the mountain goats

054. Fresh Berries for You

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

 

On one of the strangest and best songs from the early years, John Darnielle invokes the Easter Bunny as a portent.

Track: “Fresh Berries for You”
Album: Chile de Árbol (1993) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

At a show in 1999 in Bloomington, Indiana, a man called out for “the Easter Bunny song.” That night in Bloomington included “Cutter,” (which is about being born in Bloomington and is introduced as such) “Letter from a Motel,” “Tampa,” “You’re in Maya,” and “Poltergeist.” It’s one of those holy grail shows you dream of when you read a set list. It’s the kind of show that doesn’t happen anymore because it couldn’t happen anymore. You can still hear “the Easter Bunny song” though, or you could if you went to the show at the Old Town School of Folk Music in 2014 in Chicago.

Sometimes it’s obvious why a song from the early days persists. “Going to Alaska” is from the very first album, but it still gets play at solo John Darnielle shows because it’s fantastic. It’s a great song, but it’s also tonally appropriate alongside the more modern Mountain Goats songs. “Fresh Berries for You” is an entirely different beast. While certainly not common now, it’s the kind of “kinda funny” song that you’d expect to have been swallowed up by history. It’s good that it hasn’t been. It may be the best song on Chile de Árbol (depending on your ability to appreciate what “Going to Malibu” is going for, but that’s a conversation for another day) and it’s one of the most interesting songs from pre-1995.

John Darnielle’s narrator is insistent that the person they’re addressing is in for a treat. “The time is coming,” they repeat, and “it’s gonna be so nice // when the Easter Bunny comes.” Exactly what that means for everyone involved is left deliberately unclear, but it’s a testament to the other narrators of Goats songs that you can’t help but wonder how bad this is going to go.

053. Hebrews 11:40

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

The song “Hebrews 11:40” contrasts with the source of its title by arguing for a more immediate reward after suffering.

Track: “Hebrews 11:40”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009)

You have to read all of Hebrews 11 to figure out what’s going on in the final verse. I’m certainly no Biblical scholar, but some of it is very straightforward. It opens with “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” and closes with 11:40. We’re talking about faith as a shield, but a shield for a life that’s coming after this one. The faithful will eventually be rewarded, the chapter says, but they will suffer in this life.

“I’m gonna get my perfect body back someday,” John Darnielle promises in “Hebrews 11:40.” The song really challenges the whole message of The Life of the World to Come fairly directly. The chapter Hebrews 11 is obviously designed to bolster the faithful with assurances that their suffering will not go unnoticed, and it serves to strengthen people who may be experiencing weakness. The song “Hebrews 11:40,” like the rest of the album, is interested in the idea, but not so much the intention of the chapter or the verse. In the Bible, the dead faithful must wait for the rest of the faithful. In the world of the Mountain Goats, sometimes you have to take things into your own hands.

The righteous dead are told to wait for their reward, but John Darnielle says that you should “make your own friends when the world’s gone cold.” The difference is that the chapter tells people that their suffering is sign of better things to come, but the song argues a more active approach. “I feel certain I am going to rise again” is a message they both share, but “Don’t wanna hurt anyone // probably gonna have to, before it’s all done” is Darnielle’s alone.

052. Damn These Vampires

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

 

The character in “Damn These Vampires” blames everyone else for their situation, but also adds to their own problems.

Track: “Damn These Vampires”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

Amazingly, vampires don’t show up very often in Mountain Goats songs. Well, literal vampires don’t, and that’s surprising because they seem like the perfect choice for most of the band’s favorite themes. Characters in Goats songs often struggle with engaging the world and they routinely either drain or are drained by the world in some way. The “God damn these vampires // for what they’ve done to me” of “Damn These Vampires” would make sense to hundreds of narrators in the catalog.

The vampires in this song aren’t literal either, of course, but like the vampires of “Alpha Rat’s Nest” who “suck the dying hours dry,” these leave bite marks. “Damn These Vampires” is part of All Eternals Deck, so it has to fit in the very loose framework of a tarot card. The vampire card is one you’re going to see at some point as a character in a Goats song, but it’s up to you to interpret if it means you’re being bitten or if you’re doing the biting. That’s true in the start, but the full circle of “vampirism” is that once you’re bitten, you start biting others.

The narrator of “Damn These Vampires” blames others for their addictions, but they’re certainly complicit in them. They continually insist that something’s been done to them, but once you have the disease it matters more about how you live with it. “Someday we’ll try to walk upright,” they tell themselves and the other vampires, and they offer the most hopeful thought of all with “someday we won’t remember this.” In the meantime, they’ll all just keep adding to their ranks as they “sleep like dead men // wake up like dead men.”

051. US Mill

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

“US Mill” features both the Mountain Goats’ obsession with location and an intriguing vagueness.

Track: “US Mill”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Location is obviously important to the Mountain Goats, but Full Force Galesburg challenges what “location” really means. “Minnesota” may or may not happen in Minnesota. “Down Here” talks about Australia, but likely not for any particular reason. For both of those, it’s more about specificity as a concept than it is the actual, specific place. The standout “Weekend in Western Illinois” and the album-closing “It’s All Here in Brownsville” both talk about border towns, and John Darnielle has said that they’re linked for that reason. The concept of living somewhere between two things and not really feeling right in either of them is instantly relatable, be it two places or two feelings.

A song like “US Mill” takes that concept even further, since it’s nothing but locations. The first four lines, “Way up north // Down the road a little // Back in New England // Right here in the middle,” are just four descriptive phrases that help you imagine a location in general, but they don’t really tell you where you are. The rest could function as a starting point for a Mountain Goats phrasebook. “Listening for the old sound” and “bright as gold” show up often enough in other songs that they feel like familiar descriptions here. There’s no crime in reusing phrases, and in fact they make what sounds like a straightforward song feel like a bigger part of the catalog.

The strumming is impossible to resist, and you’ll find yourself snapping along with it after a few listens. It’s a fitting tune for a high point. They are hopeful and they are listening, but we know from the rest of Full Force Galesburg (if these are the same people as the couple in “Minnesota” or “Chinese House Flowers” especially) that they should enjoy it while it lasts.

050. Satanic Messiah

Alex Russell Satanic Messiah , , , , , ,

“Satanic Messiah” isn’t about Obama, but the fact that anyone thinks it is prompts a larger discussion of song meanings.

Track: “Satanic Messiah”
Album: Satanic Messiah (2008)

It can seem impossible to get a straight answer for a lot of these. There are hundreds of songs, and even though John Darnielle has commented on most of them, he’s not always consistent. As all artists do, Darnielle has evolved over time and doesn’t feel the same way about some songs now. A song like “Going to Georgia” has to include both the fan obsession and the artist’s feelings to be completely understood, even though those aren’t always the same thing. It’s important to consider all sides of something, though that can get complicated.

The title track from Satanic Messiah, the four-song EP from 2008, requires an interesting inversion of that. It’s only a song about politics if you demand that it is, and Darnielle has said over and over that it’s not. He said in an interview that people are free to read his songs however they like, but that he hopes his view comes with “an extra bit of authority.” Lines like that get at the real difficulty of the process: you can’t be “right” or “wrong” if any reading is possible, can you? Fortunately, the catalog is more of a journey than a destination.

“Satanic Messiah” talks about the “pale-blue and washed out red” posters of a leader that makes the crowd feel young. That’s pretty much where the Obama comparisons stop, but that’s enough for a huge chunk of the fanbase to demand they’ve figured out the deeper meaning. From Darnielle’s lines about meaning in his work we can determine that you’re free to think that, but he’d like you to know that you’re deriving that meaning from a source that doesn’t have it. If you do want to get political, they’ve already done that.

049. Alpha Negative

Alex Russell The Hound Chronicles , , , , , , , ,

 

The Alpha Couple considers the sweetness of evil things as they contemplate their relationship in “Alpha Negative.”

Track: “Alpha Negative”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“Ah, c’mon, nobody knows that one.” – John Darnielle at a live show, about “Alpha Negative”

After a few jokes about playing a song from 1992, John Darnielle adds that it’s not like the music he plays now, and that it was written by someone with “more death in his heart” than the current frontman of The Mountain Goats. It calls to mind the intro for “Going to Georgia” where he said that it was a song written by a very different person who had the same Social Security number.

In the original recording, there’s little better than the way Darnielle nervously delivers “cool and smooth and sweet” over and over again. Every mention of “smooth” in the song has an eeriness to it, and it forces you to consider that this person was at least partially complicit in their fate. The narrator drank poison, but they liked it, to some degree. They’re less angry than they are fascinated with their own end. That’s a recurring trait in early Goats narrators, but this one is even more dramatic than the standard fare.

The Bright Mountain Choir adds some sweetness to the whole thing, and they really bring it all together. There are angrier narrators (“Baboon” and “Poltergeist” come to mind) and there are people closer to literal death (“Sax Rohmer #1”) but there is still enough in “Alpha Negative” to think about. “I loved you, and you made me drink poison” says one Alpha to the other, but we know that’s not really the whole story. At this moment, one of them feels like they have a case against the other. They’re still blaming each other, and they’ll need to get to Florida to gain some perspective.

048. Golden Boy

Alex Russell Ghana , , , , , , ,

“Golden Boy” may be a loathed request for John Darnielle, but it’s still great for what it is (and that’s all it is).

Track: “Golden Boy”
Album: Ghana (1999)

I randomized the list of songs to pick an order, but if I hadn’t done that I would have done “Golden Boy” absolutely last. It’s a really difficult song to talk about because there’s probably no good way to do it. If you want to find a bad way, you should read this brutally awkward interview MTV did with John Darnielle. The interviewer is clearly a big Goats fan, but he starts the interview by talking about “Golden Boy” and forces John Darnielle to say “I just find nothing amusing about “Golden Boy” yelling. It’s boring and awful. I might play it more if people wouldn’t routinely wreck the concert moment by yelling it. I just don’t want to feed the troll.”

“Golden Boy” originally comes from a compilation album called Object Lessons: Songs About Products that is literally what it sounds like. “Golden Boy” is about Golden Boy brand peanuts, a seemingly defunct brand of peanuts you used to be able to get in Asian grocery stores in California. It’s essentially a joke in that the message is that you must live a good life and go to the part of the afterlife where Golden Boy peanuts are available. In the context of a series of songs about products, it functions as the most extreme form of advertising possible: the endorsement of heaven.

“Golden Boy” is genuinely funny and it’s funny without being silly. That’s difficult to do, but there are very few songs like it in the catalog. Right there on Ghana with it there are a few others, “The Anglo-Saxons” and “Anti Music Song” especially, but you have to take them for what they are. Don’t yell for the funny songs at a show. Not even the best of them, about “those magnificent peanuts from Singapore.”

047. Snow Crush Killing Song

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

On an album full of tragic figures, the lovers in “Snow Crush Killing Song” fail to even share one final tender moment.

Track: “Snow Crush Killing Song”
Album: Sweden (1995)

If you were to read the lyrics to “Snow Crush Killing Song” without hearing it, you’d think that it was an entirely different sort of song. “I know you’re changing // god damn you for that” is a message that begs to be screamed in anger. The chorus of “Chinese House Flowers” is at least a cousin to those lines with its pleading “I want you the way you were,” but “Snow Crush Killing Song” is a more complex beast.

You shouldn’t start with the live recordings, but this one from 2009 gives you a taste of what it would sound like with some more fury in it. It starts with the same quiet guitar as the original, but by the time the narrator comes to terms with the fact that this is hopeless, John Darnielle cracks into a tight scream. It’s not the same foot-stomp scream that accompanies “Commandante,” but it shouldn’t be. It’s not “god damn you” because the narrator hates the person they’re with, it’s “god damn you” because the narrator doesn’t have any outs left.

The biggest difference between Sweden and most of the other Mountain Goats albums from the 90s is that the cast of Sweden doesn’t really deserve this. From the possibly innocent sacrifice of “Tollund Man” to the hopeful youths of “California Song,” these are people whose lives have been derailed by outside forces. That’s surprisingly unique among Goats characters, and though we don’t know what lit the match in “The Recognition Scene” or “Snow Crush Killing Song,” we can tell from the tone that these are sad events rather than just rewards for lives lived poorly.

046. All Up the Seething Coast

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

 

The meth addict in “All Up the Seething Coast” doesn’t resist help, but wants you to know it’ll do no good.

Track: “All Up the Seething Coast”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

On an album like We Shall All Be Healed, where every song is about meth addiction, a song like “All Up the Seething Coast” is clearly necessary. You have your “Quito” and your “Pigs That Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of” that represent the glory of getting through it all and you have your “The Young Thousands” and your “Home Again Garden Grove” that challenge that idea and suggest that you might not get through it in the first place. If those are the two options, songs like “Mole” and “All Up the Seething Coast” follow the journey across the line from A to B. “Mole” is an ending (“Against Pollution” is another, from a different perspective) but “All Up the Seething Coast” is the album’s middle.

The addict in “All Up the Seething Coast” isn’t making a judgement about addiction, they’re just laying down the facts of their life. They say “and nothing you can say or do will stop me // and a thousand dead friends can’t stop me” not to ask this other person in his life to stop, but just to express the futility of it all. Spend your energy how it works for you, Samaritan, but understand that legions have died for the cause and I’m still here in this apartment with what I need.

It’s not the kind of song that gets played live and it’s fairly clear in its message, so it doesn’t get much dissection in the normal places. The most anyone ever comments on is the “sugar” metaphor. Meth apparently totally undoes your appetite, but you still crave sweetness. They may “show up for dinner when you tell me to” but they’re going to live by their rules: lots and lots of what they need and nothing else.

045. Going to Bogota

Alex Russell Nothing for Juice , , , , , , ,

“Going to Bogota” helps connect the furious, loud parts and the (even more) furious, quiet parts of Nothing for Juice.

Track: “Going to Bogota”
Album: Nothing for Juice (1996)

After my favorite live version of “Going to Bogota,” John Darnielle tells the audience that he’s not feeling well and wants to switch to something where he doesn’t shout. Anyone can appreciate that sentiment, but it’s good that it happens after “Going to Bogota” because the final verse is some of the best reckless-abandon yelling the Mountain Goats have.

Nothing for Juice is full of contrasts. “It Froze Me” and “Waving at You” remain two of the most subdued performances in the catalog even two decades later, but “Going to Kansas” and “Full Flower” are both sonic assaults. A lot of that is the production — we’ve already talked about how “Going to Kansas” starts with a really, really long screech — but some of it is pure intensity. John Darnielle used to say that “Waving at You” was as angry a song as any he has, but true as that may be, the primal parts of us sometimes just need to yell.

“Going to Bogota” starts in familiar territory. “I know what I want // and I know what we need” is the kind of opening that you immediately understand, though your specific understanding may vary depending on your circumstances. Our characters travel through Columbia and attempt to find a happiness they’ve forgotten. These two don’t want to destroy each other as much as your traditional Goats characters, and the narrator seems to be on the brink of actually starting a dialogue. It’s the one thing no two lovers in a Goats song can do, but a tent in South America may be the closest any two of them ever get.