we shall all be healed

036. The Young Thousands

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qtad55FbUA

On an album full of the “after” of drugs, “The Young Thousands” looks at the “before” right after the point of no return.

Track: “The Young Thousands”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

“I have this sick feeling there’s something really great past the point of no return.” – the liner notes of We Shall All Be Healed

We Shall All Be Healed may be all about one thing, but it doesn’t have one just one way of talking about it. Songs like “Mole and “All Up the Seething Coast” are entirely low points. “Quito” and “Palmcorder Yajna” are less low, though in the grand scene of addiction terms like “low” really become complex.

“The Young Thousands” is without mood, because it is about inevitability. You live in a nightmarish building, haunted by your friends who are hardly your friends, and you are consumed like the others like you. You don’t feel good or bad about your choices. You don’t think of previous or post. You exist in this moment, you and the other young thousands.

Looked at specifically among the other tracks on We Shall All Be Healed, “The Young Thousands” hints hardest at some of the darker choices. “The things that you’ve got coming will do things that you’re afraid to,” John Darnielle insists, and it drives home the album’s message that it doesn’t really matter what you’re interested in doing or not doing when you’re hooked. “Mole” may be the result of decisions made in the depths of addiction, but “The Young Thousands” is the defense that those aren’t even “decisions.” When he talks about addiction and his youth, John Darnielle always speaks very sadly of some of the choices he made. The narrator in “The Young Thousands” wouldn’t even understand that that is a place you can even end up.

029. Quito

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jNUTUefHGA

“Quito” is a song about a person possessed and the power they believe they have over things out of their control.

Track: “Quito”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

We Shall All Be Healed was released in 2004, and in 2004 there existed a website that had accompanying details about the album. It’s gone now, but like all ephemera, it was fascinating. One of the great elements was the following: “You can pick your friends, that’s what people’s mothers are always telling them when they’re growing up. Listen to me: no you can’t.”

The album is about John Darnielle’s time in Portland, Oregon where he and his friends all nearly died doing meth. His dark quote from that dead website speaks of the fact that drugs force you to make friends with people you may or may not like. Nothing else matters beyond the high, and every song on the album reinforces the driving, continuous movement towards the nothingness that John sought with this band of brothers. In various interviews he’s suggested that many of his old friends didn’t deserve the fates that befell them, but it’s never about what you deserve.

Quito is the capital of Ecuador and is literally the “highest” capital city in the world, elevation-wise. The song borrows this name to talk about the process of going home after you have been changed by leaving. John’s Portland is a terrifying world, but it’s a specific one that reinforced his darkest tendencies. The third verse is especially interesting, because it’s one of the few moments on the album that John allows himself to talk about the “after” period. He sees himself getting “off the wheel” and making amends to those he’s wounded. He believes (or claims he believes) in a type of resurrection for those who died alongside him. Above all, it’s a song about the specific life John led in Portland and the power of believing you’re capable of controlling what you cannot control.

022. Mole

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW8WJrb0XmY

John Darnielle flips the perspective of a real dark moment from his life to look at one of his own lowest points in “Mole.”

Track: “Mole”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

People think it’s the frantic, screaming songs that mean the most, but John Darnielle has always said that it’s the quiet ones that matter. Songs like “Waving at You” and “Mole” speak of the darkest parts. When performing “Mole” live, John will sometimes step away from the microphone and quietly recite the song into what rapidly becomes a silent audience. It’s more like a prayer than a song.

“Mole,” like the rest of We Shall All Be Healed, is about a group of drug addicts in the Pacific Northwest. They don’t fear death at all, but they deeply fear getting caught. In “All Up the Seething Coast,” the narrator is clear that “a thousand dead friends won’t stop me” because death doesn’t matter. What matters is getting caught, because then you will have to be alive without drugs.

In “Mole” a character has his head wrapped in bandages and is handcuffed to a bed. The reality behind the song’s creation is necessary to fully understand it. John has said that he is the handcuffed man, and that’s it’s based on something that really happened to him. He woke up handcuffed to a bed and spoke to a nurse he knew, only to find that he wasn’t going to be let out this time.

“Mole” is very minimal. The strum in the background feels like an IV drip, slowly falling in behind the lyrical description of a man chained to a bed. The chorus of “I am a mole / sticking his head above the surface of the earth” reminds us that this character has had very little time to consider his situation. He’s only interested in the cycle he’s created for himself, and in this dark moment his biggest fear is that they might try to stop it.

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.”