This Is My Fascination, Vol. 2
Sarah Welch-Larson on the Mountain Goats
Welcome to another edition of this newsletter’s new conversations column dedicated to the personal fascinations of the people I find interesting. This week I’m talking to Sarah Welch-Larson, of the Seeing & Believing newsletter (which you can subscribe to on this very platform), Bright Wall/Dark Room, and the book Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction's Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise, among other credits.
For Sarah, the choice of fascination was easy: “it has to be the Mountain Goats,” she told me over e-mail. If you’re not familiar with the band fronted by singer/songwriter John Darnielle, you’re about to become very familiar thanks to Sarah’s characteristic deep and thoughtful involvement with this music, but you should also be sure to follow along with our conversation using this playlist, which comprises all 37 songs that came up during our long and expansive talk.
How did you first discover the Mountain Goats? What's your origin story?
I don't know exactly when I first heard about them, but I bounced off them for literally years. I had some friends in college who really liked them. I was pretty familiar with the song “This Year,” because who isn’t? I think I even included that song on my end of 2016 playlist in a fit of optimism that we were going to make it through 2016 and everything was going to magically be better. But then 2017 happened, and then it's gotten progressively worse from there.
It's still a good song to yell at periodic points throughout the year.
100%
So you’re that recent a convert!
I'm even more recent a convert, because I liked that song, but I didn't listen to any of their other stuff until September or October of 2020. I think that's part of the reason why I kept trying to come back to them was because I knew people who liked “This Year,” and who liked other songs of theirs. But for whatever reason, John Darnielle’s voice wasn't doing it for me. It's a little bit of an acquired taste. But I'd read one of his novels in the interim between hearing that song and then finally getting into the band.
Which one?
Universal Harvester.1
Good book!
And I think I followed him on Twitter, because he’s a very good Twitter follow. So October 2020 rolls around. I'm working from home, as I have been for the past six months or so. And it's a slow day, so I'm scrolling on Twitter, and John Darnielle tweeted something about the song “No Children” hitting some wild milestone plays on Spotify. It was something in the 20 millions, or something like that. And so I was like, It's a slow work day, I'm gonna give this song another shot. And I think I remember him calling it, like, a nasty little song, which I appreciated.2 So that’s what won me over to just opening up Spotify and listening to the song. And I listened to it. And I was like, This IS a nasty little song! I don't know how I feel about it!
But then I went scrolling through their discography, and I found the album The Life of the World to Come, which came out in 2009. It's one of their lesser-known records. All of the songs on the album are named for Bible verses, and the life of the world to come is one of the closing lines of the Nicene Creed, something that you say repeatedly in church, if you go to a mainline church. I had not set foot in a church in six months, and I could count on one hand the number of times that I had missed church before the pandemic started. I was raised in the church and I continued to be religious even after I left the denomination that I was raised in. And so I saw that record, I saw the name, I saw the track list, and I thought, Huh! and hit play. And I knew I was in good hands almost right away.
There's a line in “Psalms 40:2,” about halfway through the song: Lord, send me a mechanic if I'm not beyond repair. And then a couple of songs later, in “Hebrews 11:40,” there's another line about, If not by faith then by the sword, I'm going to be restored. And I just broke down crying. I was sold. I was completely in the bag for this band. I had only heard two songs and one of their records. And that was it for me.
So how do you approach the breadth and depth? There's so much music.3
I do it on an album-by-album basis. I pick an album, and then I listen to it front-to-back however many times it takes for the songs to really start to sink in, or for me to figure out that the album is going to bounce off me, because that's happened a few times too. I have not really gotten into their ‘90s stuff, so most of the lo-fi stuff I'm just not as familiar with. But I did Life of the World to Come, listened to that for a week or two, and then moved on to All Hail West Texas. And that was when I was like, OK, cool. We're in this for the long haul. Because they’re such very different albums. Life of the World to Come is pretty bare-bones. It's a guitar and sometimes a piano, a little bit of drums, and John Darnielle’s voice and some backup vocals. And then All Hail West Texas strips that back even further, because it's one of the late lo-fi albums, it was recorded on a Panasonic boombox. Most of the songs were recorded maybe minutes after Danielle had written them. So they've got this sense of punchy immediacy to them that I really liked and wasn't very familiar with. I don't listen to a lot of lo-fi stuff. But I wore that one out on repeat for probably about a month before I ended up moving on to the next one.
And that's been the pattern: OK, I think I can sing all of these songs by myself. Now, what's the next set of songs that I should move on to? And usually it was just what seemed the most appealing at any given point in time. There is no rhyme or reason. I don't listen to them in any form of chronological order. It's just, What's the mood? And then once I figure out what the mood of that record is, then I'll move on to the next one. And then occasionally I'll go to a Mountain Goats show, because I've been to a few now, and I'll hear a song that I've never heard before, because their back catalog is just so freakin’ expansive. It's something like 800, 900 songs, so there's always going to be something that I don't know. And if I liked a song that I don't know, then I'll go look for that record, and then listen to that album all the way through.
What is, like, the “Born to Run”? What is it that he always plays?
“No Children,” which is a lot of fun to scream-sing at shows with people. That’s the one that made the rounds on TikTok a few years ago, with the dance—I'm drowning. There is no sign of land. You are coming down with me hand in unlovable hand, and I hope you die. I hope we both die. It’s the song that he said was a nasty little song, and it's true. But when they play it at shows—it's a four-man band at this point—the piano is really loud and enthusiastic and boisterous, and everybody in the crowd knows the words to that song, even if they don't know the words to any other songs. They do play “This Year” most shows. People get really enthusiastic about “Up the Wolves” off The Sunset Tree, which is one of their more popular albums. Scream-singing, I'm going to bribe the officials, I'm going to kill all the judges was a lot of fun to do at the last show I went to, because I think there had been a really bad Supreme Court decision shortly before then.
[sardonic] Oh, which one?
The Roe v. Wade one.
Oh, good.
Yeah, not great.
Do you want to just rapid-fire albums or songs?
Oh, my God. That's an open invitation for me to talk and not shut up for hours.
I think that would be great.
The one that I think surprised me the most was Beat the Champ, which is a concept album about pro wrestling. I know nothing about pro wrestling. I didn't grow up watching pro wrestling. None of my siblings watched it when I was growing up. I know literally nothing about it other than the terms heel and face, and I picked that up through reading TV Tropes a lot when I was in high school. But it's almost a perfect album. One of those all bangers, no skips kind of deals where you get a lot of really good, interesting storytelling, everything feels really immediate. It feels like the band—which I think was four men at that point—is really starting to find their groove. Early Mountain Goats records are just so immediate and brash, just one guy playing a guitar not particularly well, and not singing particularly well either. But the songwriting is so good that it works. Beat the Champ feels like it's a little bit more polished and a little bit more focused. And it still allows Darnielle to explore some of the stuff that he's really interested in in a way that makes you interested in it. I got into that one because of a show—have you been to any Mountain Goats shows?
I haven't! I would love to.
Oh my god, the next time they're in town, if you can go see them, go see them, because they put on an incredible show. They write the setlist day-of, so I've been lucky enough to see two Mountain Goats shows basically back-to-back, one on a Friday and then the following one on a Sunday. And it was about a 50% new setlist the second time around, and the order was completely different. You really, truly never know what you're gonna get, which is pretty great. So when I showed up for - this must have been the third or fourth time I saw them, they played this song called “Heel Turn 2,” which is off Beat the Champ, and it's about this guy who has been living an upright life until that point. And then he decides, like, Screw this, I've been knocked down enough times, I'm going to just go completely feral and damn the consequences. The song starts really fast and rapid-fire and builds up momentum, and then after the heel turn, there's another minute and a half of just music, no singing, which is a newer-ish development in Mountain Goats songwriting. It used to be that there would just be frenetic songwriting, and it's about a minute and a half, and then you're done. And then the songs started getting longer and longer, and I think that they felt a little more comfortable letting the music speak for itself and not just the lyrics, and so it's been cool to see them evolve in that way. But “Heel Turn 2” is the turning point for the entire Beat the Champ record, and it's one that I also like scream-singing at shows. But it's also one that you can sing out loud in the car, or that you can just cry to in the car if you're having a really bad day. So it's very versatile, which I appreciate a lot.
Let me ask if you have a perspective on The Sunset Tree, which is my favorite album. That was my gateway.
I still bounce off it.
[shocked] A towering masterpiece!
I know. And I recognize that it's a really good album, but for whatever reason - maybe I had a knee jerk reaction–everybody loves this, so I'm not going to even get into it. I mean, “This Year” is a perfect song, hands down. It's great. There's one song that runs through my head occasionally, “Dilaudid.”
Tough song.
Yeah, tough song. All of them are tough songs. And then I really like “Pale Green Things.”
Is that the final track?
Yeah, it's the one where he finds out that his stepfather has finally passed away.
I just love it as a coda. It opens and closes with bookends, and then it goes back in his memory. It's like a memoir of an album, and it's so cinematic. I just love everything about it.
Yeah, and it's funny because, again, Sunset Tree, good album, just not one that I play on repeat. But I do play some of his other memoir-ish stuff on repeat instead. Have you done any deep listening on We Shall All Be Healed?
I know them by cover art more than titles.
The one with the film strips.
Right, right, right. And then I never remember what any of the songs are called. Which one is, We’re all here chewing our tongues off waiting for the fever to break?
Oh, that one's “Letter from Belgium.”
Right. That's my pandemic song.
Oh my god. That's an incredible song. That was the first song I ever heard them play live. And I hadn't listened to We Shall All Be Healed at the time that I heard that song. And then later in the show, they did a song called “Whole Wide World,” which I'm not as familiar with, that went straight into “Against Pollution.” And the one-two punch of those two songs that I'd never heard before literally knocked me over. I had to physically sit down during “Against Pollution.” That's one of my all time favorite Mountain Goats songs.
There are some things that I get very obsessive about. It's probably a product of my brain chemistry. And this is just the one thing that gets me on a level that very little other art does. It’s impressive, because their art has changed so much over the years. And I feel like they're good at grabbing different moods from different times in a way that I haven't really ever run across with any other musical artist ever. But “Against Pollution” is the song that starts with, When I worked down at the liquor store, a guy with a shotgun came through -
Okay, yup.
Muscled his way behind the counter, and I shot him in the face. And then it closes out with that line, I shot him in the face. And I would do it again. And I would do it again. And when the last days come, we shall see visions more vivid than sunsets and brighter than stars. And that was the thing that completely bowled me over, because it feels like it's both a confession and completely unrepentant about what this guy has done and what he has had to do in his life. I don't know, I needed that song. And I didn't know that I needed that song at the time that I heard it. It’s one of the ones that I come back to. And it makes me cry almost every single time. Just like The Life of the World to Come, at this point, makes me cry every single time I listen to it.
So that is my Mountain Goats record, probably more than anything else, and I can't listen to it anymore because some of those songs on there just make me sad and I can't help it. I even tried this afternoon, I was listening to Life of the World to Come, and I hit “Matthew 25:21.” That's the one whose title I can remember because I've heard them play that one live as well. It’s another memoir-ish song about Darnielle going to visit his mother-in-law shortly before she passed of cancer. And it talks about grief as being like you're an 18-wheeler, your brakes are going to give, and you just hope everybody else can get out of the way before the collision actually happens. That anticipatory grief. At the time that I first heard that song, my grandmother was still alive, but very sick. And then after she passed, and after my grandfather passed—they both passed within about six months of each other, my grandfather passed unexpectedly—that was the only song that I could think about for a really long time. And now whenever I hear it, I think about them, and it's a good memory, but it's also so desperately sad that I just can't handle it anymore.
Yeah, that's an album I can't really touch. “Deuteronomy 2:10” is very pegged to a time in my life that I don't want to think about. It is a painful album of painful songs
I think that's the case with a lot of the Mountain Goats’s writing. They make—I don't think it's a safe space, but they do make space for some of those painful and ugly feelings in a way that feels like a good outlet. And sometimes it feels dangerous, especially with songs like “Up the Wolves,” when you're singing about killing authority figures. But it's a good expression of the really ugly feelings. Like the whole album of Tallahassee, which is about the two “alpha couple” characters who are locked in this really bad relationship with each other. Those songs are really, really ugly. And I'm lucky that I've never been in a relationship that evokes any of those songs. But when I have my bad days, sometimes those are good to just listen to and let it all out.
I was just thinking, you don't hear his stuff in movies that much. Does he not license it that much? There's one very notable example I can think of.
Is it the Minding the Gap example?4
Yes, it is.
Yeah, it's a great needle drop. And it's a perfect fit for that movie, and a perfect fit for that song.
There are only 14 licenses on IMDb. So they're very selective. But they use “No Children” on You’re the Worst.
Oh, OK, that fits.
That's the most recent time he's licensed a song, in 2019 for You're the Worst. But I heard them on Moral Orel. Did you ever see that show?
No, I'm bad at TV.
It was an Adult Swim show. It was a parody of Davey and Goliath.
[big laugh]
It was an exact recreation of the Davey and Goliath aesthetic, but it was, like, depraved. And a couple of the seasons were just kind of whatever. And then they decided for one of their seasons to be transcendently good. And they used “No Children” at the climax of an episode about a marriage, and it blew my socks off. That's where I found that song.
But I discovered them in a way that just isn't - I hope people are still discovering music this way. I walked into a record store -
Oh, hell yeah.
Probably 2005, to buy the new Bruce Springsteen and Ben Folds records. And I walked out with those records, but I never really listened to them that much because I also, in that store, heard the Mountain Goats, and just ran to the cashier like, What is this?
Was it Sunset Tree?
It was The Sunset Tree. It must have been “Dance Music” or “This Year.” Just something where you're like, I want to hear this song a lot more for the rest of my life.
“Dance Music” is such a great song. That's one that I can't sing because the cadence of the words is just off enough that I can't quite get it right. And maybe that's because I haven't listened to the song quite enough. But that's such a good one.
I could probably do it, but it's weird and hard.
Those verses have a funky cadence to them, which is one of the other things that I like about Darnielle’s songwriting–the wording is all intuitive, but it's also pretty surprising at the same time. And it feels very immediate. I was talking with another friend about Jenny from Thebes, their newest record, just this past week, and one of the things that struck me about this record is that it actually has a song that's in third-person, past tense, which they never do. Most of the time, the songs are in present tense and either first- or second-person. Or if they are in past tense, it's still in first- or second-person. And the songs that are past tense, I think I can count on one hand. “Woke Up New” is in past tense, but it's still first person.
A song that makes me cry.
That's a good one, and Get Lonely - that's one of the other ones that I kind of bounced off of, but most of their recent stuff is very immediate. It's not even first- or second-person, it's almost always in the imperative. I was listening to “Aulon Raid,” which is off a lo-fi album called Songs for Pierre Chuvin that Darnielle recorded very early in the pandemic. And it starts with, Come riding with your soldiers. See how they fare. And it's very punchy, and it's very, like, This is what you're going to do. And you're going to do it because you're fated to do it, and there's nothing that you can really do about it. But all of you are doomed anyway. I think he does that with a lot of other storytelling stuff, too. It's always happening in the immediate present, which I think is really cool.
There's a fluidity to his songwriting that is mind-boggling. To be able to - I mean, the thing about the Mountain Goats is, if you bounce off a record, it's like, Well, then I'll just take next year's instead. We'll try that.
That's what happened to me last year, actually. I didn't care for Bleed Out very much.
And I really did.
You liked Bleed Out?
I liked Bleed Out a lot, yeah.
What did you like about it? Like, what were the songs that worked for you?
The lead track is up there for me, “Training Montage.”
Oh, yeah. I think that was a single. And I think that was where I started off on the wrong foot with it. For whatever reason, I was just like, I want to be into it. I want to be into it. It's not working for me.
It's just a rock and roll song. Four-and-a-half minutes of just good old-fashioned rock and roll. And that works for me.
Well, that's the whole record, too. It's all in the same register, mostly, except for the two final songs. And those two worked for me. But everything else up until that point, I was just like, I get it. It's ‘80s action movies. That's really cool and evocative. But for whatever reason, I wasn't in the mood, and maybe I need to just give that record another chance, since it's been over a year now. Maybe I wasn't expecting so many of the songs to be from the villain’s point of view, which is a really dumb thing of me to take to that album, because so many of his songs are from the villain’s point of view, and they're very sympathetic, and that usually works for me. But maybe it was just the upfront baldness about it. I wasn't expecting it to be so simple and straightforward.
There's a whole-ass album I didn't notice came out in 2021. I missed that year's album.
Oh, was that Dark in Here?
Yeah! I knew [2020’s] Getting into Knives came out…
Oh man, I love Dark in Here. I love that one a lot.
What should I be listening to? What are the tracks?
“The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums” is great. There's a song on there called “Lizard Suit” where the entire band just sort of breaks down and starts playing something that's almost kind of jazzy towards the end–in a really chaotic jazz kind of way, not in a smooth jazz kind of way. “Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light” is the close-out for that album, and that one's really cool because it kind of feels like it's dealing in time travel assassin sort of stuff in a way that actually kind of ties into Jenny from Thebes. I think there's some similar leitmotifs that pop up on the back half of Dark in Here that also show up in Jenny from Thebes. I'm not sure if it's the same characters popping up in there musically, but it sure feels like it. Also, the title track, “Dark in Here,” is fantastic too. It's about revenge, and has a very Western feel to it.
So what is clicking for you about Jenny from Thebes?
For one, it's revisiting the character of Jenny, who's been in a couple of different albums.
Oh, is that Jenny that goes all the way back?
Yeah, that's Jenny from All Hail West Texas.
From “Jenny”!
Jenny from “Jenny,” including the Kawasaki motorcycle and everything. She also pops up in the song “Night Light” in Transcendental Youth, there's a line about Jenny calling the speaker from Montana. And then Jenny makes her way to Montana in Jenny from Thebes, as well. The song “Cleaning Crew” has a really good bass line in the chorus that I like a lot. The whole back half is fantastic. There's a song called “Same as Cash” that's about the character of Jenny having a breakdown in a car in a Walmart parking lot. It's just absolutely beautiful. It's got some showtunes DNA in it, which I wasn't fully expecting.
But the whole record is supposed to be kind of a rock opera about this character, who hasn't been in any of their songs since 2011 or something. And it's great because she's a mysterious character, and she just kind of flits in and out of the stories fairly early on. We learn a little bit more about her, only just enough to make the mystery a little bit deeper and more interesting. And we're doing it in a completely different musical register, because she's mostly associated with the lo-fi stuff, and this is much more produced and polished, but in a way that feels very confident, and not like it's trying to prove anything. That whole record really works for me. Also, the close-out song. Most of their close-out songs are really good, but I really like the close-out song on Jenny from Thebes, too. It's called “Great Pirates,” and it's kind of a daydream about what could have been, but it's also a callback to the original Jenny song, where the speaker talks about the pirate's life for me. And then in Jenny from Thebes, “Great Pirates” is like, We've done that, we've achieved it–now what? in a way that's really lovely and brings things full circle but doesn't really tie a bow on it.
How about the other books? Did you read Wolf in White Van?5
I’ve read Wolf in White Van. I think I need to reread it. I think it was a little bit bewildered by the writing style for that one. But it's got that same sense of inevitability and doom that hangs over a lot of Mountain Goats stuff that really vibed with me. I really liked Devil House.6 And then have you read his 33 ⅓?
I did.
It's great! And also my introduction to the 33 ⅓ series, as well. I hadn't read any of their other stuff.
Not a representative example.7
No, no, and I knew that going in. But it was kind of cool to see him experiment a little bit with the form before writing a full-length novel. It's patently unfair that John Darnielle can write such good songs and write such good fiction. He's just an incredible writer all around.
And did you hear his Star Wars song that just popped into my head?8
That was actually one of the first things that made me think I needed to try again. I think Rian Johnson had retweeted it or something. And I heard it, and I laughed really hard, and for a little while, I would go around the house just singing about the ultimate Jedi. Have you seen the concert doc that Rian Johnson did for The Life of the World to Come?
No, absolutely not.
It's literally just John Darnielle and a female singer whose name is escaping me again. I think it was shot all in one take at some college in California. And it's just them going into the hall where they're performing the songs. Nobody else is in there except the stagehands. And then the camera gets mounted on a track that kind of circles around the stage the entire time that they're playing. It'll stop, and it'll come to rest for each song. John Darnielle gets up and moves back and forth between the piano and the stool where he's playing the guitar. They rearrange all of the tracks off that album so you don't hear them in the same track order that you would ordinarily hear them. I think there were a couple of bonus tracks that aren't on the vinyl at least. It's pretty neat. It feels a little bit experimental. It's definitely very low budget, you can hear a lot of shoes squeaking around as people are walking around on the stage. But if you're a Rian Johnson completist, there is a Mountain Goats concert doc out there for you as well.
Feels very 2010, or very of-its-moment, the sort of walking around a musician with the feet squeaking. It's the kind of stuff I would watch in college, people walking around on the street making their music.
That's definitely what it feels like. It feels like it was made on a shoestring. I don't know, I dug it, but part of that is just because that is my Mountain Goats album. I would love to see something a little bit more polished, but I don't think that fits their ethos.
Any other songs that are special and magical to you? I have such random ones that are special. My family, every time we get in the car to go to Maine, we have to listen to “Going to Maine,” which is one of the tape deck songs.
That one I don't think I've ever actually heard. I love a good “Going to…” Mountain Goats song.9
“Going to Georgia” is my special one of those.
I think he's disowned that song on the grounds that it's violent and misogynist. Pretty ungenerous way to treat that song because it is still an interesting story, but I can see not wanting to sing that one anymore.
Sure, by that token - ”No Children,” a famously unproblematic song.
Oh God, but it's just so damn good. I like “Rat Queen,” off Getting into Knives–that’s one of the fun and weird ones. Any of their songs about wolves. “Wolf Count,” also off Getting into Knives, also makes me cry. Oh my gosh, In League with Dragons isn't my favorite record, but “Possum By Night” is just such a wonderfully weird and gentle song about a possum wandering around. Before I really got into Mountain Goats, there was one other song that I liked quite a lot, and that was “Rain in Soho” off Goths. That's got a really good drive to it. And then “Beautiful Gas Mask” off All Eternals Deck, which is another like, this is a Sarah album–I listen to All Eternals Deck every time the solstice or Equinox rolls around, and then I go on a little Mountain Goats bender right about then.
What is so special about that one?
The song or the album?
The album.
It's not one of the most coherent ones. It's kind of spiky. It kind of goes all over the place. And maybe that's why I like it so much.
I can't believe I haven't mentioned Heretic Pride yet at this point, either. At this rate I'm going to end up saying that half of their albums are my favorite album, but Heretic Pride was the album that convinced my husband that the Mountain Goats were good. I knew that he was hooked when he started playing it without my prompting. And I think that's what convinced him to also go to a Mountain Goats show with me not too long after that, as well. So the song “Heretic Pride” is one that I feel particularly strong about, especially because there seems to be a bit of a reading floating around right now about it being a trans pride anthem, which I appreciate. That's not what it was intended as when it was written, but it's a meaning that's been adopted, so much so that Darnielle actually mentions that in a couple of the live recordings and shows, leading into that song. I think he mentioned it at a show that I saw him perform it at, which I liked very much. It's a very defiant song, and a very, Fuck you all kind of song, which I like. And then the song “Autoclave” off that same album as well, about like, my heart being an autoclave, and there's nothing really here for anybody that's worthwhile, so we're just gonna sing it out. Also very good. That whole record I love very much.
Can you tell me why I should drag myself through the Olde English chapter of Devil House? I got bogged down and just never finished the book.
I mean, one, it's so close to the end. Maybe that's getting into sunk cost fallacy10 or something. I honestly think that's kind of the point of the book–everybody's got a little domain that they feel is theirs, and you have to defend it. And I think he's kind of treating it as though this is something that we have to tell stories about in order to be able to protect. And also, this is something that has been happening since time immemorial, so we're going to tell it in Olde English. I know he's kind of a folklore and classics kind of guy. So maybe that's part of it. It threw me off at first, but I appreciate the passage, even though I don't fully get it myself. I think the stuff that I really got out of that book were some of the earlier chapters, specifically the one where the murder with the oyster knife takes place. You remember the scene that I'm talking about?
I do now that you mention it.
Normally written violence doesn't bug me nearly as much as violence on the screen does. But that is a piece of written violence that has really stuck with me, especially because it's a passage that's still so compassionate towards everyone involved, even when they're being real scumbags. Which I guess loops back to the whole Mountain Goats ethos of dangerous feelings, but being told in a way that's still sympathetic and real and honest about all of them.
I'm wondering if I want to see him write a movie. I mean, I want to see him do anything he wants to do, certainly.
I don't know. I like that he's able to use language to evoke an image, and the language is enough. I don't know how that would translate to a movie–I almost said, I don't know how well that would translate to a movie, but obviously it would end up translating to a movie. And it would probably be pretty great. But I think I like him as a written artist more than somebody who is using that to interpolate something onto the screen. But if he does want to write a movie, I will be the first in line to see it.
John, do it.
Honestly, do whatever the hell you want to do, because I'm here for it, at least for the first listen. And then after that, if it works, great. I feel like almost every Mountain Goats song has a person that it works for. Somebody I know was talking about going to a Mountain Goats show, and when a new song started, you could look around the room and see who that song was the depression song for. Different people come alive at different points in the show.
I am going to ask something obnoxiously broad: do you have any sense of what it is in you that this band is really vibrating with?
Whatever it is, I think it's buried pretty deep. Or maybe there's deep roots that have come up closer to the surface–the metaphor is getting away from me. I think a lot of it has to do with the fairly overt spirituality of the lyrics that doesn't feel overly religious or sanctimonious. Like I mentioned earlier, I was raised in the church, and I'm still religious myself, but I am very suspicious of overly Christian art, just as a general rule. I think most of it sucks. And I think a lot of that is because most of that art tends to gloss over the hard parts of life, or to pretend that it doesn't exist, or pretend that it's too sinful to even contemplate in the first place. And so, Mountain Goats lyrics feel like they're both a safe and a dangerous place for me to process some of those feelings, and also, to be honest about the uglier side of life, the stuff that I was told, No, we shouldn't talk about this, or No, we shouldn't be feeling this, which is part of the reason why scream-singing at a Mountain Goats show feel so damn good. It's because you're not alone in those feelings. And I don't think that I had realized that. I knew intellectually that I wasn't alone, but it's nice to have that external expression of it, too. I'm also very much a rule-follower, and the Mountain Goats don't feel like they're particularly rule-followers. And so it feels like there is some level of permission being given to feel the stuff that I never had the permission to feel before.
A lot of it is the immediacy of the lyrics. A lot of it is that Darnielle is able to turn a really interesting phrase with really simple language quite often–there's poetry to it, but it's also very straightforward. And I don't get that too often either. So a fun mix of all of those.
What have we not talked about? What did we leave on the table?
Oh, my God. I feel like I need to go back and listen to a lot of the lo-fi stuff because I love All Hail West Texas, and I love Songs for Pierre Chuvin, but I haven't gone back and listened to most of the ‘90s stuff.
Go see a Mountain Goats show. Sometimes I'll stalk the Last.fm playlists from shows just to see what they've been playing lately, because again, they literally write a different setlist for every single show, and it's purely on vibes. Sometimes they'll open with the same song three times in a row, and sometimes they'll open with something that is completely different every single time. There's usually a quiet section in the middle where it's just John on stage with a guitar playing some of the old lo-fi stuff, which is how I've listened to some of the unreleased songs or some of the older things and then been like, Oh, that's incredible. And I will forever kick myself for going to one specific show in Chicago, and not the show that happened the night before, because the night before they played “Absolute Lithops Effect,” which is the closing song off All Hail West Texas, and is also the song that carried me over the threshold from winter 2020 into spring 2021. It's got a line about breaking open after a season of waiting, and it feels very hopeful, and it feels very tender., and it feels very scared, all at the same time. I think I listened to it on the way to get both doses of my vaccine, when the vaccines first became available, because it just felt so fitting. They played that at the show that I wasn't at unfortunately, and it's very unlikely that it'll get played again at any shows that I have the opportunity to go to. So there's a little bit of regret in there. I feel very jealous of the people who did get to hear that song live.
I'm sure I'll think of other stuff immediately after we officially call it. Thank you for the outlet. Everybody I know, if they know anything about me, they know that I like movies, and they know that I like Mountain Goats, so I try not to talk about them too much at length. You're so lucky that you got me right after a new Mountain Goats record dropped, because if that had not been the case, I probably would have literally said screw threads. I have very strong opinions about those. My day job is at an industrial supplier, so if you really want to hear about standards for threads, I'm your person, and I got a lot of opinions about it.
Do you have a fascination you want to talk about? Do you want to read about a specific someone’s fascination? Sound off and let’s get it on the books!
To quote the jacket copy of Darnielle’s second novel: “It’s the late ’90s, and you can find Jeremy Heldt at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa―a small town in the center of the state. The job is good enough for Jeremy, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a carwreck. But when a local school teacher comes in to return her copy of Targets―an old movie, starring Boris Karloff―the transaction jolts Jeremy out of his routine. “There’s something on it,” she says as she leaves the store, though she doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, another customer returns another tape, and registers the same odd complaint: “There’s another movie on this tape.” In Universal Harvester, the once-placid Iowa fields and farmhouses become sinister, imbued with loss and instability and foreboding. As Jeremy and those around him are absorbed into tapes, they become part of another story―one that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost that they would do anything to regain.”
To quote Darnielle’s tweet celebrating 15 million Spotify streams of “No Children”: “It is not my style to post sales figures and stuff like that, that’s always felt like the realm of the industry that’s self- congratulatory and weird...but this is humbling and I wanted to share. Thank you all for embracing our hateful little song.”
The Mountain Goats have released 22 studio albums in the last 29 years, as well as EPs dating from 1992 to 2018, and more.
“This Year” was used as the closing credits song to Bing Liu’s 2018 documentary Minding the Gap
To quote the jacket copy of Darnielle’s first novel: “Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of Trace Italian—a text-based, role-playing game played through the mail—Sean guides players from around the world through his intricately imagined terrain, which they navigate and explore, turn by turn, seeking sanctuary in a ravaged, savage future America. Lance and Carrie are high school students from Florida, explorers of the Trace. But when they take their play into the real world, disaster strikes, and Sean is called to account for it. In the process, he is pulled back through time, tunneling toward the moment of his own self-inflicted departure from the world in which most people live. Brilliantly constructed, Wolf in White Van unfolds in reverse until we arrive at both the beginning and the climax: the event that has shaped so much of Sean's life.”
To quote the jacket copy of Darnielle’s third novel: “Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That’s what his mother always told him. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success—and a movie adaptation—to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell––his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected—back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is. Devil House is John Darnielle’s most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.”
33 ⅓ is a series of monograph-length books on popular albums. They tend to be written as fairly conventional criticism, but Darnielle’s book on Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality is a novella written from the perspective of a young man committed to a psychiatric ward due partially to his fixation on heavy metal.
Darnielle has claimed he tried to sell his friend Rian Johnson, director of The Last Jedi, on the alternative title The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedi and Eats Their Bones, and wrote a prospective title song apparently to make his case.
To quote the Mountain Goats wiki: “Many of the Mountain Goats' song titles read "Going to (fill in the blank)." They often deal with a sense of restlessness and a character's need to escape their situation. Some are love songs, like 'Going to Port Washington' and 'Going to Scotland'. The majority of the 'Going to...' songs are unreleased, and are often played at live shows. There are no known 'Going to...' songs from the years between 2005 and 2020, after which Songs for Pierre Chuvin included 'Going to Lebanon 2' and Jenny from Thebes included 'Going to Dallas.'”
To quote Wikipedia: “People demonstrate a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made.”