March Sadness

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)