THE MOUNTAIN GOATS:
A DECADE IN REVIEW
TWO LISTS by ABRAHAM "ABE" RIESMAN
This document was born out of unjustified anger. A few months ago, a prominent music-oriented website made a list of what they felt were the 500 best songs recorded and released between January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2009. "This is bunk," I said to myself, probably out loud, while alone. "John Darnielle is the best songwriter of the decade. I bet I could make a list of the top 20 Mountain Goats songs, and they'd all be better than most of the crap on this list."
The lion's share of that boast was, of course, a ridicule-worthy product of my inferiority complex about musical expertise. I apologize to any members of Radiohead or OutKast who may be reading this.
But for whatever reason, the first half of the boast weighed on me. Could I make a top 20 list for the Mountain Goats? Should I? Who would read it? Could I whittle it down to 20? Why did I pick the number 20?
I didn't answer any of those questions, but I made the list anyway.
I also threw in a bonus list at the end, ranking this decade's Mountain Goats albums.
(FYI, if you are fuzzy on who the Mountain Goats are, they're a band that's fronted by a man named John Darnielle. He writes and sings all of the songs. For a long time, he was the Mountain Goats—it was a name he used while recording songs in his spare time and occasionally playing concerts. Over the course of this decade, the entity has evolved a bit, with a full studio and touring band [who are amazing]. But for all intents and purposes, it's still mainly an extension of John Darnielle.)
Three rules under which I operated:
The lion's share of that boast was, of course, a ridicule-worthy product of my inferiority complex about musical expertise. I apologize to any members of Radiohead or OutKast who may be reading this.
But for whatever reason, the first half of the boast weighed on me. Could I make a top 20 list for the Mountain Goats? Should I? Who would read it? Could I whittle it down to 20? Why did I pick the number 20?
I didn't answer any of those questions, but I made the list anyway.
I also threw in a bonus list at the end, ranking this decade's Mountain Goats albums.
(FYI, if you are fuzzy on who the Mountain Goats are, they're a band that's fronted by a man named John Darnielle. He writes and sings all of the songs. For a long time, he was the Mountain Goats—it was a name he used while recording songs in his spare time and occasionally playing concerts. Over the course of this decade, the entity has evolved a bit, with a full studio and touring band [who are amazing]. But for all intents and purposes, it's still mainly an extension of John Darnielle.)
Three rules under which I operated:
*** I only chose songs Darnielle recorded solely under the "Mountain Goats" moniker. No Extra Glenns tracks, nothing from the split 12" with Kaki King.
***No covers. That means no renditions of "The Boys Are Back in Town" or "The Sign."
***Only finished versions. Darnielle often releases demos of his LPs, but I'm not using them here.
And just so you have a sense of the time period here, the decade started with the release of The Coroner's Gambit and concluded with the release of The Life of the World to Come. So that means no "Going to Georgia" or "Golden Boy" or any of the other hundreds of great pre-2000 songs you may or may not have in your iTunes.
Enough blabbing. The top 20 Mountain Goats songs of the decade, with accompanying explanations, in ascending order, according to me, someone who just loves the band a whole goddamn lot, but has no music criticism expertise:
(Top photo credit: flickr/sovay.sovay)
And just so you have a sense of the time period here, the decade started with the release of The Coroner's Gambit and concluded with the release of The Life of the World to Come. So that means no "Going to Georgia" or "Golden Boy" or any of the other hundreds of great pre-2000 songs you may or may not have in your iTunes.
Enough blabbing. The top 20 Mountain Goats songs of the decade, with accompanying explanations, in ascending order, according to me, someone who just loves the band a whole goddamn lot, but has no music criticism expertise:
#20: "Autoclave," Heretic Pride, 2008 (Listen / Lyrics)
All neurotics are conquistadors while they’re sleeping. The first two verses are catchy, Jon Wurster’s drums are wildly propulsive, everything’s taut and muscular, but it’s all about that third stanza. “I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human skulls / on a cliff above the ocean; howling wind and shrieking seagulls.” Even the last line, with its Cheers reference, somehow makes sense in its emotional free-association. Capturing the logic of dreams: no easy trick for a pop song.
#19: "Your Belgian Things," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
A lilting meditation on objects, absence, and witness. They say a person isn’t really dead until his mail stops arriving. Our narrator has a corollary: a toxic friendship isn’t really dead until your companion’s spoils of war are gone, leaving only stains on the carpet. Vocals are first beautifully descriptive (“mud caking on their rubber boots”), then chastising (“I guess / I guess / But Jesus, what a mess”), and finally, plain in their longing (“I wish you had a number where you are”). Peter Hughes’s bass notes twist and slide with gentle confusion.
#18: "Color in Your Cheeks," All Hail West Texas, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
It's not too common these days that you get a song narrated by a Greek Chorus— or, for that matter, a West Texan Chorus. A community sings of the times it has taken in lost travelers—be they from Taiwan or down the block. "Some were bright-eyed / some were dead on their feet.” All were embraced. And yet, John sounds vaguely — only vaguely — menacing. A DJ once did a trance remix of this song, but doesn't that just seem redundant?
#17: "Matthew 25:21," The Life of the World to Come, 2009 (Listen / Lyrics)
For a man who is, technically, a singer-songwriter, Darnielle rarely sounds like one. This one’s a rare indulgence into the kind of music your parents might listen to at a folk music concert. But it works because it captures two of the ways the human brain deals with the death of a loved one — obsession over mundane detail (“Find the Harbor Freeway / and head south / real tired / head kind of light”) and grand metaphor (“I am an airplane tumbling wing over wing / Try to listen to my instruments; they don’t say anything”). The only song that ever made me cry on a first listen. Hell, it made me cry twice, first at this beautiful image: “Between the pain and the pills trying to hold it at bay / stands a traveler going somewhere far away,” then at the devastating final lines.
#16: "See America Right," Tallahassee, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
A Via Dolorosa through the Panhandle, sung in angry block letters on a crumpled sheet of notebook paper found in a dry gutter. It hits on two common Darnielle topics: homecomings and drinking. But it doesn’t sound like any other Mountain Goats song—sonically vicious and screamed with scorn. As the title implies, our narrator is too drunk, tired, and pissed off for gray areas—things are either right or wrong, and for Chrissakes, stay the fuck out of his way. All he wants is for you to know how goddamn hard it was to get back to you, the one he loves, you goddamn piece of shit. But hey, who says furious alcoholics can’t write poetry: “Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp / and the weather’s getting warmer.”
#15: "Family Happiness," The Coroner's Gambit, 2000 (Listen / Lyrics)
Hard to remember that this one was written about a year before 9/11. How can you read lines about escaping to Canada and the repeated scream, “You can’t make me go to war” without being anachronistic? Real talk: I have no idea what the story of this song is, but that confusion seems to be written into the lyrics: “I guess I’m supposed to figure these things out / or maybe it’s supposed to be self-evident.” All that’s clear is that (a) there are lines here more chilling than most anything else Darnielle’s written (e.g. “I’ve gone feral / and I don’t speak the language anymore”) and (b) rarely has a solo acoustic guitar sounded this frightening.
#14: "Mole," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
First and foremost, notice the central guitar phrase: a tender, deceptively simple lick that tiptoes, crouches, and tiptoes again. Every time it’s overcome by John Vanderslice’s wall of pianos, it gains new urgency upon its return. The narrator came to see his pal in the ICU, like any good friend, but then the second line drops in: “They had handcuffed you to your bed.” This is not a visit between guiltless men. It’s hard to write a song that so evenly balances sympathy (“Out in the desert, we’ll have no worries”) and frustration (“I know what you want and you know what I want: / Information”). The last couplet of the third verse is no simple pun, either: intensive care is enforced wellness; living care-free is a pretty dangerous opposite.
#13: "Song for Dennis Brown," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
Perhaps the most terrifying part of death is that you never live to see whether anyone noticed that you died. We get verses about the day a famous reggae singer croaked, but the big news in Kingston was a drug bust. The narrator predicts his own nameless death will mean even less: just some guy “jumping into dumpsters." The melody and chords are as simple and compelling as a campfire sing-along. When I die, how will I go? Will it be like deaths I’ve heard about in the news or history books? Will anyone care? Will I care? The certainty about mortality in the refrains is something we all hope for, and think we have—that is, until, like Dennis Brown, our organs fail, and we’re not around to know for sure.
#12: "Broom People," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
The most prevalent motif in the Mountain Goats catalog is the act of taking inventory. Here, the list of objects and characters serves as a mnemonic device. In order to remember the ecstasy of teenage passion, John first has to recall everything he saw — both horrifying and mundane — during the daylight hours before a make-out. The garage had a 1936 Hudson. The carpet was disgusting with pet hair. “Half-eaten gallons of ice cream in the freezer!” is the cry, as though the confection was a sign of the apocalypse, because maybe it was. One girl’s body is the earthly reward at the end of each verse. When he finally reaches euphoria — “But in the long tresses of your hair / I am a babbling brook!” — John literally gains the power of two voices. All instruments telling the universal story: teenaged hell and the things we carried.
#11: "Jaipur," The Coroner's Gambit, 2000 (Listen / Lyrics)
In a haze of exhaustion and righteous determination, our narrator is returning home. He has seen things we would never believe: “I came to the gates of the fabled pink city / Hungry and tired and mad as all hell.” He is simultaneously a common man of the modern world (“I am coming to Atlanta again”) and the embodied force of Biblical (and pre-Biblical) destruction (“I am the killer dressed in pilgrim’s clothing… I am the white sky high over Tripoli / I am the land-mine hidden in the sand”). All that can save him is the sweet chariot sung of by the enslaved, be it “jewel-encrusted” or something with a “chrome tail pipe shining bright as spun gold.” All the while, three spectacularly enormous chords give the song a cinematic scope seldom heard in the sound of a lone man with a guitar. Who the hell writes songs about this stuff?
#10: "Oceanographer's Choice," Tallahassee, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
The curious opening lines are a play-within-a-play. "Well / guy in a skeleton costume / comes up to the guy in the Superman suit / runs through him with a broadsword." It’s what’s on TV when the narrator’s lover bursts in with murderous intent, but it also reminds us of the filter through which we see what happens next: Domestic violence as action movie. “Stubbed my cigarette out against the west wall / quickly lit another”—wasn’t that a stage direction in Shaft? The guitars wail, John’s voice rattles, gets lost, stands alone for half a second, and as two people finally consummate their failed marriage in an orgy of violence, there’s the question every hero asks just before he kills his supervillain: “What will I do when I don’t have you?” The coda goes on a bit too long, but then again, isn't that true of all fights?
#9: "This Year," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
Repetitive. Unsubtle. No change in dynamics. Wholly linear story. The chorus just keeps saying the thesis over and over. The best line is a crib from an old Jewish blessing. Simple to learn; even simpler to understand. Oh, wait. Whoops. I just listed all the things that make this song great. (Plus, isn’t simplicity and repetition the whole point, when you need to wake up from despair?)
#8: "Palmcorder Yajna," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
A yajna is a category of Hindu ritual, usually associated with sacrifices to the gods. Weddings are yajnas. According to our narrator, so are group drug trips. Guitar, piano, and bass charge in lockstep, and John speaks of the holy temple — a Travelodge™, of course. The meth worshippers follow the prescribed steps ("Send somebody out for soda," "Every couple minutes, someone says he can't stand it anymore") and wear the ceremonial garments ("Reflective tape on our sweatpants / big holes in our shoes"). The priest sees visions (a house full of speedfreak ghosts, a factory giving him his earthly delights). And hey, yajnas usually involve a purifying flame, so our narrator's only being reverent in the bridge: "If anybody comes into our room while we're asleep / I hope they incinerate everybody in it." Funny how rituals make pain endurable largely by inducing it regularly.
#7: "Love Love Love," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
I would add one more parable to the list given in this song. In Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker goes to Yoda because he has a recurring premonition that his wife is going to die. Speaketh Yoda: "Fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side." Anakin ignores him and does everything he can to gain power over life and death, in order to save her. And we all know how that turned out. "Now we see things as in a mirror dimly / but then we shall see each other face to face," John sings, quoting 1 Corinthians. All the men in this song met their doom trying to see the biggest Love there is: oneness with the Infinite. There is no cause more honorable, more understandable, and more dangerous than that of true Love. Kinda sucks to be human, don’t it?
#6: "Woke Up New," Get Lonely, 2006 (Listen / Lyrics)
It’s so perfectly realized that it renders the album surrounding it almost unnecessary. Very little to say about "Woke Up New" that it doesn't say for itself. But one thing must be pointed out: while being a gaspingly beautiful song about a break-up, it endures because its imagery transcends its stated topic. "And I stood there like a businessman waiting for a train / and I got ready for the future to arrive": a mantra for all seasons of change. The world is coming, always coming; the best you can do is blow your nose and stand up straight.
#5: "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
What is religion, if not a statement of certainty? There is right, and there is wrong. There is truth, and there is lies. There is good, and there is evil. And as long as you remember which is which, you will endure. The boy singing this song, feeling his stepfather's fists, knows that. "I vanish into the dark / and rise above my station." But more importantly, as long as we're talking about absolutes: "And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face / hoping you don't break my stereo / because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without / and so I think about that, and then I sorta black out." The best song John Darnielle ever wrote about faith, and that's saying something.
#4: "Against Pollution," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
In which a great storyteller wonders whether any story is ever true. “When the Last Days come / we shall see visions,” our narrator predicts. “We will recognize each other / and see ourselves for the first time / the way we really are.” Now that’s scary. What if we’re just a pile of vulgar synapses? “Apocalypse” is just Greek for “lifting the veil,” after all. What if the narrator’s windows keep rusting for dull, moisture-based reasons? What if the most adrenaline-pumping moment of his life, when he pulled the trigger on a guy in a liquor-store robbery, was just boring old instinct? Not much of a tall tale, if that’s the “truth” of the matter. The only way to stay sane is to string it all together with mystery, destiny, and other things that probably don’t exist. Isn’t that the reason people write songs? Or listen to them?
#3: "The Mess Inside," All Hail West Texas, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
In July of 2005, I fell in love on a long plane ride. While she was asleep, I tried to write out what I was feeling in the pages of my diary. I scribbled a phrase from this song, because it fit perfectly: “When I felt such love for you I thought my heart was gonna pop.” Of course, this is a song of utter misery and love that ran dry a long time ago, but you can’t lose something you never had. Our narrator beats out painfully straightforward chords and speaks with the grave plainness of a scientist who has proven mankind’s imminent destruction: “Tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things / Most of the time I guess I felt alright.” But the worst part is that the opposite of love’s fullness isn’t emptiness. It’s debris.
#2: "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," All Hail West Texas, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
By saying anything, I'm insulting the song. I'm pretty sure the point is to make sure nothing gets in the way of Cyrus and Jeff having their story heard.
#1: "No Children," Tallahassee, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
“The thing about me is, I’m not even in the slightest bit afraid of dying,” John Darnielle told the audience at a Manhattan concert this past December. “What I’m afraid of is living with infirmity for ever and ever and ever.” That’s the key to “No Children,” a 2-minute, 46-second waltz that has arguably become the Mountain Goats’ signature song. Is it any coincidence that John traditionally changes the last line whenever he leads it as a live sing-along? “I hope we both die” becomes “I hope we all die.” It’s the secret of this song. It’s the secret of what makes John Darnielle different from all the other guys with guitars. Some problems can’t be solved. Some marriages will never stop disintegrating. Some pains end only with death. But here, too, is beauty! This is not a song of suicide. There’s a reason the sentences all begin with “I hope.” There are things we can only do in living despair; visions we can only see in total darkness; songs we can only write by examining what we’re most afraid of. “You are coming down with me / hand in unlovable hand.” You are never alone.
Honorable Mentions (aka Great Songs That I Feel Really Guilty For Leaving Off This List And Also You Probably Think They Should Have Been On There So I'm Sorry For That Too): “Jenny,” “Fault Lines,” “Source Decay,” “Home Again Garden Grove,” “New Monster Avenue,” “Sax Rohmer #1,” "Michael Myers Resplendent," “Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” “Genesis 30:3,” “Psalms 40:2,” “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,” “Pale Green Things,” “Tallahassee,” “International Small Arms Traffic Blues,” “Alpha Rats Nest,” “Game Shows Touch Our Lives,” “The Young Thousands,” “Quito,” “Cotton,” “Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into the Water, Triumph of,” “Ox Baker Triumphant,” “Shadow Song”
BONUS LIST: THE 8 MOUNTAIN GOATS ALBUMS OF THIS DECADE, RANKED BY ME:
#8: Get Lonely, 2006
Underrated, but still the least-best. Maybe you can only really understand it if you’ve had your heart shattered as hard as the protagonist had his shattered. If that’s true, then thank God I can’t get into this album just yet.
#7: The Coroner's Gambit, 2000
The last of the original Mountain Goats breed. Songs in exotic locales, no unifying thread, occasional tracks that are non-metaphorical examinations of stuff like onions, and so on. A bunch of standout tracks, and still more creative than most things people record, but it’s dwarfed by what came after.
#6: Heretic Pride, 2008
Probably the most conventional album Darnielle has made, and that’s not an insult. Plus, the production has never been better. A collection of wonderful little pop songs. And yet, it doesn’t age into a fine wine; it’s more like some comfort food you keep refrigerated and dip into now and then.
#5: The Life of the World to Come, 2009
I’m probably being unfair to this one, what with it being so recent and all. Such is the curse of retrospective lists. The evil twin of Heretic Pride, in a way, what with its vignettes about faith, devotion, and rare creatures—except this one’s scary and sparse. The main thing keeping it out of the top tier is that it mostly covers thematic ground better explored in Darnielle’s other LPs. Nevertheless, a damn fine album.
#4: All Hail West Texas, 2002
The top 4 are essentially tied, so I don’t really have anything bad to say about any of them. This record has the best of both Darnielle worlds: his old-school, lo-fi, lyrically experimental obscurantism of the 1990s stirred in with the maturing pop songcraft that came to define his work in the 2000s. His best album, if it weren’t for the other ones that are his best albums.
#3: We Shall All Be Healed, 2004
A profound LP with an unusual perspective: that of a man who is equal parts condescending and worshipful toward the awful times and hard-up people he saw. If it ultimately fails to tell a coherent narrative, well, maybe that’s the point, what with all the meth. Don’t let the title of the last song fool you: nobody wins in this one.
#2: The Sunset Tree, 2005
Plays like a greatest-hits record. With the exception of a few duds (“Magpie,” “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones,” “Lion’s Teeth”), every song has the weight and force of an epic. Because, well, that’s what the album is. One man’s childhood and adolescence writ large, as though he were Aeneas. Dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams. The only reason the last track didn’t make my top 20 list is that its devastating power can only be realized as an epilogue. The dedication in the liner notes says it all: “You are going to make it out of there alive. You will live to tell your story. Never lose hope.”
#1: Tallahassee, 2002
Greater than the sum of its parts, intricately conceived, endlessly open to autopsies, never indulgent, and hell, you can even dance to a bunch of the tracks. A great novel in album format, but it grips you like a potboiler. Plus, it’s the best kind of farewell: the central couple had been the stars of dozens of his previous songs, but he doesn’t kill them off. The final track is like the end of The House at Pooh Corner: even if you never see these guys again, you can rest assured that they’re out there somewhere, causing all hell to break loose. When you make characters with that kind of life, you’ve made something wonderful.
All neurotics are conquistadors while they’re sleeping. The first two verses are catchy, Jon Wurster’s drums are wildly propulsive, everything’s taut and muscular, but it’s all about that third stanza. “I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human skulls / on a cliff above the ocean; howling wind and shrieking seagulls.” Even the last line, with its Cheers reference, somehow makes sense in its emotional free-association. Capturing the logic of dreams: no easy trick for a pop song.
#19: "Your Belgian Things," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
A lilting meditation on objects, absence, and witness. They say a person isn’t really dead until his mail stops arriving. Our narrator has a corollary: a toxic friendship isn’t really dead until your companion’s spoils of war are gone, leaving only stains on the carpet. Vocals are first beautifully descriptive (“mud caking on their rubber boots”), then chastising (“I guess / I guess / But Jesus, what a mess”), and finally, plain in their longing (“I wish you had a number where you are”). Peter Hughes’s bass notes twist and slide with gentle confusion.
#18: "Color in Your Cheeks," All Hail West Texas, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
It's not too common these days that you get a song narrated by a Greek Chorus— or, for that matter, a West Texan Chorus. A community sings of the times it has taken in lost travelers—be they from Taiwan or down the block. "Some were bright-eyed / some were dead on their feet.” All were embraced. And yet, John sounds vaguely — only vaguely — menacing. A DJ once did a trance remix of this song, but doesn't that just seem redundant?
#17: "Matthew 25:21," The Life of the World to Come, 2009 (Listen / Lyrics)
For a man who is, technically, a singer-songwriter, Darnielle rarely sounds like one. This one’s a rare indulgence into the kind of music your parents might listen to at a folk music concert. But it works because it captures two of the ways the human brain deals with the death of a loved one — obsession over mundane detail (“Find the Harbor Freeway / and head south / real tired / head kind of light”) and grand metaphor (“I am an airplane tumbling wing over wing / Try to listen to my instruments; they don’t say anything”). The only song that ever made me cry on a first listen. Hell, it made me cry twice, first at this beautiful image: “Between the pain and the pills trying to hold it at bay / stands a traveler going somewhere far away,” then at the devastating final lines.
#16: "See America Right," Tallahassee, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
A Via Dolorosa through the Panhandle, sung in angry block letters on a crumpled sheet of notebook paper found in a dry gutter. It hits on two common Darnielle topics: homecomings and drinking. But it doesn’t sound like any other Mountain Goats song—sonically vicious and screamed with scorn. As the title implies, our narrator is too drunk, tired, and pissed off for gray areas—things are either right or wrong, and for Chrissakes, stay the fuck out of his way. All he wants is for you to know how goddamn hard it was to get back to you, the one he loves, you goddamn piece of shit. But hey, who says furious alcoholics can’t write poetry: “Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp / and the weather’s getting warmer.”
#15: "Family Happiness," The Coroner's Gambit, 2000 (Listen / Lyrics)
Hard to remember that this one was written about a year before 9/11. How can you read lines about escaping to Canada and the repeated scream, “You can’t make me go to war” without being anachronistic? Real talk: I have no idea what the story of this song is, but that confusion seems to be written into the lyrics: “I guess I’m supposed to figure these things out / or maybe it’s supposed to be self-evident.” All that’s clear is that (a) there are lines here more chilling than most anything else Darnielle’s written (e.g. “I’ve gone feral / and I don’t speak the language anymore”) and (b) rarely has a solo acoustic guitar sounded this frightening.
#14: "Mole," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
First and foremost, notice the central guitar phrase: a tender, deceptively simple lick that tiptoes, crouches, and tiptoes again. Every time it’s overcome by John Vanderslice’s wall of pianos, it gains new urgency upon its return. The narrator came to see his pal in the ICU, like any good friend, but then the second line drops in: “They had handcuffed you to your bed.” This is not a visit between guiltless men. It’s hard to write a song that so evenly balances sympathy (“Out in the desert, we’ll have no worries”) and frustration (“I know what you want and you know what I want: / Information”). The last couplet of the third verse is no simple pun, either: intensive care is enforced wellness; living care-free is a pretty dangerous opposite.
#13: "Song for Dennis Brown," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
Perhaps the most terrifying part of death is that you never live to see whether anyone noticed that you died. We get verses about the day a famous reggae singer croaked, but the big news in Kingston was a drug bust. The narrator predicts his own nameless death will mean even less: just some guy “jumping into dumpsters." The melody and chords are as simple and compelling as a campfire sing-along. When I die, how will I go? Will it be like deaths I’ve heard about in the news or history books? Will anyone care? Will I care? The certainty about mortality in the refrains is something we all hope for, and think we have—that is, until, like Dennis Brown, our organs fail, and we’re not around to know for sure.
#12: "Broom People," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
The most prevalent motif in the Mountain Goats catalog is the act of taking inventory. Here, the list of objects and characters serves as a mnemonic device. In order to remember the ecstasy of teenage passion, John first has to recall everything he saw — both horrifying and mundane — during the daylight hours before a make-out. The garage had a 1936 Hudson. The carpet was disgusting with pet hair. “Half-eaten gallons of ice cream in the freezer!” is the cry, as though the confection was a sign of the apocalypse, because maybe it was. One girl’s body is the earthly reward at the end of each verse. When he finally reaches euphoria — “But in the long tresses of your hair / I am a babbling brook!” — John literally gains the power of two voices. All instruments telling the universal story: teenaged hell and the things we carried.
#11: "Jaipur," The Coroner's Gambit, 2000 (Listen / Lyrics)
In a haze of exhaustion and righteous determination, our narrator is returning home. He has seen things we would never believe: “I came to the gates of the fabled pink city / Hungry and tired and mad as all hell.” He is simultaneously a common man of the modern world (“I am coming to Atlanta again”) and the embodied force of Biblical (and pre-Biblical) destruction (“I am the killer dressed in pilgrim’s clothing… I am the white sky high over Tripoli / I am the land-mine hidden in the sand”). All that can save him is the sweet chariot sung of by the enslaved, be it “jewel-encrusted” or something with a “chrome tail pipe shining bright as spun gold.” All the while, three spectacularly enormous chords give the song a cinematic scope seldom heard in the sound of a lone man with a guitar. Who the hell writes songs about this stuff?
#10: "Oceanographer's Choice," Tallahassee, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
The curious opening lines are a play-within-a-play. "Well / guy in a skeleton costume / comes up to the guy in the Superman suit / runs through him with a broadsword." It’s what’s on TV when the narrator’s lover bursts in with murderous intent, but it also reminds us of the filter through which we see what happens next: Domestic violence as action movie. “Stubbed my cigarette out against the west wall / quickly lit another”—wasn’t that a stage direction in Shaft? The guitars wail, John’s voice rattles, gets lost, stands alone for half a second, and as two people finally consummate their failed marriage in an orgy of violence, there’s the question every hero asks just before he kills his supervillain: “What will I do when I don’t have you?” The coda goes on a bit too long, but then again, isn't that true of all fights?
#9: "This Year," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
Repetitive. Unsubtle. No change in dynamics. Wholly linear story. The chorus just keeps saying the thesis over and over. The best line is a crib from an old Jewish blessing. Simple to learn; even simpler to understand. Oh, wait. Whoops. I just listed all the things that make this song great. (Plus, isn’t simplicity and repetition the whole point, when you need to wake up from despair?)
#8: "Palmcorder Yajna," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
A yajna is a category of Hindu ritual, usually associated with sacrifices to the gods. Weddings are yajnas. According to our narrator, so are group drug trips. Guitar, piano, and bass charge in lockstep, and John speaks of the holy temple — a Travelodge™, of course. The meth worshippers follow the prescribed steps ("Send somebody out for soda," "Every couple minutes, someone says he can't stand it anymore") and wear the ceremonial garments ("Reflective tape on our sweatpants / big holes in our shoes"). The priest sees visions (a house full of speedfreak ghosts, a factory giving him his earthly delights). And hey, yajnas usually involve a purifying flame, so our narrator's only being reverent in the bridge: "If anybody comes into our room while we're asleep / I hope they incinerate everybody in it." Funny how rituals make pain endurable largely by inducing it regularly.
#7: "Love Love Love," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
I would add one more parable to the list given in this song. In Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker goes to Yoda because he has a recurring premonition that his wife is going to die. Speaketh Yoda: "Fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side." Anakin ignores him and does everything he can to gain power over life and death, in order to save her. And we all know how that turned out. "Now we see things as in a mirror dimly / but then we shall see each other face to face," John sings, quoting 1 Corinthians. All the men in this song met their doom trying to see the biggest Love there is: oneness with the Infinite. There is no cause more honorable, more understandable, and more dangerous than that of true Love. Kinda sucks to be human, don’t it?
#6: "Woke Up New," Get Lonely, 2006 (Listen / Lyrics)
It’s so perfectly realized that it renders the album surrounding it almost unnecessary. Very little to say about "Woke Up New" that it doesn't say for itself. But one thing must be pointed out: while being a gaspingly beautiful song about a break-up, it endures because its imagery transcends its stated topic. "And I stood there like a businessman waiting for a train / and I got ready for the future to arrive": a mantra for all seasons of change. The world is coming, always coming; the best you can do is blow your nose and stand up straight.
#5: "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
What is religion, if not a statement of certainty? There is right, and there is wrong. There is truth, and there is lies. There is good, and there is evil. And as long as you remember which is which, you will endure. The boy singing this song, feeling his stepfather's fists, knows that. "I vanish into the dark / and rise above my station." But more importantly, as long as we're talking about absolutes: "And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face / hoping you don't break my stereo / because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without / and so I think about that, and then I sorta black out." The best song John Darnielle ever wrote about faith, and that's saying something.
#4: "Against Pollution," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
In which a great storyteller wonders whether any story is ever true. “When the Last Days come / we shall see visions,” our narrator predicts. “We will recognize each other / and see ourselves for the first time / the way we really are.” Now that’s scary. What if we’re just a pile of vulgar synapses? “Apocalypse” is just Greek for “lifting the veil,” after all. What if the narrator’s windows keep rusting for dull, moisture-based reasons? What if the most adrenaline-pumping moment of his life, when he pulled the trigger on a guy in a liquor-store robbery, was just boring old instinct? Not much of a tall tale, if that’s the “truth” of the matter. The only way to stay sane is to string it all together with mystery, destiny, and other things that probably don’t exist. Isn’t that the reason people write songs? Or listen to them?
#3: "The Mess Inside," All Hail West Texas, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
In July of 2005, I fell in love on a long plane ride. While she was asleep, I tried to write out what I was feeling in the pages of my diary. I scribbled a phrase from this song, because it fit perfectly: “When I felt such love for you I thought my heart was gonna pop.” Of course, this is a song of utter misery and love that ran dry a long time ago, but you can’t lose something you never had. Our narrator beats out painfully straightforward chords and speaks with the grave plainness of a scientist who has proven mankind’s imminent destruction: “Tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things / Most of the time I guess I felt alright.” But the worst part is that the opposite of love’s fullness isn’t emptiness. It’s debris.
#2: "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," All Hail West Texas, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
By saying anything, I'm insulting the song. I'm pretty sure the point is to make sure nothing gets in the way of Cyrus and Jeff having their story heard.
#1: "No Children," Tallahassee, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
“The thing about me is, I’m not even in the slightest bit afraid of dying,” John Darnielle told the audience at a Manhattan concert this past December. “What I’m afraid of is living with infirmity for ever and ever and ever.” That’s the key to “No Children,” a 2-minute, 46-second waltz that has arguably become the Mountain Goats’ signature song. Is it any coincidence that John traditionally changes the last line whenever he leads it as a live sing-along? “I hope we both die” becomes “I hope we all die.” It’s the secret of this song. It’s the secret of what makes John Darnielle different from all the other guys with guitars. Some problems can’t be solved. Some marriages will never stop disintegrating. Some pains end only with death. But here, too, is beauty! This is not a song of suicide. There’s a reason the sentences all begin with “I hope.” There are things we can only do in living despair; visions we can only see in total darkness; songs we can only write by examining what we’re most afraid of. “You are coming down with me / hand in unlovable hand.” You are never alone.
Honorable Mentions (aka Great Songs That I Feel Really Guilty For Leaving Off This List And Also You Probably Think They Should Have Been On There So I'm Sorry For That Too): “Jenny,” “Fault Lines,” “Source Decay,” “Home Again Garden Grove,” “New Monster Avenue,” “Sax Rohmer #1,” "Michael Myers Resplendent," “Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” “Genesis 30:3,” “Psalms 40:2,” “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,” “Pale Green Things,” “Tallahassee,” “International Small Arms Traffic Blues,” “Alpha Rats Nest,” “Game Shows Touch Our Lives,” “The Young Thousands,” “Quito,” “Cotton,” “Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into the Water, Triumph of,” “Ox Baker Triumphant,” “Shadow Song”
BONUS LIST: THE 8 MOUNTAIN GOATS ALBUMS OF THIS DECADE, RANKED BY ME:
#8: Get Lonely, 2006
Underrated, but still the least-best. Maybe you can only really understand it if you’ve had your heart shattered as hard as the protagonist had his shattered. If that’s true, then thank God I can’t get into this album just yet.
#7: The Coroner's Gambit, 2000
The last of the original Mountain Goats breed. Songs in exotic locales, no unifying thread, occasional tracks that are non-metaphorical examinations of stuff like onions, and so on. A bunch of standout tracks, and still more creative than most things people record, but it’s dwarfed by what came after.
#6: Heretic Pride, 2008
Probably the most conventional album Darnielle has made, and that’s not an insult. Plus, the production has never been better. A collection of wonderful little pop songs. And yet, it doesn’t age into a fine wine; it’s more like some comfort food you keep refrigerated and dip into now and then.
#5: The Life of the World to Come, 2009
I’m probably being unfair to this one, what with it being so recent and all. Such is the curse of retrospective lists. The evil twin of Heretic Pride, in a way, what with its vignettes about faith, devotion, and rare creatures—except this one’s scary and sparse. The main thing keeping it out of the top tier is that it mostly covers thematic ground better explored in Darnielle’s other LPs. Nevertheless, a damn fine album.
#4: All Hail West Texas, 2002
The top 4 are essentially tied, so I don’t really have anything bad to say about any of them. This record has the best of both Darnielle worlds: his old-school, lo-fi, lyrically experimental obscurantism of the 1990s stirred in with the maturing pop songcraft that came to define his work in the 2000s. His best album, if it weren’t for the other ones that are his best albums.
#3: We Shall All Be Healed, 2004
A profound LP with an unusual perspective: that of a man who is equal parts condescending and worshipful toward the awful times and hard-up people he saw. If it ultimately fails to tell a coherent narrative, well, maybe that’s the point, what with all the meth. Don’t let the title of the last song fool you: nobody wins in this one.
#2: The Sunset Tree, 2005
Plays like a greatest-hits record. With the exception of a few duds (“Magpie,” “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones,” “Lion’s Teeth”), every song has the weight and force of an epic. Because, well, that’s what the album is. One man’s childhood and adolescence writ large, as though he were Aeneas. Dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams. The only reason the last track didn’t make my top 20 list is that its devastating power can only be realized as an epilogue. The dedication in the liner notes says it all: “You are going to make it out of there alive. You will live to tell your story. Never lose hope.”
#1: Tallahassee, 2002
Greater than the sum of its parts, intricately conceived, endlessly open to autopsies, never indulgent, and hell, you can even dance to a bunch of the tracks. A great novel in album format, but it grips you like a potboiler. Plus, it’s the best kind of farewell: the central couple had been the stars of dozens of his previous songs, but he doesn’t kill them off. The final track is like the end of The House at Pooh Corner: even if you never see these guys again, you can rest assured that they’re out there somewhere, causing all hell to break loose. When you make characters with that kind of life, you’ve made something wonderful.
(Top photo credit: flickr/sovay.sovay)
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