkness, macabre elements, horror, etc.) are certainly present, but my knowledge of that world only goes so far. I’m not a horror fan and as much as I love the Goats, I can’t get into everything John Darnielle loves the way he can.

The thing is: that’s okay. You don’t need to love wrestling to listen to Beat the Champ. You don’t even need to have seen Halloween II to appreciate “Michael Myers Resplendent.” You just need to know that the slasher gets burned in a house fire. You can handle the rest in your mind.

“Resplendent” means “attractive or impressive through being richly colorful or sumptuous.” It comes from the Latin verb for “to shine” and shares space in our language with “splendid.” It’s a truly fantastic word that doesn’t get used very often. It’s rare that “resplendent” is the exact word you need. It is the exact word for a man ablaze not emerging victorious from something. He’s a force of nature, less a man than an idea, and he’s not the “winner.” John Darnielle wants you to consider the monster in its final moments. Even if you can’t pity this character, you can appreciate that the victory for the other characters has another side.

Darnielle includes enough detail in the song that you can tell it’s about the actor portraying Michael Myers. The song works when just describing the character, but it adds an extra element of sadness given the preparation it takes just to play the doomed monster’s role.

108. High Hawk Season

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

 

“High Hawk Season” examines the cast of the cult classic The Warriors as Mountain Goats characters.

Track: “High Hawk Season”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

All Eternals Deck is about a fictional set of tarot cards and each song represents a card. The conceit is easy to identify in songs like “Birth of Serpents” and “Damn These Vampires,” but it’s murky in more direct songs like “Sourdoire Valley Song” and “Liza Forever Minnelli.”

John Darnielle says that “High Hawk Season” is about the plot of the cult-classic film The Warriors. In the film, nine Warriors must escape dozens (and potentially hundreds) of other gangs after someone shoots another gang leader in Van Cortlandt Park and pins it on the Warriors. It’s campy as hell, but it holds up as exciting and filled with machismo. The characterization is thin and your mileage may vary for the narrative, but the drama of the chase in the film is infectious.

The song’s parallels with the movie are obvious. The Warriors in “High Hawk Season” are “young supernovas” and they travel all night towards their own version of happiness. In the film it’s Coney Island, but really it’s a sense of home. The characters are lost through the rest of their journey in New York, often literally as much as metaphorically. There are small moments where you remember that these are kids, despite all the fight scenes and big talk, when they have trouble reading the map and get scared.

Darnielle uses that fear to make the characters his own. “Rise if you’re sleeping, stay awake” became a tagline for the All Eternals Deck tour, and the motto is easy to apply to Darnielle’s world. They see these Warriors who run through the night as their people, isolated and in need of consideration. The harmony and vocals may be unique for the Mountain Goats, but the sense that “the heat’s about to break” sure isn’t.

107. Fall of the Star High School Running Back

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle laments the reality of drug laws in “Fall of the Star High School Running Back.”

Track: “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

All Hail West Texas is about specific people. They aren’t all real, but they are specific in the sense that they have names and personalities. John Darnielle’s early work features characters that speak in first person and often talk about the same themes (love, desperation, longing, and the like) so the first album with a full cast is a big departure.

Jenny from “Jenny” shows up in other songs and Jeff and Cyrus from “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” live again every time the band closes a live show. William Staniforth Donahue is a different sort of character, but still specific. His name changes in live shows, but he’s always the same person. He always plays football well and he always goes to jail. He lives a short life in the two-minute song.

John Darnielle says the song is about mandatory sentencing. The character is based on a person who did time in a Dutch prison for drug possession, ostensibly with the intent to distribute. The real guy was another young person who probably didn’t fit the intent of a mandatory 10+ year sentence for peddling hard drugs.

He refers to the song as “a protest song” which makes sense. It’s also the story of a troubled person who chooses temporary happiness at the risk of all else. That’s a very familiar idea. More of Donahue’s character comes out in the line “people you used to look down on” about the drug dealers he hangs with after he loses his football career. He changes his perspective about the lower social strata, which would be the start of something if it weren’t connected with the end of everything else.

106. Original Air-Blue Gown

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

 

John Darnielle writes his own version of a Thomas Hardy poem in the ode “Original Air-Blue Gown.”

Track: “Original Air-Blue Gown”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice” includes the lines “Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then // Even to the original air-blue gown!” The rest of the poem talks about Hardy waiting for a woman’s return, though he slowly begins to realize that she cannot return. He thinks he hears her voice but also worries that she is a ghost. We get the sensation that his fears are founded.

The narrator in “Original Air-Blue Gown” waits for a similar return with similar fears. They describe colorful surroundings: green horseflies, plums, and red air. All of that color leads to “dark blue shapes” that they can just make out through their eyelids and the statement “I am not afraid of death.”

When a character says that we generally think they’re talking about their own mortality, but we need to look deeper here. Hardy was describing his wife in “The Voice” and Darnielle’s narrator is definitely describing someone else’s passing. They obsess over a black-and-white boxing match and the youth and power of Cassius Clay, which shows that they’re tied up in the past. The repetition of “my God, my God, my God // he was something” helps lock the image in the listener’s mind. You can’t breeze past it any more than the narrator can.

At the end of “The Voice” Hardy’s character attempts to come to terms with reality. Darnielle’s believes that the target of his affection has returned. The backing strings intensify and lend bonus eeriness to the scene. As a callback to the earlier repetition, the narrator looks out into the clearing where either a ghost or a loved one is and says “it’s you, it’s you, it’s you.”