Month: March 2016

Jam Eater Blues

A testament to the power of a Mountain Goats live show: a song like this, which might play as a mildly amusing joke on paper becomes an almost spiritual celebration of life. The first time I ever heard this was at the Philadelphia show in April of last year, and I don’t know that I would have given this song much thought if I’d first encountered it on a record, but the energy that Darnielle puts into his live shows is something akin to a preacher at a big-tent revival, so it’s wholly appropriate that people clapped and cheered at the end of every verse of “Jam Eater Blues” like it was a call to worship.¹

I hesitate to call it the most life-affirming song that the Mountain Goats have ever recorded, though the temptation is there. But most of the music in the Mountain Goats catalogue is life-affirming, just not in the way our culture typically defines it. We usually apply the “life-affirming” label to a piece of art that celebrates the beauty of life or illustrates a redemptive arc of some sort, and much of Darnielle’s writing is lacking in the easily-quantifiable elements that would make for a good Best Picture Nominee or a selection for Oprah’s Book Club. No, the Mountain Goats are life-affirming in the most technical sense. Even their bleakest music often reminds us that yes, life can go on, not in the way you expected or wanted or even in a way you particularly like, but you can continue living if you are willing to adapt to your situation.

“Jam Eater Blues” is a little simpler than that. There are only the barest hints of darkness in the narrator’s life (“Life is too short to wait around/For you to come home tonight”), but his unabashed enthusiasm outshines them. It helps that we’re meeting this character at a point where he’s already made the decision to turn his life around, a decision at least in part inspired by a particularly delicious jar of jam.

In the context of Darnielle’s other work, it’s not hard to hear “Jam Eater Blues” as a joyous celebration of life’s smallest pleasures and the way those pleasures take on added significance when just living a mundane, average life is an accomplishment in itself. The phrase “life if too short” is so overused that it usually doesn’t even register as an actual thought to me², but when you’ve gone through the sort of pain that Darnielle’s characters endure and come out the other side, it’s not surprising that you might develop a deep, abiding love of fruit preserves. More proof that the Mountain Goats are the greatest band of all time: even their goofy songs about food have the power to change your life.

Oh, except the one about the peanuts. That one’s definitely just a joke.

 

1. Plus, he changed the lyrics in the final verse to include a reference to Newbridge, the fictional New Jersey town co-created by Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster, and it was very endearing — particularly because Wurster was not even on stage at the time.

2. I’m far from the first person to notice this, but the ‘1001 Before You Die’ series is a great example of needlessly elevating a curated list with the threat of mortality.

Enoch 18:14

“Enoch 18:14” falls within the very slim category of Mountain Goats songs inspired by video games¹. The refrain is lifted directly from a semi-obscure PlayStation 2 game called ‘Odin Sphere’, but the context of this quote (and the plot of the game itself) is a convoluted mess that has nothing to do with the song itself. In fact, despite its status as an apocryphal song from The Life Of The World To Come, “Enoch” feels more of a piece with Transcendental Youth, the band’s masterful exploration of sickness and isolation.

I saw some old friends as I came to the city gate
They asked me where I’d been of late
I hadn’t been anywhere, but what was I going to say
Two hopeful people, looking at me that way

I’m thinking specifically of “In The Shadow Of The Western Hills“, another song that didn’t quite make the album it was written for. The protagonist in that song–like most of the characters on Transcendental Youth–is doing his best to cope with an uncooperative mind. We find him at the end of his rope, desperately trying to hold himself together while looking for a way to re-enter his old life. He’s recently been hospitalized, following some sort of episode so intense that when he calls a friend and tries to apologize for something he’s done or to at least just explain himself, he’s so thoroughly alienated her that she hangs up on him mid-sentence.

The narrator in “Enoch” isn’t explicitly dealing with mental illness, but he’s carrying around some sort of heavy load. In the world of the song, it manifests as a ‘curse’, but it’s not hard to draw a line from that to any range of personal traumas. Like the guy from “Western Hills”, he’s standing at the edges of the life he used to know, but where that character was pounding on doors and being refused entry, this character is greeted by a couple of smiling old friends who want nothing more than to welcome him back into their joyous company.

But he hesitates.

We stood in the sunlight, and they asked me where I’d been
Held the gate open, and told me to come on in
I saw the damp green grass, so nice on the other side
Couldn’t explain myself to them, but I tried

It’s not a ground-breaking proclamation to say that you can never really know another person. It isn’t exactly a comforting notion, but the simple fact is that you cannot crawl inside a person’s brain and feel the same sensations they feel. This is not always a bad thing — the raw, unfiltered contents of a person’s mind don’t typically represent who they  actually are as a person. But there are times when you need to cross that barrier, which is easier said than done.

The narrator in this song is suffering under the weight of something that he knows his friends have never experienced. It’s so deep within him and so closely bound to his sense of self that he couldn’t possibly communicate the reality of it, even to the people who love him. The acceptance they offer makes him think for a moment that maybe he could explain his curse to them, and maybe it would offer some relief, but in the end, he knows it’s no use.²

The ground was dry but giving, the sky was nearly black
Saw some old friends when I looked back
Remember my old home, haven’t forgotten yet
What happens on the day when I forget?

The narrator in “Enoch” ends the song with one last look back towards the safety and comfort he’s giving up. Before turning away, he briefly wonders what will become of him when he’s forgotten his old home and his old friends, when even the illusion of support is gone from his life. But a more frightening question goes unasked: does he really have to do this? Is he really so damaged that he has no choice but to walk into the darkness? Or is he not allowing himself to be a part of something good because of a curse that might be self-imposed?

You and your brother
You both escaped the curse
You can’t comprehend what it’s like

1. The more famous entry in this category, “Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is In Another Castle,” was one of the first Mountain Goats songs I ever heard; a strange entry point, since it’s the only song in their catalogue that could have conceivably been written by Jonathan Coulton.

2. Besides, if you’re already that caught up in your own pain, the desire to share it with someone can start to feel ugly and selfish. At first you think it would be healthy, maybe that it would even be the first step on the road to healing — but after a while, it starts to feel like a manifestation of the most toxic kind of narcissism. After all, what kind of person would really want to force the fullness of their disease onto someone else, someone they love, even? And you can see how that sort of thinking can quickly send you into an even deeper spiral of self-loathing — it’s all a mess.

Alpha Double Negative: Going To Catalina

I love the Alpha Couple, I love them like they were my alcoholic best friends, two people that I’ve only ever known as a couple, who like me enough to let me drink their booze and crash on their couch when I’m visiting. I always make a point to see them when I’m in town but the idea of sticking around for more than one night makes me nervous. If I was smarter, I might have decided to spend a whole month just writing about the Alpha Couple. It would be a more cohesive project and it would be a lot easier to track any personal development along the way, but hey, there’s no use thinking about what could have been, right? It’s not like I’m operating under a totally arbitrary set of parameters that I could change any time.

I’m not alone in my love for the Alpha Couple. Even people who don’t know them by their proper name love them. If you know about the Mountain Goats, you either know “This Year” or you know “No Children,” and even if you don’t love the Mountain Goats1, you probably love “No Children,” the best darkly humorous sing-along about a hateful alcoholic couple ever recorded. And while “No Children” is arguable the climax of their story2, Darnielle tracked their downward spiral over the course of nearly a dozen songs spread out over several releases before he settled down and devoted an entire album to them on Tallahassee.

“Alpha Double Negative: Going To Catalina” takes place when the doomed lovers are still living in California. Before they try to outrun all their troubles by moving across the country, they warm up by trying to outrun all their troubles on a vacation to Catalina Island. It’s funny that this is the one place that the ‘Alpha’ series and the ‘Going to…’ series overlap, considering that the Alpha Couple live their entire lives under the belief that they can move far enough away to escape who they are, but I guess this was the first time they really gave it the old college try3. Physically speaking, that is; they’ve presumably been trying to drink themselves free of themselves for years now.

Part of me just loves the Alpha Couple for the sheer fact of their existence: a couple of recurring characters with a (somewhat) clear plot-line running through a decade’s worth of output, without all the tedious duties of continuity that plague other forms of storytelling. For the most part, each song in the “Alpha” series examines a single moment or scene from the couple’s lives—usually through an accumulation of details about their drinking habit and whatever shoddy hotel their holed up in at that point—and in doing so paints a more complete picture of their relationship than traditional narrative could. I suppose those are the benefits of a background in poetry4.

They’re perfect vehicles for Darnielle’s brand of songwriting, which so often centers on emotionally extravagant characters living at the edges of society. These two are a couple of bottom-feeders who spend their days in a perpetually heightened state of intra- and inter-personal turbulence. “Double Negative” is a quieter moment in the Grand Guignol of their relationship, but it’s still recognizably the same two characters from “No Children.”

1. And, like, what’s your deal, anyway?

2. I once heard JD describe it as “the moment when all the romance finally goes out of the alcoholic marriage.”

3. Ha!

4. It’s times like this I wonder if I have devoted my life to the wrong discipline.

Sometimes I Still Feel The Bruise

When this song came up on the randomizer this morning, I thought, “This is a cover, right? I probably shouldn’t do this one,” so I hit ‘next,’ only to find that the second song was also a cover, and when I hit ‘next’ a third time, I got “This Year,” and I was in no way emotionally prepared to write about “This Year.” So, here we are.

The obvious first step was to listen to the original version of “I Still Feel The Bruise”, as performed by Trembling Blue Stars, a British group that I have never heard of because I’ve been listening to the same five bands since I was in college. I expected that the original version would vary greatly from the cover; after all, Babylon Springs, the EP on which the Mountain Goats version of “Bruise” appears, was released between The Sunset Tree and Get Lonely, when Darnielle and co. were still working to develop the sound of the full-band Mountain Goats.¹ To put it plainly, I thought that Darnielle had taken an alt-rock tune and run it through some sort of Generic Mountain Goats Filter.

In fact, the two versions are very similar, from the low-key arrangement to the melancholic tone. The Mountain Goats version makes two notable changes: it replaces the drum machine of the original track with a live drummer and removes the synthesizer to make more room for the organ that runs under the whole song. While these changes do nudge the song away from british synth-pop and towards the realm of country-western², neither does anything to damage the quiet yearning of the original, which remains intact even though Darnielle’s voice has a piercing, direct quality that doesn’t quite match up with the dreamy murmur of Robert Wratten, singer on the original track and chief creative force of Trembling Blue Stars.³

Wratten’s lyrical style isn’t much like Darnielle’s—he’s a bit closer to the traditional heart-on-sleeve singer/songwriter type—but it’s not hard to see what drew Darnielle to this song. It’s a delicate piece of writing that clearly expresses an emotion that could sound spiteful and angry (perhaps even: bitter?) in another person’s hands. It’s a simple idea: the singer is in love with someone who doesn’t love him and probably never loved him, and he wishes he could see them again. It’s the sort of thing that sounds simple and clichéd on paper but in real life can contain a multitude of emotions so tangled that they remain indecipherable even to the person who is feeling them.

So, it’s impressive that Wratten was able to not only capture those feelings clearly, but to communicate them in a manner that is non-aggressive and highly reasonable but still deeply sad. The singer in this song is a wounded man, reaching out tentatively for comfort that he knows he’ll never get, but he’s so very polite about it, and that just makes it more painful. He might not reach the depths of self-loathing as the characters in “How To Embrace A Swamp Creature” or “New Monster Avenue,” but he’s still alienated, broken and painfully aware of his own flaws. In other words, he’s right at home on a Mountain Goats record.

 

1. A full two years before Jon Wurster joined the group! Were we ever so young?

2. By the way, the second cover that came up on the randomizer was the version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” from Taboo VI, and nothing I could write would be as entertaining as the story of how that song was recorded.

3. Also, as I mentioned earlier, Wratten is british, which explains some of the lines (“How I would hate to be a bother/The way we left it was you’d ring”) that sound a bit odd coming out of Darnielle’s mouth.

Heel Turn 2

Beat The Champ is an album about survival, endurance and legacy, and all of those threads intersect at “Heel Turn 2”. The narrator has suffered for years in the name of an ideal that has outlived its usefulness, and in order to move forward he must change in a way that will seriously complicate how people remember him. This is not a choice he makes lightly; if it’s not a matter of life and death, it certainly seems that way to him. (“I don’t want to die in here.”) His life is at stake, but not in the sense that he’s facing a literal death. He’s looking down the barrel at the rest of his life and he’s seeing nothing but a fist flying into his face over and over again. It’s not hard to see why he might want to torch a few bridges.

What complicates things is the unfortunate fact that he’s a good guy — or at least he’s played the part of a good guy for so long and so well that it’s the only way people see him He’s an “upstanding, well-loved man about town,” and the thought that he would throw all of that away is too terrible and confusing to grasp. But out of all the people watching his transformation, pearls clutched and mouths agape, none of them knows how it feels to be down there in the ring, getting the shit kicked out of you just because you decided to be a “good guy.” If you’re taking that kind of beating day in and day out, the thing you’re fighting for eventually stops looking so important. You stop seeing ‘good’ or ‘bad’, you just see winning and losing. And nobody wants to spend the rest of their life on the losing side.

For the wrestler in this song, there’s only one choice he can make. In the dual-toned morality of his world, if you’re not fighting on the side of righteousness, you’re a bad guy, a heel. All you can do is burn it all down and walk in the other direction. Come unhinged. Get revenge.

For the rest of us, things are rarely that decisive. Barring a sudden, personality-altering medical event, you’re not going to switch sides just like that. But you can still make the turn. If you’re frustrated, or you’re in love, or you’re angry, or you’re trying to avoid pain, you can take a step away from yourself. A lot of the time, it’s going to blow up in your face. You’re going to push the limits of who you are, wind up looking like an ass, and slide back into your old ways. But sometimes, that step helps. It gets you closer to what you’re looking for or further away from what you want to avoid. So you take another step, and then another. Enough steps and you can make the turn.

The really, really tough part about making the turn out here in the real world is that there’s no way of knowing if you’ve done it for the right reason. Maybe you did it to survive, or maybe you were just looking for an excuse to let off some steam. Either way, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. After all, there’s no way of knowing if you were even a good guy to begin with.

Wild Sage

John Darnielle strikes me as the kind of artist who wants his work to stand on its own, with little-to-no explanation from the creator. From the way he describes him self as a guy who “made a thing” and compares his songs to pieces of furniture, it seems pretty clear that he’d like every listener to interpret each song for themselves and take what they need from that. Unfortunately, some of us aren’t smart enough to be trusted with that sort of responsibility, which is why I’m grateful that he occasionally lays it all out for us, Death of the Author be damned.1

Case in point: for a long time, I accepted the general wisdom that Get Lonely was a “breakup album,” and because of that, I never spent much time with it. That’s a piece of furniture I don’t really need in my day-to-day life. But I always liked “Wild Sage,” and I wasn’t sure what about it resonated with me2 until I saw Darnielle perform it live, and he said something akin to this:

“I’ve been puzzled by the few things that people have had to say about this next song, so I’m just going to violate my own policy and tell you explicitly what it’s about. And I am telling the truth. Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, he lies when he describes his songs.’ That’s not true either. It may seem like a lie now, but give it a couple of years. But this is true, that the fellow who narrates this song, uh, is losing his grip on things as they are. He’s going insane, as they would put it. And so that’s why he feels like he does. He hasn’t lost anybody or anything like that. Uh, he suffers from a sort of solitude that most of us, uh, thank God, can only really imagine, uh, so, I wrote this for a lot of people that I used to work with, and whom I think of from time to time.” – 8/22/2006 – Amoeba Music, San Francisco, CA

In ten years, I have not gone through a break-up, but I have for sure felt this disconnect, the hazy state of being that Darnielle captures so beautifully in this song. I have had days–many of us have–where I could skin my hands falling to the ground and then spend the better part of an hour staring at the scrapes and laughing intermittently. “When someone asks if I’m okay/I don’t know what to say.” That just about sums it up, right?

The guy in this song is pretty much a worst-case scenario; like Darnielle says, the psychic pain he’s feeling here is at the very edge of human endurance.3 I didn’t catch this at first, but the person that picks him up has to drop him off less than a block later, presumably because our hero is too far gone to share a space that small for any length of time. But even is his situation is far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced, I can still recognize enough of my self to get what I need from this song. Honestly, I was doing that before I heard Danielle’s explanation. It’s just nice to know I’m not crazy.

 

 

1. I’m also grateful for sites like The Annotated Mountain Goats and The Mountain Goats Wiki for transcribing and archiving so much illuminating pre-song banter from live shows — where Darnielle offers explanations that, again, I would assume he prefer never left the specific room he spoke them in, but, well, you know.

2. Aside from the fact that Sarah went to college at Chapel Hill, so I’m very familiar with the North Carolina highway where the majority of “Wild Sage” takes place. This was a real novelty, having a local landmark mentioned in a piece of pop culture, at least before I moved to New York.

3. Also, he shows up again at the end of the album, and his situation has very much not improved, so if I ever write about that song, you will know that this blog has finally become the cry for help that, on some level, it has always been.

Jaipur

Hell, yes.

“Jaipur” is a monster of song. It’s the only Mountain Goats song you could use as your entrance theme at Wrestlemania.1 It’s one of the all-time great album openers, a razor-sharp statement of purpose that grabs hold of you and shakes your mind clean. It is, indisputably and unavoidably, a banger.2

Lyrically, it’s a mish-mash of Judeo-Christian references, with the narrator drawing on a hazy a mixture of the stories of Joseph and Moses to explain his own background. He re-appropriates “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to describe a car like a “jewel-encrusted chariot” with a “chrome tailpipe shining bright as spun gold.” Not until the final verse does he recite the proper lyrics of the hymn, but by that point, “carry me home” holds a much more ominous meaning. The specific meaning of the religious references aren’t super-important; they mostly work as an invocation of power. The only god here is the God of Wrath. Woe unto anyone still within the city limits of Atlanta when this man arrives.

For once, the sound quality works in favor of the story being told. The low-fi recording flattens out JD’s strained shout and spreads it across the entire song, like a sinister character lurking around the corner in a horror film who takes seven bullets to the chest and gets back up.3 The buzzing of the tape recorder underneath the guitar is more effective than any swelling of strings could be in selling this character as an agent of holy unstoppable vengeance.4

1. “Werewolf Gimmick” is the obvious runner-up here, but it’s a little on-the-nose for professional wrestling, which we all know is medium where the real art happens in moments of ambiguity and nuance.

2. Urban Dictionary refers to a “banger” as a song that “extremely tight or just unbelievably awesome.”

3. This was probably not the right time to deploy this particular reference.

4. I’m going to level with you here: I really like this song, and I have a lot more that I could say about it, but as I’m writing this Sarah and Kelsey are both sitting on the couch behind me, waiting for me to finish today’s entry so we can begin our evening of programming, and I am, you might guess, a little distracted. I’ve been hunched over my laptop for the past half-hour, trying desperately to focus my thoughts, while they have both been telling me to just type out 500 words and leave it at that, so that’s what I’m going to do. Right now, they’re talking about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which just got renewed for a second season. Didn’t I mention Crazy Ex-Girlfriend yesterday? I’m pretty sure I did. I could easily write 500 words about that right now. One issue with this project is that I deeply love most of these songs, and I feel a pressure to live up to them – an impossible feat, I know, since JD is one of the best songwriters of all time. Okay, now Sarah and Kelsey are listening to a song from this week’s episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I am beginning to suspect that they are trying to sabotage this project, which would be confusing, since the two of them are essentially responsible for me writing about music again. Well, them and Daniel Dockery. And Katie Trosan, too. Okay, Kelsey’s literally yelling at me now. “Just finish your fucking writing so we can watch The 100!” That’s a direct quote. I’ve just, I’ve got to go, I’m sorry.

Going To Bogotá

The songs in the “Going To…” series are all about more or less the same thing: the dubious belief that you can up and leave the place you’re currently in and settle in a new location where everything will be different and all of your past problems will be forgotten. Or, as JD has called it on multiple occasions, “pulling a geographical.”1 Essentially, moving to a new physical location without addressing any of the inner dysfunctions that are actually causing your unhappiness. You probably have one friend who has done it, most likely someone who has also had a really bad acid trip. The Alpha Couple does it in Tallahassee, to predictably self-destructive results. Rebecca Bunch did it in the series premiere of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Mondays at 8pm/7pm central on the CW, and now all of the American viewing public is better for it.2

Sometimes it’s clear what the people in these songs are running from (or what they think they’re running towards), but in the case of “Going To Bogotá,”3 things are a little more vague. There has been some shift in the air, maybe as mundane as a changing of the seasons, and it has stirred up a sudden revelation in the narrator (“I know what I want/And I know what we need.”) He and his companion have fled to the capitol of Columbia, where they appear to be sleeping in tent, and given the deteriorated state of the tent, one would guess they’ve been staying there for quite some time. It’s not clear how much time passes between the first and second verse, but it’s long enough that whatever faint hope in the future drove them to Bogotá has all but withered away.

The first verse is very focused on sensory details: the color and physical texture of the local fruits, the vibrant colors of the tropical climate and the colorful animals that live there. It all seems to be leading up to a glowing portrayal of Colombia, until the narrator hears a parrot singing, takes a moment to consider it, and comes to the decision that this bird is evil and that he must be stopped at any cost.4

After that, it’s no surprise that things go south5 in the second verse, but the end result of this ill-fated journey is especially pathetic, even for one of these songs. Many entries in the “Going To…” series involve a violent confrontation between two personalities, or at least a simmering dissatisfaction that threatens to boil over any second.6 But for the couple in “Bogotá,” the end comes slowly. The narrator doesn’t completely realize it’s coming until he watches a fateful sun rise in Columbia, but from the apathetic way he regards his companion in the second verse (“And if I knew how to form the words/I would ask what you’d come for”) makes it clear that he’s already lost interest in them.

It is one thing to leap into a grand gesture and have it fail spectacularly; it is another thing entirely for that gesture to pan out about as well as one could expect, only to leave you with the slow, draining realization that it was pointless from the start and fundamentally empty.

1. I know JDa did not invent this term, but I first heard it through him. I’ve also heard it referred to simply as a “pulling a geographic,” which doesn’t have quite the same pleasing shape, but is a full two-letters shorter. You’ve got to respect that razor-thin dedication to brevity.

a After enduring “Solomon Revisited,” I feel pretty comfortable referring to Darnielle as ‘JD’ from here on out.

2. This is not a joke, you should watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

3. The randomizer strikes again. After yesterday, I spent some time ruminating about eliminating the ‘random’ aspect of this project, and whether or not that would lead to an increase or decrease in the quality of the writing. I’ll spare you the full extent of my mental back-and-forth; just know I have decided to continue along the path I first set for myself, but that I still reserve the right to turn off ‘shuffle’ if I start to actively dread writing these.

4. “His little song/Is a very pretty song/But it’s something I won’t stand for” is a classic example of a character in a Mountain Goats song wildly mis-directing his emotions. These run the scale from Absurd & Funny to Horrible & Sad. This one lands more on the former side, but it’s in sight of the latter.

5. Ha!

6. It is perhaps worth mentioning here that the “Going To…” songs aren’t connected in any real way except that they existed as a means for JD to make fun of people he knew who had poor conflict-resolution skills. It’s also worth mentioning that their supposed central thesis—going to a different place to fix your problems will never work—is not even always apparent. The couple in “Going To Port Washington” sounds like they’re doing pretty well, all things considered — and whatever’s happening in “Going To Queens,” it doesn’t sound like a guy running away from his problems.

 

 

Solomon Revisited

Clearly, this entire project has been a huge mistake.

I know I usually throw in a link to the day’s song at the end of my post, but today I’m going to put it right up here, so please: listen all the way through, and imagine the disappointment I felt when this came up on my iTunes this morning.

What am I supposed do with that, huh?

Like, I know that I said I wanted the randomizer to serve me up some early stuff so that I could develop a better appreciation for it, but I am an idiot and I sometimes say things that are completely wrong. I also said that I would stop doing random songs if I got several in a row off of Taboo VI: The Homecoming, and clearly my limit was actually much lower than that.

One. It was one song.

Can you imagine a version of this write-up that doesn’t sound ridiculous? I love the Mountain Goats, but if I really sit here and try to dredge up some great, universal truth out of “Solomon Revisited,” I’ll be doing a disservice to myself and to you. I’d also be doing a disservice to John Darnielle by over-analyzing what was clearly meant to be a dumb joke song, but I don’t really care about his feelings right now because I’m so mad at this song for making me write about it.

But, y’know, we’re already here, right? I might as well take a swing at it. So: what is “Solomon Revisited?”

Simply put, it is the story of a young man who has a radio. His radio is a source of endless fascination and amusement. If you come to see him, it doesn’t matter what sort of outside stimuli you offer, be photographs, conversation or the pleasures of the flesh; he will always return to his radio. Is it a newly purchased radio? Does it hold some sort of special significance, or is it celebrated simply for operating appropriately ? Does he prefer the AM or FM stations? Does he even turn it on, or is the functionality secondary to his aesthetic appreciation of the radio? We do not know, we simply do not.

Even this early in his career, Darnielle knew the power of withholding information. No answer he could have provided would be as satisfying as the mystery at the core of this song: who is this young man, and what is his deal with this radio?

Perhaps the answer lies in the song’s title. At first glance, it seems like an oblique, almost esoteric reference to the Biblical figure of Solomon. Solomon, a just and great but ultimately fallible king, was well-known for his wisdom and judgment. He is traditionally considered the author of several Biblical books, including Proverbs and the Song of Solomon. Could it be that

 

 

Okay, I’ll level with you: I was mostly free-styling that last bit, and only as I was writing it did it dawn on me that the title of this song might be an incredibly dumb joke about the “song” of Solomon, which is admittedly unlikely but the mere possibility of it has made me so mad that I don’t want to write anymore tonight.

The Mess Inside

Top 5 Travel Destinations That Won’t Save Your Dying Love

1. Provo, Utah

Sure, a weekend in Utah won’t fix what’s wrong with you — anyone can see that, the woman at the front desk of the car service could see it in your eyes when you came in at 7am to pick up the keys before setting off on this ill-advised trip — but the rolling majesty of the American West is something everyone should see, even if they are locked in a two-person death-spiral of a relationship.

2. The Bahamas

Ask anyone who’s been there: the Bahamas is a great place to fight the creeping sense of dread that you now feel whenever you’re alone in each other’s presence. You can go dancing in one of the many local dancehalls, get a drink at a beach-side bar, or throw your money away on any number of temporal things that might trigger enough endorphins to momentarily distract you from the emptiness that you now feel where there once was warmth and affection.

3. New Orleans

Listen: you’re not gonna find what you’re looking for here. The thing you’re trying to find doesn’t exist anymore. You think you’re on a rescue mission, but you can’t rescue something that’s already dead. All you’re doing now is exhuming a corpse. You’re a grave-robber. Is that what you want? And don’t kid yourself, thinking that maybe if you dig up that corpse, maybe you can determine the cause of death so that maybe next time, maybe — no, no, no. The thing you’re looking for has been so utterly devastated that you wouldn’t recognize it if you found it, and if you did, you’d be so horrified that you’d wish yourself blind or dead. Trust me, you’re better off not knowing. If you ever find what you’re looking for, I pray God will have mercy on you.

And besides, did you know you can carry an open container of alcohol on the street in New Orleans? Woo! Grab yourself a hurricane and hit the TOWN!

4. Brooklyn

Just because you’re visiting NYC doesn’t mean you have to do it like a tourist! Hop on the subway and go on an adventure to one of the outer boroughs! In fact, get on a Brooklyn-bound 2 or 3 train and ride it out to Grand Army Plaza! When you get off, you’ll be greeted with the nauseating sight of the park bench you both sat on when your love was still young, when you were so full of love you felt your heart could barely hold it! It seems like a lifetime ago, but being here again will bring it all rushing back! And even though you know what will happen –you’ve known ever since your plane broke through the clouds and that hideous brown-and-gray skyline shot out of the ocean to taunt you — walk over to the bench and sit down! Put your arms around one another and grip tight to your heart to see if you can pull out even one bit of that love you used to feel, and as the years between now and then begin to collapse in on each other, feel the warm memories of days gone by tainted by the bitter, petty reality of your day-to-day life!

5. West Texas

Ah, there’s nothing quite like coming home after a long trip. I mean, it’s nice to get away once in a while, but you knew you had to come back here eventually, right? You knew it was always leading to this, that no matter what brief glimpses of happiness you may have caught out there, you were still circling around this moment, the moment when you step through the door and the stale air of your empty home fills your lungs and everything you had tried to escape settles in around you. You could never run from the truth, and as they step in behind you and close the door, you realize that you always knew you couldn’t run from it, and out of all the lies you’ve told, this is the one that makes you feel the most pathetic.