the mountain goats

084. Wizard Buys a Hat

Alex Russell Satanic Messiah , , , , , , ,

Spiritually connected to another album, “Wizard Buys a Hat” details the fear of a town that feels turned against you.

Track: “Wizard Buys a Hat”
Album: Satanic Messiah (2008)

I was fortunate enough to see John Darnielle play “Wizard Buys a Hat” in 2008. By way of introducing it, he talked about the great challenge of coming up with the peculiar title first and then trying to write a song that could live up to it. The title is a wonderful melding of mystical and mundane, and it definitely deserves consideration before you hear the song. Is it tongue in cheek? Is this an actual wizard (not necessarily a stretch, for these guys)? If nothing else, we get a curious image of a mythical creature doing something we’ve done many times.

It’s almost better left vague, but it’s possible to break down a little bit through the lyrics and some assorted Goats knowledge. John said in a different show in 2008 that the song is about his time in Portland, but one could interpret it as NYC, given 6th Street and Broadway. There’s even a “red steps” in NYC that helps the argument, but let us picture The City of Roses. It’s possible our main character stole something — maybe even a hat, if we want to think literally — and then fled back to Broadway. That’s certainly supported, given that he’s entered his “crucible” in the department store and then a crowd is looking for him.

Whatever the interpretation of the first two verses, the third is the payoff. This only works if you consider Portland the setting, but “Feel like this town’s gonna put a quick end to me” works for the character in We Shall All Be Healed. He’s running from addiction but not succeeding. The Portland album offers a lot of different perspectives, but “Wizard Buys a Hat” sums up the fiery anger and paranoia very well.

 

083. Onions

Alex Russell The Coroner's Gambit , , , , , , ,

 

“Onions” is an ode to a beautiful spring morning and the things that come with the end of the coldest season.

Track: “Onions”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

John Darnielle doesn’t eat meat. He wrote that the original liner notes for Full Force Galesburg were “a militant vegetarian rant which, among other things, described the lives of meat-eaters as “meaningless.” He’s done benefit shows for the animal protection agency Farm Sanctuary. It would be difficult to miss this element of his personal politics, but just in case he’s got dozens of lyrical references to the beauty of the simple cow to remind you.

“Onions” paints a beautiful picture. The narrator informs us that it’s late-winter/early-spring both directly and indirectly. “Springtime’s coming,” they say, but they also watch migrations and other animal behaviors that mirror the seasonal change. It’s easy to feel a little joy yourself as you picture the cows picking up speed as they realize the world is no longer cold and is inviting to the touch again. On a surface level, it’s a sweet image that gets coupled with new onions growing to show how wonderful the world becomes and how great everyone feels when winter thaws.

It may seem a strange song for The Coroner’s Gambit, then, since the rest of the album mostly covers loss, death, and divorce. One explanation is that it’s the glimmer of hope among all the sorrow, but it may be that our narrator doesn’t have all the facts yet. “Springtime’s coming, that means you’ll be coming back around” can be read as an assumption that may not turn out to be true. The world is new again in spring and that usually means the return of this character for our narrator, but we’ll have to see if this year goes the same as years past.

082. Seeing Daylight

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

“Seeing Daylight” seems simple at first, but the importance of one phone call when you need it shines through.

Track: “Seeing Daylight”
Album: Beautiful Rat Sunset (1994)

Some of the songs evolve. In 1994 on Beautiful Rat Sunset, “Seeing Daylight” sounds like a song from a troubled narrator. John Darnielle’s voice trembles as he sings the simple chorus of “boil, boil.” He lilts as he talks about the strange niceness of hearing a voice on the other end of a phone. He’s contemplative, but clearly very sad about his day and his space in the world. It’s understandable, even though we don’t get any details about this narrator.

By 2011, the song changes. On this live recording in New York, John is even quieter when he speak-sings the sad, mundane lyrics. The narrator is still troubled, but it’s now a more specific, less hopeful kind of troubled. He vibrates over “the impossible echo inside” and it makes you consider what that means, both to the narrator and in general. There are a dozen lyrics like that scattered over the catalog. There is no clear meaning to it, but you can get a general sense of the tone it is meant to evoke. The narrator is cooking a very simple meal and they are surprised by how much they are surprised by a phone call. Everyone can remember a day where they felt like they were the only person on earth and were then taught otherwise by a surprising interaction.

The only comment on this song I can find is from that same live show, where John said “this is a song about death.” I take that to mean that the narrator is feeling lost and scared and is only tethered to this world by one interaction. This is not unfamiliar territory for the Goats, but this song’s mundane nature requires deeper digging to find your own meaning in it.

081. Choked Out

Alex Russell Beat the Champ , , , , , , ,

 

“Choked Out” describes a wrestler being choked, but it forces the listener to consider what we do when we’re desperate.

Track: “Choked Out”
Album: Beat the Champ (2015)

Much like how “the drugs album” isn’t only about drugs and “the Bible album” isn’t at all about the Bible, Beat the Champ is only tangentially about wrestling. The album delights in the language and characters of wrestling, but as John Darnielle says it’s about the difficulties of life. Even the EP released right after the album works this way: “Blood Capsules” is directly about a wrestler who can’t make ends meet despite being willing to do anything. That makes it a nice companion piece for “Choked Out,” a more in-the-moment examination of the same idea.

At a show in New York, Darnielle talked about how the song destroys his voice. It’s not really the kind of song the band writes as much these days. It’s an explosion, and after two minutes you’re left to consider what the flurry of words represents. As they are choked, Darnielle’s narrator describes the process and why they’re okay with it. A horrified nurse realizes they’re going beyond the bounds of what wrestlers should do, and the reality is that if you don’t fight within the “rules” when you wrestle you can do serious damage to yourself. In that sense, “fake” or “real” doesn’t really matter. The result may be scripted, but you have to put on a show without hurting yourself to get to the result.

They know the crowd wants to see something that looks real and they’re willing to oblige them at the cost of his consciousness. “Everybody has their limits // nobody’s found mine,” they tell us, establishing a willingness to do whatever it takes to put on a show. The crowd screams “like hounds in the heat of the chase” and the wrestler continues to describe representations of death. The ultimate sadness of the song: it’s all for $200.

080. Downtown Seoul

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

With a simple, but strange, description, “Downtown Seoul” offers a brief look at love that’s better than any pop song.

Track: “Downtown Seoul”
Album: Sweden (1995)

Is Sweden the best Mountain Goats record? A lot of fans contend that it is, and I think they’ve got a good case. The album opens with the extremely brutal “The Recognition Scene” and follows up with “Downtown Seoul.” Songs like “The Mess Inside” and “Half Dead” might be rougher, but there is no harder one-two punch in the catalog than the two songs that open up Sweden.

Every song on Sweden has a Swedish sentence written next to it in the liner notes. For “Downtown Seoul” it is very simple: “He is younger than me.” The meaning of some of the Swedish sentences is tough to decipher, but this one seems to suggest that the song may be about John Darnielle himself. It predates the autobiographical records like The Sunset Tree, but it’s easy to see how Darnielle sympathizes with his narrator here. In the first verse their beloved walks across a square in Seoul. They are consumed by the moment. “As the rest of my life went by,” they say.

What makes this song so wonderful is the specificity. Most love songs talk about generic love, but the Mountain Goats offer you a moment where a person takes another’s finger in their mouth and rests it lightly on their tongue. It sounds strange, but you know what it means. We are all different and we cannot totally explain the best moments of our lives to other people, because they were not there. “I remember your eyelids,” they say, and we also remember something extremely exact and indescribable about someone we loved in a place far away from our present.

079. 1 John 4:16

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

The Bible verse and the Mountain Goats song “1 John 4:16” talk about sources of love, but with very different results.

Track: “1 John 4:16”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009)

The Life of the World to Come is certainly well-loved now, but it’s impossible to forget how out of left field it felt when it came out. In most of the interviews that led up to the release John Darnielle defended his choice to write an entire album based on verses from the Bible and tried to explain what it meant to him. It’s hard to describe succinctly, but Darnielle’s description of it being more about “hard lessons” from the Bible and less about actual Christianity is a good place to start.

While the Mountain Goats had plenty of biblical history before The Life of the World to Come (as has been written about at length in this amazing article), the album at first appears to be a whole new level of dedication. It only seems that way from the track list. Aside from the title, there isn’t anything directly biblical about “1 John 4:16.” The verse is about how love comes from God and how faith and love cannot be experienced separately. The song is much darker, though it also deals with love. The narrator is trapped, first in a “holding tank” (though they do say they built it themselves) and then in just a “cell” (though they are led out of it).

The tone here, like the message on much of The Life of the World to Come, is pensive. The narrator is trapped and afraid, but is comforted somewhat by rain-inspired thoughts of a loved one. The delivery of “I know you’re thinking of me // because it’s just about to rain” is wonderfully delicate, but it’s the piano that makes the song work. Live performances have become more and more about the piano portion, and songs like “1 John 4:16” are exactly why.

078. Faithless Bacchant Song

Alex Russell Bitter Melon Farm , , , , , , ,

In the very silly “Faithless Bacchant Song,” a presumably drunk character battles a toad that talks.

Track: “Faithless Bacchant Song”
Album: Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

There is much to love about the fun little song that is “Faithless Bacchant Song.” It’s part of the original “funny” songs that John Darnielle sometimes wrote in the early days. There are still remnants of that old style in the modern Goats songs, notably the “I personally will stab you in the eye” line in “Foreign Object.” If you get the jokes, you enjoy them. If you don’t, then maybe a song where a numbered toad speaks to a man in a clearing just isn’t going to work for you.

Bitter Melon Farm is a compilation album which includes a lot of hard-to-find Goats songs from the first years of the band. John Darnielle says in the liner notes that he feels compelled to not re-release material because it removes the skill of finding those gems on other albums. It’s similar to a story he tells about including great songs on foreign releases, just to be devious and hide some of his best work. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but Darnielle says this song forced his hand on the re-release because the original version had bacchant spelled with one c. He couldn’t let the world think he didn’t know how to spell “bacchant,” which is a follower of Bacchus, the god of wine.

The song is genuinely funny. “Somewhere in the damn forest” is an all-time-great opening line and “fire-bellied toad number five // from what may or may not have been a limited series” is a beautifully specific absurdity. It all leads to a stanza from a folk song about playing with a friend, but the real gem is the ending. It’s a shame this doesn’t get some weird, one-off live play, because “honey it was downright creepy” deserves to be heard yelled from a stage.

077. Oceanographer’s Choice

Alex Russell Tallahassee , , , , , , , ,

Even more than “No Children,” “Oceanographer’s Choice” shows the anger inside the dying relationship of The Alpha Couple.

Track: “Oceanographer’s Choice”
Album: Tallahassee (2002)

“Oceanographer’s Choice” is the bridge between “Old College Try” and “Alpha Rats Nest” on Tallahassee. “Old College Try” represents your final attempts to find something worth loving and your inability to do so. “Alpha Rats Nest” is the euphoria you feel at the absolute end when you’ve decided that it’s over and you don’t even care to pretend to save it. There’s a big gap between those two emotions, so “Oceanographer’s Choice” has some heavy lifting to do.

It connects the other two tracks well because it shows how that one drunken night inspires you to say and feel everything you’ve never let yourself say or feel. The Alpha Couple fires a number of warning shots between each other over the album, but the explosion is in “Oceanographer’s Choice.” It’s arguably even angrier than “No Children” and that is saying a helluva lot. Lines like “I don’t mean it when I tell you // that I don’t love you anymore” are the things you say to a person that you can’t take back. This is the end of the sniping and the arguing. This is the end.

Four lines sum the whole thing up: “I don’t know why I’m so persuaded // that if I think things through  // long enough and hard enough // I’ll somehow get to you.” The narrator is finally honest with themselves and understands that they cannot save this patient. In the right mood the song can fuel a snarling disdain, but it can also inspire profound pity. John Darnielle calls it “another love song, sort of” and it’s all in that last line. The character isn’t blaming the other lover. The character understands this was their own doing: “what will I do when I don’t have you // when I finally get what I deserve?”

 

076. Hello There Howard

Alex Russell Hot Garden Stomp , , , , , ,

“Hello There Howard” finds a sneering indifference in a narrator who is endlessly throwing dice at a craps table. 

Track: “Hello There Howard”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

Someone asked John Darnielle if any songs from Hot Garden Stomp would ever be played live again. He gave a very thorough response, song by song, about all of them. He says that “Pure Milk” and the title track are the only ones he does play live, but he leaves the door open with regard to many of the others. “Hello There Howard” earns a “probably no” from the man that wrote it.

The world loves to speculate about these songs, so my job is partly done for me for all but the strangest and oldest songs in the catalog. “Hello There Howard,” as far as I can tell, has exactly no other words written about it online aside from “probably no” from John Darnielle. There is one positive YouTube comment, but that’s it. It’s just not a song that people seem interested in breaking down.

The straightforward ones can be the most difficult. The narrator is clearly at a craps table in a casino and is met by a sad character who asks the narrator to throw the dice. A craps table turns immediately on the wrong throw, but the narrator says “the table is hot // and so am I” and things are going well.

Darnielle loves placing his characters in destructive situations, and a casino is a purely destructive place. Casinos are designed to keep you in them perpetually and to keep you focused on the games. Even if you do win, the reasoning goes, eventually you will lose it all back. The narrator in “Hello There Howard” concludes that it doesn’t even matter what the result of the throw is, and in so doing finds the only way to really survive their actions. They don’t care anymore what happens, which is a very Goats-narrator move.

075. Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace

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

In “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,” two people drive through the desert in their final real moments.

Track: “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009)

Sometimes you have to listen to dozens of live performances of a song to find out how John Darnielle views it, but sometimes you just have to look at his Tumblr. He’s been very forthcoming with his reasoning for why he won’t play “Going to Georgia” anymore: it’s a song that romanticizes stalking and emotional violence towards someone you love. Recently a fan asked him why he wouldn’t play that song but would play “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,” a song about a man kidnapping and torturing another man. Darnielle says he doesn’t see the connection and that the point of “Ezekiel 7” is that it’s nakedly about a bad event. “Going to Georgia” can be interpreted as “sweet” if you have a black enough heart, and he doesn’t want anyone to get that out of it.

“Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace” closes out The Life of the World to Come on a really dark moment. The events in the song are straightforward and it ends with an eerie heartbeat, suggesting that the victim is still alive for now but won’t be for long. The background effects on the album really amplify the terrifying scene, but Darnielle’s live piano version has just as much pain. It’s not a traditional Goats song, but the message is one they preach a lot: dark behavior meets with dark ends.

The source material of Ezekiel 7 is the story of the end of the world through God’s wrath. The song is the literal end of one person, but also the figurative end of the other as they die to themselves through their choices. Like “Going to Georgia,” the main character is the one doing literal damage, but the worst violence that happens is internal.