the mountain goats

014. Historiography

Alex Russell Bitter Melon Farm, Transmissions to Horace , , , , , , , ,

 

The narrator of “Historiography” only remembers one (or ten) things about love and wants to tell you about that one (or ten).

Track: “Historiography”
Album: Transmissions to Horace (1993) and Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

Historiography is the study of how history is written and kept, and that is a concept central to the Mountain Goats. Unreliable narrators, loners, people lost to society, and other misfits are sprinkled through the catalog, and it’s important to always consider the source when reading history, be it of great nations or of a relationship.

“Historiography” is originally from Transmissions to Horace, which may be considered the third official Goats release. It’s tough to number them — especially because Transmissions to Horace was released in its entirety, with other albums, on Bitter Melon Farm six years later — but it’s enough to say that this is one of the earliest existing songs. The title of the album suggests that John Darnielle is talking to history itself as it name drops the famous poet from the early days of the Roman Empire. This particular transmission is filled with forlorn strumming and an overall tone that makes you hear rain that isn’t really falling.

Our narrator is in love. It’s the kind of love that strikes you dumb and makes you say passionate, immediate things. They recount their own history of a beautiful moment by repeating “all I remember” about the situation. The early “you were warm // and that’s all I remember” is a sweet sentiment, but by the tenth thing that is “all I remember” it’s clear that our character is too in love to focus on the structure of how they show it. “Historiography” is aptly named, because it doesn’t so much matter what happened as it does how they record it. The narrator cares more about getting everything said than they do about wondering if each thing really is the only thing they remember. Moment to moment history is as important as that of time when you’re this in love.

013. Burned My Tongue

Alex Russell On Juhu Beach , , , , , , ,

The narrator of “Burned My Tongue” offers up a one-sided view of someone who left them alone on a beach in India.

Track: “Burned My Tongue”
Album: On Juhu Beach (2001)

The beach at Juhu is said to be beautiful, and it’s apparently the defining feature of the suburb of the most populous city in India. On Juhu Beach is also a suburb in a way, since it’s an out-of-print collection of five songs that originally came in a hand-sewn cover in 2001. The five songs of On Juhu Beach are all oddities, and at first glance the only tie that binds is the common element of repetition. Most of the songs feature extended use of the same line over and over, but none more than “Burned My Tongue.”

John Darnielle says “it burned my tongue” or “it burns my tongue” 12 times in the 22 lines of the song. It becomes haunting long after it’s already insistent. The narrator wants the audience to be totally aware of their pain, which is both physical and otherwise. They burn their tongue on a life-giving prayer, the name of a lover, a song they doesn’t want to sing alone, and the pain of being alone in Juhu, but also on grains cooked in butter. It might be too much to assume that it’s supposed to be funny that a person so tortured would accidentally mention one actual use of burning one’s tongue in the middle of so much dramatic language, but it certainly puts the character in perspective.

Not every narrator in a Mountain Goats song is in the right. Our hero here might be in Juhu alone, 30, and angry because of something they’ve done. They tell us “I gave you all I got // what more’ve I got to give” but that’s their opinion. We never hear anything distinct about the lost love beyond their impact on the narrator, and it’s worth considering how reliable they really are.

012. High Doses #2

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree , , , , , , , , , ,

 

The hero in “High Doses #2” is prepared to fight the good fight, but would much rather hear a loving voice in a tough time.

Track: “High Doses #2”
Album: Come, Come to the Sunset Tree (2005)

Come, Come to the Sunset Tree was a limited edition release during the tour for The Sunset Tree proper. It features eight of the thirteen songs from The Sunset Tree and three bonus songs, all of which have become fan favorites. Some of that is owed to the “rare” label placed on them, but there’s some logic to those songs being special. John Darnielle has said that he loves feeding the “collector” impulse and is often tempted to release his best work in ways that make it extremely difficult to find. That’s died out (sorta) with their relative success, but a lot of the most unique Mountain Goats songs of the earlier years are hidden on EPs and imports.

“High Doses #2” is one of the bonus songs, and it’s the one you hear talked about least often of the three. “The Day the Aliens Came” is the most fun you can have at the end of humanity and “Collapsing Stars” is a special kind of revenge fantasy, but “High Doses #2” gets right in the mind of the young John Darnielle in The Sunset Tree years.

The Sunset Tree is about how to respond to abuse, and “High Doses 2” is the song you scream into the mirror as a replacement for the target of your anger. Our hero is “wringing my hands // grinding my teeth” and is obsessed with violent imagery. From paper cuts to flesh wounds, our narrator has plans for the people who have wronged them. The violence is warranted, but it’s the phone call that says it all. After calling their sister and not reaching her, they lament “the points where contact fails us.” The lesson: find someone to help you through it, but be ready to fight when it’s time to fight.

011. Going to Bolivia

Alex Russell Sweden , , , , , , ,

In “Going to Bolivia” John Darnielle offers the listener one potential outcome of life without successful connections with others.

Track: “Going to Bolivia”
Album: Sweden (1995)

What meaning can you find in insanity? John Darnielle is “on the record” about a lot of his material, but he’s extremely clear about “Going to Bolivia.” In that interview from 2008, he picked “Going to Bolivia” as one of five character songs that he wanted to explain. His explanation is interesting, but it leaves more questions than it answers. He says that the protagonist of the song is “a little crazy” and that we “get the sense that he’s been isolated for a little while.” That’s what we know for sure: this is an unhinged person who is on their own, waiting for someone to return to them in Bolivia.

Beyond that, what is there in “Going to Bolivia?” Sweden is filled with isolated characters that probably shouldn’t be left on their own, and this is yet another poor soul like that. “Tollund Man” focuses on a man cast aside by his tribe, “The Recognition Scene” describes two people lost to each other, and “Prana Ferox” looks at two people who should be lost to each other. The world of Sweden is a lonely world — as contrasted with an angry or a remorseful world, like some other The Mountain Goats albums — and one wonders what John wants us to get out of this particular character. The song seems to be without implied judgment, so it’s left to the listener to invent a back story for just why this character is hearing distant carnivals and fearing the sight of the natural world. Whatever you decide made him this way, he’s a warning to other people that life can turn inwards on you very quickly, and that you need to be worried when you see animals that aren’t there.

010. Broom People

Alex Russell The Sunset Tree , , , , , , ,

“Broom People” uses specific images to talk about the general feeling of young love being the only damn thing you need.

Track: “Broom People”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

Most of The Sunset Tree is a very personal look at John Darnielle’s abusive stepfather. Songs like “Lion’s Teeth,” “Dance Music,” and “Magpie” get right at the heart of the fear and the sadness of what it’s like to be young and afraid. The album is also concerned with the entirety of sad childhood in a lot of ways, and that’s where songs like “Broom People” come in.

While “You or Your Memory” and “Pale Green Things” offer John’s stepfather a chance to be a more complicated character than the brutal villain he is through most of the album, it’s in “Broom People” that we really get to know the boy himself. His stepfather doesn’t even make an appearance. The closest the song comes to the album’s dark center is in lines where he’s suggested, like “I write down good reasons to freeze to death” or the appearance of “well meaning teachers.”

“Broom People” is about the ways we hide. He’s on the record about the song and he says it’s about a girl that he slept with three times a day when he was 14 years old. She’s not Cathy, which only matters for the narrative because it’s not the same name from “This Year.” In that fact we find a little commentary on the fleeting nature of “love” as a teenager. Everything is intense immediately, but that doesn’t cut into the reality of lines like “down in your arms // in your arms, I am a wild creature.” This is a place for John to hide from a life that he can’t find any other way to process.

All of The Sunset Tree is about making the best of bad situations, but only “Broom People” ends with — at least temporarily — a happy protagonist.

009. Home Again Garden Grove

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

In the intense “Home Again Garden Grove,” two characters with a dark past drive towards similarly dark futures.

Track: “Home Again Garden Grove”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

Every song on We Shall All Be Healed is about John Darnielle’s time in Portland and California and the meth addicts he knew while he lived there, but none of them are as intense as “Home Again Garden Grove.” Most the album tilts more towards the low-key. Songs like “All Up the Seething Coast” and “Mole” are concerned with the quiet sadness of addiction, and their tones reflect that. While “Palmcorder Yajna” and “Quito” are certainly rockers, “Home Again Garden Grove” is the Mountain Goats at their foot-stomping best.

John Darnielle once defined his early career as “one guy stomping his foot on stage for anyone who would watch,” and you can feel those early 90s shine through in the manic chords of “Home Again Garden Grove.” The song opens with preparations as John and a friend prepare to go score some heroin. The album’s cast is motivated almost solely by the acquisition of drugs, but this song is the only one entirely about the hunt itself. They wrap themselves up and avoid the police in their quest. It’s methodical and the driving beat helps it all feel inevitable and practiced.

Though the angry guitar is the best part, the second half deserves special mention. John speaks to his driver of happier (or at least other) times: “I can remember when we were in high school // our dreams were like fugitive warlords // plotting triumphant returns to the city // keeping TEC-9s under the floorboards.” The next line is just a panicked, primal”Ahh-ah!” Must of the rest of the album describes considering the duality of “getting high” and destroying yourself, in “Home Again Garden Grove” the characters know what they’re doing and just don’t care about “shoving our heads straight into the guts of the stove.”

008. Full Flower

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

Love and devotion can’t conquer addiction in the Mountain Goats’ “Full Flower.”

Track: “Full Flower”
Album: Nothing for Juice (1996)

On an album like Nothing for Juice, a lot of songs can get lost. John has said in interviews that his most brutal song (a trait many fans would ascribe to something like “No Children” or “Baboon”) is “Waving at You.” “Going to Scotland” is on many fans’ top 10 lists. It’s easy, in a quick pass through the early years of the Mountain Goats, to miss so much.

Nothing for Juice is the last album with Rachel Ware in the group. While most people would insert the divide between “early Goats” and “the new stuff” somewhere later down the line, this is as good a place as any to say the “early stuff” ends. “Going to Kansas” opens with a full five-second alarm, essentially. Songs like “Orange Ball of Pain” and “It Froze Me,” while holy to long-time fans, are tough sells to folks without deep love for John Darnielle’s craft. It’s not a starter album, and “Full Flower” is right at home on “not a starter album.”

At a running time of 2:10, it’s over quickly. You focus on the driving electric guitar in the background and the haunting, distant vocals. The guitar builds over the refrain into the loud, angry beat that covers John’s repeated “I would give anything in the world up for you // but I will not stop.”

Every single line in “Full Flower” features the word “I.” The entire song is the narrator simply stating facts. They give a benign description of their world, but the titular flower shows up in the second verse, and it’s clear that this is a person consumed. They care for the recipient of the song, but like so many characters in the world of the Mountain Goats, wanting to stop and stopping are very different beasts.

007. No Children

Alex Russell Tallahassee , , , , , , , ,

 

Both a love song and an anti-love song, “No Children” is iconic because it is “sweet in the way of rotting things.”

Track: “No Children”
Album: Tallahassee (2002)

You do not have to speculate about “No Children.” It is the most famous song in the entire Mountain Goats catalog, with the possible exception of “This Year.” It’s mostly that “No Children” mixes dark lyrics with bright melody and delivery, but it’s at least partially that you can take the song whichever way you like. The darkest among us can find some beautiful statements about intensity and dedication beyond reason in there. The average person can recognize — no matter how sweet that person is — the time in their life they could look out over everything and say “I hope it stays dark forever.”

John Darnielle wrote the song because he felt that many songs about love weren’t genuine. He’s often quoted as saying that he wanted people to have a song for that moment in their love that they would need a song like “No Children.” It’s brutal, no doubt, but it’s honest. It’s universal. It’s powerful for the refrain of “I hope you die // I hope we both die” but even though that’s what you’ll scream and pump your fist to, it’s the rest of it that sells the message. It’s the rest that complicates that cry from the center of the darkness.

The most important lyric in the song is “hand in unlovable hand.” The couple in “No Children” is The Alpha Couple, two people found in dozens of Goats songs that drive across the country to try to save their marriage in a tiny house in Florida. They drink and fight the inevitable in a crumbling house all over Tallahassee and other songs on previous albums, but “No Children” is a romantic view of their end. It gets darker — much, much darker — but in “No Children” they still feel some kind of love.

006. Cobscook Bay

Alex Russell Isopanisad Radio Hour , , , , , , ,

In “Cobscook Bay,” the narrator comes to terms with permanent loss and searches for meaning in the birth of baby cows.

Track: “Cobscook Bay”
Album: Isopanisad Radio Hour (2000)

In “Cobscook Bay” the narrator is in Maine, but their friends are in California. The first verse follows the narrator reflecting over a sunset in Cobscook Bay, a part of Maine mostly known for fishing and shipping. They remember Jill, who left though we know not to where, Gail, who fled to Dana Point in California, and a third, unnamed friend, who left with Gail. All three are gone, thus being “alone most of the time these days.” It’s a fairly blunt description of the narrator’s circumstances, though the immediate “you both committed suicide” may be a metaphor or just a dramatic way of saying what “leaving” can feel like to a friend.

If there was any doubt, it’s cleared up in the second verse. The narrator spends half the verse describing the beauty of a cow giving birth and caring for calves. It’s a gorgeous image, and it’s not the only use of cows as stand-ins for perfection in the world of John Darnielle. He doesn’t eat meat, and he waxes poetic about the animal world at live shows. Other than calling them “snow white” there is no attempted description of the cows, which suggests that John believes you’ll just take his word for it that this is a beautiful sight. It works.

The end of the song recalls the beginning, as the narrator is back at sunrise in Maine trying to consider what their friends “falling off that cliff somewhere in California” means. They may or may not be literally dead, but they are gone from their life, which is certainly its own kind of death. One last oddity: this may be the only narrator who has for sure never seen California, the holiest place in the world of the Goats. In that sense, they’re missing out twice.

005. 1 Samuel 15:23

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

 

In “1 Samuel 15:23,” a supposed crystal healer speaks of their life and the choices they’ve made.

Track: “1 Samuel 15:23”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009)

Every song on The Life of the World to Come is titled after a biblical verse, but the album is not about Christianity. John Darnielle has said that he likes the literature of the religious text, and the source material of 1 Samuel 15:23, the first track on the album, is exceptionally compelling. In the preceding verse, the prophet Samuel chastises King Saul. He tells him that obedience to the Lord is more powerful and more important than complicated religious sacrifices and burnt offerings: “To heed is better than the fat of rams.” In our title track here, he continues the condemnation and likens rebellion (to the Lord) as “like the sin of divination” and compares insubordination to idolatry.

Greater people have broken down what those two verses mean, but in the world of The Life of the World to Come, they seem to describe our narrator’s ability to heal but not to save themselves. They can heal you with crystals and they can protect you when you lack protection, but they seem unfulfilled by it. Samuel warns the king to avoid things like crystal magic, but our speaker here says it works for them. One thing to be clear about: they says it works for them. Maybe you get healed and maybe you don’t, they aren’t really clear on that. All they’re saying is that their career as a healer who is spoken of as powerful is working. There’s no commentary on if rejecting dark magic or embracing the light of the Lord is the purer (or more successful) path.

The album has lots to say about the emotions tied up in biblical language, but “1 Samuel 15:23” is about making your way through life as best you can. If all else fails, plant grapes.