https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQGg58ixXjE

“White Cedar” finds a narrator in a painful loop they hope to break.

Track: “White Cedar”
Album: Transcendental Youth (2012)

In 2012, Pitchfork interviewed John Darnielle about the release of Transcendental Youth. I love that they just said essentially “White Cedar is sad, what’s up with that?” He said that it’s about a narrator accepting that they are going to be in the hospital a lot and that they have to come to terms with that reality. This person probably isn’t going to be okay and they probably aren’t going to get to the day they describe in the song. His answer is really worth reading in full, but “White Cedar” goes off in a different direction.

The narrator in this song hopes for a future they likely won’t see. “My spirit sings loud and clear // even in here,” is powerful, when one considers the reality of “here.” The comment sections of Mountain Goats blogs and videos are filled with people who say they just got out of facilities that were supposed to reform or fix them and how they didn’t always work. John Darnielle asks us to ignore that part and to think about what you do when you wake up handcuffed to the bed.

“Mole” is the obvious sister song, with the same setting and a similar idea. The difference is that “White Cedar” finds a narrator really hoping this isn’t how it’s going to go. “You can’t tell me what my spirit tells me isn’t true” is a willful statement, undercut deliberately by the questioning “can you?” They don’t know, because they can’t know. There’s hope in all cases, but the gaps we fill in through the story untold in “White Cedar” makes it hard to find that hope. This is a song for when you have to look extra hard.