the mountain goats

564. Hail St. Sebastian

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“Hail St. Sebastian” would be at home on an album and feels more complete than many unreleased songs.

Track: “Hail St. Sebastian”
Album: Unreleased

John Darnielle played “Hail St. Sebastian” in 2012 and told the crowd he thought he wrote it outside of a venue in Nashville at this show in 2009. I lived in Memphis at the time and had gone to Nashville for that show. To date it’s the only show I’ve seen outside of Chicago. It doesn’t mean anything or signify anything, but it’s interesting to me to learn that fact only today after having heard this one so many times over the years. I’ve always loved this one. Is that why? No, of course not, but we look for patterns where there are none.

The song is great and is in the tradition of a lot of Mountain Goats songs of the time about pushing through adversity. It feels like a lost part of Transcendental Youth in that way, though obviously it would need the full sound to really work. It’s fierce, though. I know the rule is you never say an unreleased song should have been on an album, but this one really makes that rule hard to follow.

The story of the actual saint is that Sebastian withstood being shot with arrows while tied to a tree. Over time, he’s become a figure cited in hopes of preventing plague, which would have made this one a big hit during the years of lockdown we just came out of. I’m not going to campaign for it, but I have found the sentiment of this one useful at times and I hope if you’ve never heard it that you spend a few minutes with it.

 

 

563. The Doll Song

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

“The Doll Song” is funny, but it’s reductive to lump it in and call it just a “funny song.”

Track: “The Doll Song”
Album: Unreleased

It is easy to get a little too grand when talking about the unreleased world of the Mountain Goats. You could be an enormous, committed fan of the band who goes to shows and buys merch and loves them to death and it would not be weird that you don’t know an obscure song that was played live a few times twenty five years ago. In fact, the opposite is true. Nevertheless, let’s talk about “The Doll Song.”

There are two versions you can hear online, both with a little bit of context. The one that’s been going around YouTube and was on music sharing programs before that (ask a trusted adult what those were if you were born after 1990) is from 1992 and features some form of the Bright Mountain Choir and the other one is this one, from 1998 in St. Louis. Both of them are pretty intense and the performance and the commentary drive home this is one of the “funny” songs from the early days, but it’s one of the good ones. 

I’ve always been fond of the image of this narrator telling the dolls “you have no compassion” and the central idea, that this person is taking their troubles out on dolls and not dealing with some kind of actual relationship, is a proto version of so many Mountain Goats narrator coping mechanisms. Sure, this one’s not a deep investigation of human relationships that anyone’s getting tattooed on themselves, but I think it’s legitimately funny without that being the only redeeming quality.

562. Skeleton’s Tooth

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle performed “Skeleton’s Tooth” just once, it seems, for a spooky event.

Track: “Skeleton’s Tooth”
Album: Unreleased

In October of 2018, John Darnielle curated a series of spooky stories read by some famous actors at this event in New York. At that event he played “Skeleton’s Tooth,” which was listed on the event’s description as brand-new and a special performance for the “eclectic evening.” It fits with the vibe, absolutely.

The imagery of “Skeleton’s Tooth” is what will stick with you, from dried blood on iron gates as a warning to a mouth full of bloody gums as the positive outcome if the alternative is death. It’s a song about taking the least-bad outcomes, seemingly, and about trying to make it through a world that seems to be full of foreboding and grim spectacle. I’m willing to be wrong on all of these, but especially I’m willing to be wrong on a song that was performed one time for a special event. If you hear something else, you’re probably right. For my money, though, it’s all in this part: “threats of my enemies run loose in my head // the way that lullabies do.”

561. In The Cane Fields

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The nervous moments compound by the end of “In the Cane Fields.”

Track: “In the Cane Fields”
Album: Unreleased

You have two options if you want to hear “In the Cane Fields” today. You can listen to this one, from 1992, which may very well be the oldest Mountain Goats recording available, or you can listen to the one from 2019 which includes video and the story behind the song. The older version ends with a few jokes about the song and the newer version includes a lot more detail about the original construction. I encourage you to do both because the song is very short.

Part of the fun of the unreleased stuff is it all just exists out there, usually without any context. What little we get here doesn’t really dampen that fun. The early Mountain Goats songs were poems that John Darnielle put to music and this is one of those. The first verse ends with some interesting repetition, but the real meat of this one is the tense moment this couple finds themselves in by the end. It opens with a sugary kiss and closes with a bombshell. It’s not going to be anyone’s favorite Mountain Goats song, but you can hear a lot of what came later being unpacked in this one.

560. The New Potatoes

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

Decades after what might be the only surviving version was recorded, you can still contemplate “The New Potatoes.”

Track: “The New Potatoes”
Album: Unreleased

At the risk of writing more about it than the full text of it, “The New Potatoes” is one of those live songs you can only find one version of. In this instance it’s one John Darnielle played by himself at Duke Coffeehouse at Duke University in 1997. Remarkably, 26 years later as of this writing, there’s even a scan of the poster from the show you can see here. The fact that both of these exist is a testament to the permanence of media even in an increasingly impermanent world. I truly cannot believe these are here for us all these years later.

The song itself is short, as I said before. It’s 54 words long and those words describe some potatoes being washed away by rain. Darnielle belts out his goodbyes to these potatoes in increasing severity. It’s a song about things being temporal and the change of things that accompanies that reality. The final lines are really intense, even for him, even for the time, but the real remarkable element of this is that it’s still here for you to hear long after anyone in that room might have guessed that it would be.

559. Malted Milk

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

If you were in one specific room in 1992 you’d have heard the only performance of “Malted Milk.”

Track: “Malted Milk”
Album: Unreleased

You would be forgiven for not knowing “Malted Milk.” As near as anyone outside of John Darnielle and company would have any way of knowing, it exists solely on this recording from 1992 at Munchie’s in Pomona, California. Darnielle responded to a tweet in 2013 to clarify that the backing singers are “the Dark Mountain Boys” and as far as I can find, history does not recall them. For a song like this it’s still a remarkable amount of info to have and my hat is off to the intrepid fan who asked the question.

The song itself can best be called “of the time” for 1992. Honestly, it’s a little more complete than a lot of the unreleased stuff from the era. It is, however, right on the money for the subject matter of the time. Our narrator drinks malted milk. They love malted milk. They are sick enough looking to potentially require medical attention and their love life is maybe falling apart, but, hey, malted milk. I’ve always loved the line “I guess you know what happens next.” No one could know what happens next.

558. Need More Bandages

Alex Russell Bleed Out , , , , , , ,

In a song that sounds unique for the album, “Need More Bandages” tells a familiar story.

Track: “Need More Bandages”
Album: Bleed Out (2022)

Thematically, “Need More Bandages” absolutely belongs on Bleed Out. The narrator is involved in some sort of elaborate mission that isn’t really made clear and they speak in extreme terms. There are jugs of Molotov cocktails or other improvised explosives and there are crates of what seem to be smuggled goods hidden among cheap tobacco, but we don’t really get enough to know the whole scene. We know enough, obviously, and we’re right at home among the rest of the cast on the album.

But that’s all just the theme. This one doesn’t sound like anything else on the album or much of what the band has made over the years. John Darnielle said as much in his liner notes for Apple Music and went deeper into detail but you’ll hear the basic difference right away. It’s not one I’ve found myself listening to often when I go back through the album, but I have to appreciate the extremely on-brand nature of a Mountain Goats narrator demanding that after their shovels break they will dig with their literal fingernails.

557. Make You Suffer

Alex Russell Bleed Out , , , , , , ,

The message of “Make You Suffer” is simple, but when your message is that powerful it doesn’t need to be complex.

Track: “Make You Suffer”
Album: Bleed Out (2022)

There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs that are remarkable because of, not despite, their lyrical simplicity. “No, I Can’t” is a list of mundane objects as a means of reassuring someone. One of the more quotable Goats lines is a simple near repetition: “the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you // and that you’re standing in the doorway. These are not memorable because they do something no one else could do. They are memorable because, like modern art, they cause us to look at something simple in a new way.

“Make You Suffer” is a song where someone is going to make someone else suffer. The chorus, with some minor deviations, is largely about the title. The simplicity really forces you to contend with what that means. “I’m going to make you suffer,” the narrator tells us, and by the end of the song we have to assume they mean it. The thing works here not just because of how powerful that statement is but because the song itself is beautiful. These same lyrics over mightily strung chords back in the day probably wouldn’t work.

556. First Blood

Alex Russell Bleed Out , , , , , , ,

In a song the band calls “extremely meta”, we hear about the reality of action movies in “First Blood.”

Track: “First Blood”
Album: Bleed Out (2022)

The Mountain Goats are on the record a lot. There are a few albums, Bleed Out among them, where the band has given a few quotes about every single song. For “First Blood” their liner notes are about how action movies set you up to believe in these simplistic hero stories but that ain’t how things happen. That’s right there in the text, too, as directly as “John Rambo never went to Vietnam.” John Darnielle extends his description to say this kind of thinking leads to bad actors in the judicial system. We don’t have the space to get into that, but I figure it deserves to be repeated as often as absolutely possible.

This makes “First Blood” a fascinating song to include on Bleed Out. Most of the song is about “real” figures (either people who actually existed or characters who actually exist outside of this song) but about how their exploits can’t be trusted to be the way justice actually works. The bulk of the album uses action movie tropes to stand in for other emotions or situations. The Goats want to make sure you don’t get too caught up in that, thus here you get a reminder that absolutely could not be more direct.

555. Extraction Point

Alex Russell Bleed Out , , , , , , ,

The Mountain Goats are at their fullest and their best in the after-the-fact scene “Extraction Point.”

Track: “Extraction Point”
Album: Bleed Out (2022)

In the Apple Music liner notes for Bleed Out John Darnielle called “Extraction Point” a personal favorite and says “…what I really like about it is there’s something that just finished happening and you have to put together the details of what it was. And it looks like it was pretty gnarly, but the song is pretty, it’s triumphant.” Obviously, all of that is true. It would be pretty wild of me to say it isn’t. It’s hard to build on things when the man himself is so succinct. He’s doing my job for me.

But beyond the basics, “Extraction Point” is one of those songs that really shows the evolution of the Mountain Goats. The full band here is truly in sync. If you listen for the drums specifically they’re excellent, but if you don’t you’ll still appreciate the entire rhythm section. I’m always a fan of the horns, but sometimes they come across as additional and bonus rather than necessary. Neither is a bad thing, but you really feel the length between the versus here and you get the time to contemplate that the narrator would be feeling in that moment. It’s simplistic to call a song great but I feel like this one is “complete.” The lyrics wouldn’t be totally out of place on an earlier Goats song, but the tapestry and the fullness absolutely would be, which makes this stand out.