AN IMAGINARY COMPILATION ALBUM : #410: THE MOUNTAIN GOATS

A guest posting by Rol (My Top Ten Blog)

I’ve been wanting to write this ICA for ages now… but, y’know… I waste enough time on the internet trying to get people to like the songs I like as it is. It can be quite exhausting, can’t it? Swimming upstream, while the curmudgeonly throw rocks at you from the safety of the riverbank. Why do we do it? Because, as Pete Postlethwaite once said, “Music matters”. And in this crazy, mixed-up world that gets crazier and more mixed-up every day, it’s one of only two things I can rely on to keep me afloat. The other thing? Books. Reading and listening to music are my lifejacket… which brings us to John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. Because as well as being a superb songwriter (hipsters at the New Yorker called him “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist”), Darnielle is also an acclaimed novelist. I read his most recent novel, and it blew me away. Here’s my review from Goodreads…

“A true crime writer moves into a house where an infamous murder took place… and it begins to affect his work.”

The title and cover suggest a generic horror tale, but this is much, much more – an investigation into the very nature of storytelling (but not in a wanky, “in’t stories brilliant?” Neil Gaiman way), questioning whether a narrative can ever be truly subjective, unbiased or reliable. There is horror here – most notably two gruesome murder scenes – but there’s far more psychological darkness, with superior use of perspective shifts and alternating voices, and a climax that manages to surprise without going for the obvious shock.

I’ve become increasingly enamoured with Darnielle’s work as a songwriter with his band The Mountain Goats, so it’s hard to believe he could be an even better novelist. Frighteningly good.”

Darnielle has only written three novels to date – most of his time is still devoted to the day job and since 1991, that means 23 studio albums from The Mountain Goats. I don’t claim to have heard them all – I’m still at the early stages of discovering the delights they have to offer. But I’ve already come across more than enough songs to make a decent ICA and hopefully try to get to get a few more people to like the songs I like.

1. This Year

You need a proper life-affirming anthem to kick off a mixtape, right?

My broken house behind me and good things ahead
A girl named Cathy wants a little of my time
Six cylinders underneath the hood crashing and kicking
Aha! Listen to the engine whine

Shades of Springsteen’s Born To Run right there, but also the work of previous ICA honorary Craig Finn. Premier storytellers all. And if you’re looking for a chorus to thump the steering wheel to as you tear down life’s metaphorical highway…

I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me!

That’s become my mantra lately.

Here’s a great live performance of the song featuring US TV host Stephen Colbert on guest vocals.

2. No Children

OK, let’s take the mood down now. Waaaaay down, with a blacker-than-bleak doomed relationship song that a lot of old country music stars would have given their right arm for. I can hear George Jones singing a slowed down version of this, or Loretta and Conway turning it into a duet.

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow
I hope it bleeds all day long
Our friends say it’s darkest before the sun rises
We’re pretty sure they’re all wrong

I hope it stays dark forever
I hope the worst isn’t over
And I hope you blink before I do
I hope I never get sober

And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can’t find one good thing to say
And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out
You’d stay the hell out of my way

3. Love Love Love

Now for something a bit more cheerful… how about a love song? Featuring King Saul, Sonny Liston, Raskolnikov and Kurt Cobain. Some things you do for money and some you do for love, love, love.

4. Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back To Leeds

A lot of Mountain Goats records are thematically linked and tell a larger story between the songs. I won’t use the word “concept album”, because I know it’ll make some of you come out in hives. Anyway, this one is from the 2017 album Goths, which might be when I first started to pay attention to John Darnielle’s songwriting. I’m always attracted to songs about other singers, and as I go to work in Leeds, I was doubly intrigued.

Although he was born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, Andrew Eldritch went to university in Leeds, and that’s where he formed The Sisters of Mercy. The song isn’t strictly a biography, it’s more a metaphor about returning to your roots to get back what you’ve lost. In many ways, it seems like a direct reply to our opening tune, This Year.

There’s indifference on the wind
But a faint gust of hope
At a club nobody goes to
With a musty velvet rope
Guys in Motörhead jackets
Who knew him way back when
Haven’t raised a drink in years
But now meet up again
To remember how it was
When they all thought they’d move away
And ride in Lotus 7s
Through the London streets one day

5. Cold At Night

Bang up to date now with a song from last year’s album, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan, a “full-on musical” (track 1 is an overture) about three stranded shipwreck survivors, an idea that apparently came to Darnielle in a dream.

For those of you who don’t want your albums to tell complete novelistic stories, with each song a chapter, I’ll say this… much as I like the idea from a writing perspective, I don’t ever listen to these records with the larger narrative in mind. I take them song by song, as I do any other record. I have this dream that when I retire and have more time to find a comfy chair to sit back in, with the lyrics sheets on my knee, appreciating my favourite albums as a whole, like proper musos must do. I’m sure I’ll get even more out of the Mountain Goats back catalogue if I ever get the chance to do that. I guess what I’m saying is, the songs work on their own too. You don’t need to worry about the forest, just enjoy the trees.

The first thing you learn is there’s always a clock ticking somewhere
And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night
The first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to
And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night

6. Training Montage

Speaking of which, here’s a song that… well, I have no idea what it’s about. But I think I read somewhere that the Goats wanted it to be the kind of tune you’d see Sylvester Stallone working out to in Rocky. It’s got a slow start, but around the thirty second mark it all kicks off and… well, if you’re not singing along by the end, check your pulse for signs of life.

7. The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton

Now forget all that larger narrative bunkum I was talking about earlier – how about a tune that tells a complete story in two and a half minutes? A story some writers would need a whole book to tell. Darnielle understands that a writer’s greatest skill is not what he puts on the page, but what he leaves off… making the reader fill in the blanks.

JD apparently wrote this song after working for a couple of years in a California Mental Health facility. He wrote a longer version as part of Bloomsbury publishing’s 33 1/3 series, ostensibly a tribute to Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality LP, but really just expanding on this song’s central premise: the awful impact of crushed dreams. So many great lines here, it’s both funny and very, very sad.

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream
Don’t expect him to thank or forgive you
The best ever death metal band out of Denton
Will in time both outpace and outlive you

Hail Satan!

8. Woke Up New

But if you’re looking for a more traditional pop song, try this. A classic “day after I was dumped” tune from 2006.

The first time I made coffee for just myself, I made too much of it
But I drank it all just ’cause you hate it, when I let things go to waste
And I wandered through the house like a little boy, lost at the mall
And an astronaut could’ve seen the hunger in my eyes from space

And I sang, “Oh, what do I do?”
“What do I do?”
“What do I do?”
“What do I do without you?”

9. Damn These Vampires

John Darnielle always seems to be writing in character, so it’s hard to tell how much of his own life creeps into these stories, and how much of it is just his imagination. However, Damn These Vampires is apparently semi-autobiographical – the vampires in question being the heavy drugs he took back in the 80s, before he managed to turn his life around.

Crawl ’til dawn
On my hands and knees
Goddamn these vampires
For what they’ve done to me

10. Anti-Music Song

I wanted to close with this because it takes me back to my introduction, specifically the question of why I waste so much time on the internet trying to get people to like the songs I like. You see, it seems there are some people out there who get far more pleasure from rubbishing the songs they don’t like rather than celebrating the ones they do. There might even be one or two of them reading this post… except I doubt they’ll have made it this far. Have I mentioned that the first band I truly loved was Queen? Big ELO fan too. And as for Billy Joel…

Anti-Music Song is written from the perspective of a musical snob and/or internet troll. Over on Genius, the site that allows people with far too much time on their hands (Ha! Irony!) to pull apart song lyrics and offer “definitive” interpretations, there’s a suggestion that when Darnielle wrote this, he really did dislike all the people he mentions here – even Brian Wilson. (And if you don’t like the Beach Boys, you don’t like joy.) Although he apparently changed his mind about many of them with the wisdom of age.

Apparently he even changed his mind about the Stretford Segregationist after this song was recorded… although I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d changed it back again given recent infamy. Either way, I’m sure many of you will get a chuckle out of the way Darnielle repeatedly mispronounces That Guy’s name here. It would wind him up no end, if he ever heard it.

 

 

Rol