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I'm not 100% certain but I think "Terror Song" was one of the ones Joel did when he was living in McKinleyville. Furniture Huschle tapes used to come through my mail slot (hush, you) with an alarming regularity. Time was moving pretty quickly back then so it probably wasn't as constant a stream as it appeared to be. Either way, I thought then, as I do now, that the Furniture Huschle songs were in a class all by themselves, which isn't something I'd say about, y'know, a particularly delicious sandwich. The best sandwich you ever had is still a member of the class "sandwich." It's just a better sandwich than the rest of them. "Terror Song," however, isn't really properly a member of the class "song," even though it obeys a lot of that class's entry-level rules or customs (rhymed couplets, balladic plot development, a refrain). It's in many ways the ideal Furniture Huschle jam: the scene is set quickly & is identifiable to anybody who's even paying distracted attention; once set, said scene degenerates almost immediately into senseless and inexplicable violence; the narrator seems not to know what to make of it, but sounds like he feels obligated, at the least, to pass the information along. This would be one thing if the narrator were reporting back from Kabul or something. Instead, he's sending along dispatches from this nightmare kitchen nook. There's a sound like a drone, but higher in your head. You can almost see the Dutch curtains on the windows facing the carport; they have blood on them now and nobody's going to clean them. As sinners roasting in Hell sometimes say: "Bummer."

- John Darnielle

Download: "Orange" by Furniture Huschle

The Mountain Goats started playing "Orange" on tour a year or two back when a few members of the band we were touring with wanted to play something with us. I ad-libbed some chords (your standard I/IV/VIm/V/IV kinda deal) and started singing one of my favorite Furniture Huschle lyrics. Probably unknown to Furniture Huschle is that there's a whole section of William Gass's The Tunnel which is essentially this song blown up much bigger and rendered much uglier. What if you do drip juice on the fine Corinthian leather? What then, O disobedient child? I'll tell you "what then," if you want to be snotty about it: I'll pull this fucking car over at the first service station we pass, and you'll clean the goddamn seat 'til I can see my face in it, that's what. You want to fuck up the upholstery, buy your own goddamn car. I don't work five days a week just so people can fuck up my stuff. What? I know he's upset, he should be upset! Let's just not talk about it any more. Let's just be quiet.

- John Darnielle

Download: "Furniture Store" by Furniture Huschle

OK so "Furniture Store." It's the 4th of July, maybe 1992? I don't remember. Long time ago. Mark and Roger ask if I'm up for a Chicken Damage show at somebody's house. At the time - it tickles me to say this - I was the occasional drummer for Chicken Damage. How many shows did I do with you guys, anyway? The Sneakers one, and it seems like there was an outdoors one someplace - anything else? I used a special two-drum stand-up kit and if I remember right I mainly used my hands to play it. So anyway it's the 4th of July, I'm in the middle of a five-year sobriety stretch and would rather play music at a party full of strangers than hang out with a bunch of drinkin' friends, and Mark and Roger have been invited to play their songs for some work friends. Restaurant work friends, again relying on my memory; I could be wrong. So we get three guitars, I think one of 'em was mine, and we go to some nightmare planned community in like Chino Hills or North Upland or something. Fake adobe feel, fake terracotta, cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac, the whole nine yards. Show up at the party, a buncha people I don't know are already pretty ploughed. They tell us to set up in the living room. Lol wut? OK cool. We set up. One or two people - both women as I recall - pay a sort of polite attention for a while, but eventually they wander off into the upstairs room, or the TV room where somebody was watching a Howard Stern pay-per-view, or onto the patio. We are playing to an empty room. There are people in the house, but we might as well be playing next door. So when we play "Furniture Store" and kind of enjoy it, we decide to play it again. What the hell, right? By the time we'd done it four or five times, we were hitting some really sweet three-part harmonies, the sort of thing that none of us really had much expertise in trying to attain on purpose; and while I don't mean to speak on behalf of anyone else, to me it felt pretty special. Like we were doing something in a vacuum that was good for its own sake. So we just kept right on playing. Not other songs. Screw other songs. Just "Furniture Store." We stopped stopping between takes - since there was only one chord to play, we'd just hang on the chord for a while and start the song over. At one point we began to wander through the house, still playing and singing, to make sure everybody got properly serenaded. I'm pretty sure we played that song for a solid hour. Do I have to say this? It was awesome. Please note that this might actually have been New Year's Eve, or Labor Day, or no holiday at all, or at any rate not the 4th of July. I am pretty bad with dates.

- John Darnielle