Month: March 2016

All Up The Seething Coast

“All Up The Seething Coast” is the empty-hearted black-hole center of We Shall All Be Healed, which is really saying something for an album about meth addiction. Darnielle never shies away from the realities of drug abuse, but the other songs on the album imbue the suffering of these characters with some sort of greater meaning, if not for all of mankind then at least for the characters themselves. The tweakers in “Qutio” and “Mole” still have dreams of better times, even if those dreams are just an empty lie. The guy in “Against Pollution” finds something life-affirming in a fatal act of self-defense, even if the weight of it is slowly crushing him. The narrator in “Home Again Garden Grove” makes scoring a fix sound like a last-ditch run behind enemy lines, one last bit of romantic flourish before he gets locked away.

Well, the narrator in “All Up The Seething Coast” has reached the point where the pretty varnish has rubbed off and all that’s left is the bleak, physical reality of addiction. To match this state of mind, Darnielle strips his writing style down to the bare bones; there’s none of the poetic language or grandiose lyricism that he normally deploys to balance out more mundane details, just the sad, daily routine of a person who has disappeared so far into their own need that they’ve ceased to exist on anything but the surface level.

He starts his day eating candy bars and drinking coffee full of milk and sugar, because that’s what his new appetites dictate and he doesn’t particularly care what his diet does to his body. His dinners are arranged by someone else (a nurse?  the staff at a halfway house?), and he just goes along with it, probably because any meal-prep beyond putting $1.25 into a vending machine is either beyond the limits of his ability or outside the realm of his interest. And it doesn’t really matter, because whatever they serve for dinner, he’ll just cover it with sugar, anyway. He’s obsessive enough that spends his days clipping pictures out of magazine at random and sticking them on his wall, but his thoughts are so unfocused has to write things down on his hands and arms or he’ll forget to do them. In only a few lines, we get a clear picture of a human life cut off from any of the things that make life worth living.

If the words themselves weren’t enough to get the point across, Darnielle doesn’t even sing the verses, choosing instead to recite them in the same detached, uncaring way that the narrator approaches his life, only breaking into a weak, half-sung melody when he reaches the chorus, where he drops the money-line:

And nothing you can say or do will stop me

And a thousand dead friends can’t stop me

And Jesus, what can you even say to that?

I don’t want to ascribe too much motive to this character, since We Shall All Be Healed is a largely autobiographical album, and this song in particular strikes me as self-lacerating enough to be based on Darnielle’s own personal experience as opposed to that of his friends. But what’s most remarkable here is the narrator’s’s awareness of his own insatiable addiction. He might not have actually decided, might not have actually sat himself down, weighed the options and made the decision that getting high was the most important thing in his life, that the only thing that could make him stop getting high is his own death – but he knows it’s true.

He reiterates in the second chorus, “The best you’ve got is powerless against me/And all your little schemes will break when they come crashing up against me,” and he tosses off, almost as an aside, “Anybody asks, you tell ‘em what you want to tell ‘em.” This is a man who cannot be reached by anyone, no matter what language of love, healing or just plain survival they speak.

“It’s a bad place I’m in” — yeah, no kidding.

Source Decay

When critics want to take their approbation to the next level, they’ll refer to a songwriter’s work as “novelistic,” or compare an album of loosely related songs to a collection of short stories, but a song like “Source Decay” does things that no piece of prose could. Outside of the most avant-garde flash-fiction, a short story could never get away with the amount of detail that Darnielle withholds here: all we get is a description of the main character’s bi-weekly ritual on an afternoon where things go slightly worse than usual. We know someone is sending him mail to a post-office box two hours from his house, but we don’t know who is sending him these post-cards or what their history is; the narrator calls the sender his “old best friend,” but considering that the two of them are now engaged in an elaborate game of one-sided emotional torture, that’s still leaving a pretty big gap.

But the missing pieces of the story aren’t much of a distraction when the narrator drops a line like, “I park in my front yard/I fall out of the car like a hostage from a plane,” or admits that the “bitter smile” that crosses his face following an emotional revelation is “not a pretty thing to see;” and then there’s the almost-but-not-quite-title-drop, “I wish the west Texas highway was a Möbius strip/I could ride it out forever.” Maybe it would be possible for a piece of short fiction to tell us this little and still function as a satisfying story, but I don’t think it could capture the elusive, heart-breaking quality of the narrative in this song.

That narrative, opaque as it is, is also complicated by the song’s place as the penultimate track of All Hail West Texas, which the album cover refers to as “fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys” – which basically means it’s a concept album in the same way as a lot of the early Mountain Goats albums, telling a series of loosely-related stories and character sketches which are only held together by a shared location. I’ve always thought it was more or less impossible to discern anything resembling a clear plotline from most of those albums, but the specificity of All Hail’s tagline makes such narrative cohesion seem almost attainable, enticing you to unravel its mysteries.

But that’s probably a waste of time and definitely not the point – if Darnielle wanted to tell us a straightforward story with a beginning, middle and ending, he would have written a book. In fact, he did! It’s called Wolf In White Van and it’s very good. But this isn’t that. This is All Hail West Texas, and like most Mountain Goats albums, the subtitle could just as easily be “Songs About People In A Tough Place Who Are Doing Their Best, Or At The Very Least Are Following The Dictates Of Their Heart In A Way That Makes Sense In The Moment.”

Quite frankly, trying to narrow that down to “who, what and where” is a waste of time.¹

1. Okay, so, the way I see it, there’s Jeff and Cyrus from “Best Ever Death Metal Band,”, that one’s a given, then there’s William Standaforth Donahue, former star running back for an unnamed high school football team. Then there’s Jenny, from “Jenny,” which also gives us the definite location of at least one house and the origin of the bike – although I have heard some people theorize that William’s “Japanese bike” from track two is the same vehicle that Jenny and the narrator are riding here, but I have my doubts about that – Jenny’s Kawasaki is “fresh out of the showroom,” after all. There is always the chance that “Jenny” takes place before “Fall Of The High School Running Back,” but that complicates our understanding of the narrative in a way that precludes further discussion.

There’s at least one doomed pair of lovers knocking around the middle of the album (not quite as nasty as the Alpha Couple, but nearly as drunk), and given how much time they spend traveling from place to place, it seems possible that Jenny and her well-documented wanderlust might make up half of that duo. But that’s a lot of misery for one couple to take, so maybe Darnielle showed a little mercy and spread it out among four people.

Then there’s the poorly-informed guy feeding mashed-up bananas to a baby in “Pink & Blue” – Darnielle himself has pointed out that this is not the proper way to feed a nine-day-old infant – and if we count the baby as one of the seven, that brings us up to a full cast. Also, the narrator and the baby are presumably living inside, so that might get us our second house, unless this is the same “ranch-style house” from earlier, but boy, it makes me sad to think that Jenny and her dude might have had a baby before she up and vanished on him.

We can track Cyrus and William through to “Color In Your Cheeks,” possibly over to “Balance” and maybe, God help us, “Pink and Blue” – then Jenny and her beau roll around through “Fault Lines” and on to “The Mess Inside,” but I’d like to posit that it’s actually Jeff struggling with his defective heart on “Riches And Wonders,” since he seems like the kind of maladjusted teen that would grow up to be a functional but fundamentally maladjusted adult—speaking of which, I’d wager that it’s either Cyrus or William drifting around Texas in between jail stints on “Jeff Davis County Blues”, since they both got totally reamed by the system and more than likely ended up living that sort of unmoored existence. And after spending all that time on “Blues in Dallas” I don’t even want to think about which one of these pour seven souls ended up carrying around that smoldering bitterness.

Finally, “Source Decay”: from the use of the phrase “old best friend,” it’s easy at first glance to pin this one on Cyrus and Jeff, but the timeline doesn’t really add up – when in 1983 did those two metal-head teenagers spend any sort of time in Bangkok? So, maybe it’s Jenny whose hopping around the world with no discernible pattern at all, while her estranged lover sorts through the wreckage of their old life. I prefer this explanation, since it clears the stage for the much more optimistic “Absolute Lithops Effect,” which hopefully shows Cyrus (or William, or hell, even Jeff) taking the first steps towards the sort of life that will bring him peace and contentment.

Weekend In Western Illinois

I don’t tend to think of early Mountain Goats as “songs” so much as poetry shouted over guitar chords. This is because I am a small-minded man and a reductive thinker, but it’s also because I forget about songs like “Weekend In Western Illinois.” John Darnielle is best known as a lyricist, but he’s also a long-time musical theater nerd who once recorded a cover of “Tomorrow” as a bonus track on the Japanese edition of Transcendental Youth and did a charming version of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” for the AV Club. Dude knows his way around a melody, is what I’m saying, and that really shows through in a low-key way on “Weekend In Western Illinois.”

It doesn’t hurt that this is one of the early-period Mountain Goats song recorded in an actual studio with other musicians. The addition of Peter Hughes on electric guitar and Bob Durkee on organ really opens up the sound of this record, giving it a sense of space and scale as the additional instruments weave in and out as the song builds toward the chorus and then towards the even bigger climax.

(By the way, isn’t it always nice to hear Peter show up on early Mountain Goats songs? I don’t really have anything intelligent to say about that, I just like picturing him in his nice suit, bopping around with his bass guitar.)

But it isn’t just the additional musicians or the subtle, vaguely country-music melody that makes this song stand out — Darnielle’s vocal performance here, which builds from a low murmur (with that wonderful little trill on “thirst in our thro-oo-ooats”) and builds to a full shout. Galesburg is just a unremarkable town near Illinois-Iowa border (birthplace of George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., inventor of the Ferris Wheel!), but the way Darnielle sings about it at the end of this song, it might as well be an mythical lost city where good and evil come to battle it out in the form of howling stray dogs.

But even before all that, before the unique musicality of this song shows through, there’s something that grabs hold of my attention and won’t let go. The first few lines of “Weekend In Western Illinois” describe a romantic relationship between two characters in well-crafted but pretty standard romantic language, until Darnielle blows it all open with the couplet, “We are for some reason all the time bleeding/We are friendless.”

I don’t want to strangle the beauty out of that lyric by putting too much attention on it, but whenever I try to think about this song, I keep circling back to it. We never find out exactly what’s up with this couple, though there is the suggestion that they’re selling all their belongings and that they might be living outside. But those two lines tell us all we need to know about the frame of mind they’ve fallen into. Plus, it’s just a wonderfully written line, with the slightly off-kilter snytax, and then there’s the way that Darnielle drops his voice and almost mumbles the word “bleeding” — fantastic.

For those keeping track at home, this is the second time in five days that I’ve had to re-evaluate my feelings about pre-Tallahassee Mountain Goats and I am already feeling the full weight of my past ignorance settling over my shoulders. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a new, more enlightened chapter in my life, where I don’t willfully ignore one-half of my favorite band’s catalogue.

Home Again Garden Grove

1. Let’s just count our blessings here: this is a deep-cut from the middle of the tracklist on the band’s most slept on album, coming right after the emotional one-two punch of “Your Belgian Things” and “Mole,” and musically it sounds like a slightly cleaner version of the character sketches Darnielle would hammer out when he would write and record a song all in the same afternoon. And yet every one of this song’s four verses are razor-sharp and beautiful. There’s the first two verses, with their description of meth-score-as-suicide-mission, ending with the couplet, “Hands in your pockets and soot on your face/The warm love of God seeping through you.” And there’s the entire last verse, “now we are practical men of the world/we tether our dreams to the turf,” I mean I could go on but really, you should just listen to the song, or just pull up the lyrics and read them yourself. There’s no damn reason why a song that sounds this tossed-off should be this perfectly composed.

2. We Shall All Be Healed is Darnielle’s first foray into autobiographical songwriting, coming one year before The Sunset Tree. It’s a fictionalized series of snapshots based on his time spent as a self-described “speed freak” living in Portland, and while I am just as unqualified to write about methamphetamine as I was to write about domestic abuse, I don’t get the same feeling of intimate betrayal that I sometimes do from The Sunset Tree.  I don’t know exactly why that is, though I suspect that I find the mindframe of a self-destructive addict more relatable than that of an abuse survivor, but I can’t really explain that either, it’s probably a subject that requires a good deal of soul-searching and self-analysis to fully uncover and you probably don’t want to hear me talk about myself that much.

3. “So, anyway our dealer is going through one of his periodic I’m-not-going-to-sell-to-you moments, which I’m just assuming means he got enough money and doesn’t need anybody hanging around his house, right now, right, so Max drives into Orange County into the housing projects where he knows who can get it, but we don’t know what to do once we get there. It’s not a thing we know. And I say we — I wasn’t with him this day — thank God, because he went and scored, and he was very excited, it worked, so he pulled over on the side of the 57 freeway in Orange County to fix and nod off, instead of, I guess his idea was fix and then get back on the freeway? But he didn’t do that ’cause he nodded out, and that’s when the California Highway Patrol came up behind him, and asked him how he was feeling with the needle of heroin on the seat, and he went to jail, and so, well, then years later I think, ‘Oh man, remember that one time Max went to Garden Grove?'” — John Darnielle, Bowery Ballroom, New York City, March 29, 2011 (source: The Annotated Mountain Goats)

4. I once heard We Shall All Be Healed described as “drug-user horror movie.” I don’t know where I heard that–or, read that, if I’m being verbally precise. I have a lot of things like this bouncing around in my head, single phrases about works of art that I read somewhere during a long day of wasted hours in front of my computer, probably an Amazon.com review or a comment on Songmeanings.net. I think I read somewhere that the Ramones were essentially just “The Beach Boys with the distortion turned up,” but I have no idea who said that, if it’s meant to be a compliment or an insult, or if it’s even a remotely intelligent thought to have about the Ramones.

Whoever made this comparison — if that person exists outside of my head — was probably influenced by the appearance of Exorcist star Linda Blair’s name on the tracklist, and also by the fact that methamphetamine abuse is fucking scary and Darnielle writes about it in a very clear, real way, not “real” in that he obsesses over the gory details, but emotionally real, so that when he sings about “shoving our heads straight into the guts of the stove,” you know damn sure he’s been there and felt the heat on his face.

If this album is anything like a horror movie, it’s because death and doom lurk around every corner, and we only know for sure that one person will survive.

5. A couple of years ago Darnielle released a demo of a song that he wrote around the same time as the songs on We Shall All Be Healed. I had always thought of it as being lighter in tone than most of the stuff on this album, but listening to it now for the first time in a while, it paints a picture just as bleak, if not actually a little bit scarier. Most of the people on We Shall All Be Healed are either in a deep state of denial about their lives, or they’ve passed through denial to acceptance, which is frightening in its own way, but “You & Me & A High Balcony” details the moments before the awful truth of the situation finally settles over two people who have been running from it for God knows how long. I wouldn’t want to be in that hotel room the next morning.

6. “Jellyfish riding the surf.” We Shall All Be Healed is about as sympathetic a portrait of meth addiction as you’re going to find, but it doesn’t let anyone off the hook, either. The characters here all know that they’re destroying themselves in pursuit of a temporary high; they’re addicts, it’s what they do. And while we’re not subjected to a finger-wagging moral about how Drugs Are Bad For You, we also aren’t given any context for WHY these people want to escape so bad they’ll risk death on a daily basis. We don’t have any reason to sympathize with them — except for the fact that they’re human beings, dangerous to anyone they touch, yes, but also caught up in a series of events they couldn’t possibly have foreseen and couldn’t have planned for even if they did.,

7. Oh man, remember that one time Max went to Garden Grove?

 

Tahitian Ambrosia Maker

So, it turns out that the Mountain Goats made music before 2002. Huh! Who would’ve guessed? I mean, I had a feeling that something was going on whenever Peter and Jon would walk offstage halfway through a concert and John would step forward with his guitar, and the gathered masses would begin shouting out what seemed like a random collection of words. “Orange Ball of Hate?” “Going to Queens?” “Family Happiness?” Madness! Surely, these were the ravings of a crowd driven to hysterics by the presence of their prophet. There could be no meaning in such words!

Look, so, the embarrassing truth is that I’m just not that into the lo-fi stuff. My encyclopedic knowledge of the Mountain Goats stretches only as far back as All Hail West Texas ; everything before that is just a daunting, tangled mess in my mind, blanketed in a thick coat of tape-recording sounds. The old EPs, the cassette-only releases, even the proper albums – it’s lot to keep straight, and oh, by the way, most of it sounds like it was recorded onto a cheap boom box, which it was.

And for what it’s worth, I don’t think the songwriting is always that good. Is that alright to say? I know there are people that love this stuff – in fact, I’ve heard that some people prefer it, which is baffling to me. I’m no stranger to nostalgia, and I can only imagine how strong your bond to a musician would feel if you discovered their work when they were releasing mail-order cassette tapes through no-name California indie labels. But do you really want to throw Hot Garden Stomp up against anything from Beat The Champ? Huh? Is that you what you want to do, imaginary person?

I’m stalling. But only because I have no idea what to say about “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker” off of the Sweden album. Several sources tell me that Sweden is a “song cycle,” but like a lot of Darnielle’s early output, it sounds to me like a bunch of songs about an unhappy couple that are basically just first drafts for Tallahassee – and yes, I know that a lot of those songs are literally about the couple from Tallahassee, I’m just making a point.

Maybe I just don’t get it. Could that be what it is? I know Darnielle wrote a lot of songs back then that were basically just a delivery system for a punch line – or as humans call them, “jokes.” This song appears to be about two people lying around in a tropical climate–possibly hung-over, though that might just be me viewing them through the prism of the Alpha Couple—when one of them produces a half-loaf of bread and the other experiences a moment of intense spiritual re-awakening. Boy, when I write it out like that, it actually sounds pretty funny. I mean, it’s no “Golden Boy,” but it’s alright.

Part of the problem here is that I learned to love the Mountain Goats through the post-Tallahassee albums, so the lyrical style of the early stuff, coupled the sonic sameness of the lo-fi recording process–it’s just not a language that I understand. While there is a lazy part of me that hopes I’ll get nothing but studio tracks on the randomizer from hereon out, I do want more opportunities to think and write about the boom box era. If so many people love it—and if it was written by the same guy who wrote “The Ballad of Bull Ramos”—it’s got to be at least pretty great.

Also: I just had an awful vision of myself looking back on this entry thirty days from now and being so embarrassed that I delete it, so embarrassed that I delete this whole website, salt the earth and put up a Google.com re-direct where my front page used to be.

Dilaudid

I feel uncomfortable listening to The Sunset Tree, so uncomfortable that I hardly ever do it.

It’s not because it’s a bad album; the writing is evocative and the musical arrangements are a giant leap forward from the previous two Mountain Goats records. And it’s not because I have some obnoxious, hipster-ish affectation about how many people love “This Year”—it’s a fantastic song, of course people love it—though I would forgive you for thinking that, I am certainly not above the occasional obnoxious affectation.

As you probably know if you’ve ever even heard of The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree is an autobiographical album based on John Darnielle’s adolescence, particularly the abuse he suffered at the hands of his step-father. It covers themes that are universal to many people’s youth—feelings of helplessness, depression, frustrated anger. But the specific trauma that Darnielle endured is baked right into the album, and you can’t engage with the songs on any level without addressing it.

Can I get real for a minute, here?

I draw a lot of emotional strength from listening to The Mountain Goats. Even though many of the characters in their songs are living under conditions I can’t imagine, the ways they cope with these conditions are intensely relatable to me. But when I listen to Sunset Tree, I feel like I’m tapping into a deep vein of something that doesn’t belong to me. Maybe it’s the knowledge that Darnielle lived through these things, these exact things—or maybe it’s the knowledge that a lot of Mountain Goats fans came to the band through this album, and this album has a powerful, powerful meaning to those people, a healing light so clear and pure that I have to shut my mouth and turn away during concerts when Darnielle sings “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod,” because I feel like my very presence might cheapen it, somehow.

What I’m trying to say here is that this album isn’t for me. It’s for all the people Darnielle addressed in his “total victory” tweets from New Year’s Eve three years ago. And that’s an amazing beautiful thing that he has given those people, a thing that belongs wholly to them.

But it’s not quite that simple, right? Because like Darnielle says in that first tweet, he tries to talk to everybody all of the time. I can’t pretend to know why another person makes the art that they make, but I do know that Darnielle didn’t just lay his pain bare on The Sunset Tree so that we could stare blankly at it — he gave us a way in.

“Dilaudid” is a highly potent derivative of morphine – exactly the kind of drug you would take if you were trying to escape an unimaginably bleak home life. Twenty minutes ago, I did not know this, and I probably would have told you that a dilaudid was a type of flower or something. While the song “Dilaudid” is based on a period of time where Darnielle was doing heavy drugs and having lots of sex—two things that were not part of my teenage routine—what it sounds like is the reckless abandon of youth, a highly relatable subject for anyone who’s ever felt the darkness of the future opening up underneath them and tried to outrun it.

The repeated refrain of “kiss me with your mouth open” is about as naked and emotional a plea as a person can make, and when you hear that stark and foreboding cello riff that runs underneath it, the song’s only piece of instrumentation, you understand the fear and lust that are driving the narrator to make that plea, and you understand why Darnielle screams the way he does at the very end.

And once you understand that, you’ve got your way in. And you’ve got a shot at glimpsing a small sliver of something you otherwise couldn’t begin to understand.

Blues In Dallas

 

I am far from where we live,

And I have not learned how to forgive

But I will wait

I will wait

I will wait

The subject of waiting comes up a lot in John Darnielle’s catalogue. Often, the characters in these songs are waiting for a moment of transformation, whether it’s the narrator of “Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod” longing for the day he can escape his abusive step-father, or the profoundly damaged narrator of “White Cedar” and his zealous belief that he might someday be free of his own mental illness. Whether or not they ever receive the blessing they’re waiting for is usually beside the point – even though the kid in “Tetrapod” leaves his dysfunctional home and outlives his abuser, while the guy in “White Cedar” is almost certainly never going to get better, they’re both drawn with the same sympathy Darnielle affords all of his creations.

That same sympathy extends to characters who are waiting for something bad – the roomful of people anxiously awaiting a potential disaster in “In The Craters On The Moon” abide diligently to a strict code of behavior, even if it doesn’t seem to be doing them any good. The guilty man hiding from his neighbors in “If You See Light” might think of himself as a monster, but he gets in a few good shots at the nosey interlopers that dare to pass judgment on him. Even the person in “Black Pear Tree,” staring up at the sky waiting for a storm that never comes, still has some faith they will emerge unscathed from whatever ambiguous darkness has gathered over their heads.

Whether they’re stuck in a holding pattern of misery or white-knuckling the last bit of hope they have left, the characters in these songs are portrayed in a noble light. Waiting becomes an almost heroic act, not because the thing they’re waiting for is morally pure or righteous, but because the act itself requires a spectacular show of human strength and will.

… and then you have the narrator of “Blues In Dallas,” a guy holding a grudge so deep in his heart he expects it to endure past the seventh trumpet of the Apocalypse, a guy with some real violent thoughts in his head and an unhealthy fixation on the place where John F. Kennedy was shot. Sung by Darnielle in a sleepy, menacing drone over a buzzing keyboard and a unceasing, tinny drum-machine, this song has none of the painful longing that marks his other songs about waiting. This one is dingy, unglamorous, unromantic; a song about waiting for a day that will never come and wouldn’t make you happy even if it did.

But there’s that tiny lilt in Darnielle’s voice at the end of the last verse when he sings “I will wait.” And then there’s that little bit of ambiguity in the narrator’s final refrain of devotion – is there a chance that he’s pledging his soul not to revenge, but to the belief that he might still learn how to forgive the person who wronged him?

Or is he just… waiting?

 

(hey everyone! i’m going to be writing about a different mountain goats song every day this month. all the songs will be picked randomly by the ‘shuffle’ function on my itunes  player – unless i get like five tracks in a row from ‘Taboo VI’, in which case i might have to take matters into my own hands. i don’t really need a theme/gimmick to spend all my time thinking about The Mountain Goats, but the ‘official’ name of this series is ‘march sadness’ because it’s march and i’m a funny guy, ha-ha ha-ha)