26 May 2008

tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Johnnie Cluney // Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley and Shawn Biggs

John Darnielle procures pain and suffering like no other man. And what he does with it when it’s all bundled up, held tight to him like squirmy prisoners is that he lets all of it play together. He introduces one to the other and watches them, taking meticulous notes, finding that when one sufferer starts mixing with another, they create another thing entirely – a red and yellow makes blue sort of thing. The right pain and the right sufferer can make a new life that might be mistaken for a version of the grass finally getting greener on their side of the fence. The characters in his hundreds and hundreds of songs sometimes find that certain pains are addictive and restorative, keeping them interested and getting them back to normality. ... [Story Continues Below]

First song

San Bernardino (Mountain Goats) [3.03MB] [1799 downloads]





– original version appears on Heretic Pride

I have great personal fondness for this song so I’m going to leave the lyrics to speak for themselves. Instead, let me tell you about how it came to be the way it is. One day I was sitting on the floor of the office I keep here in Durham, monkeying around with a book of guitar tunings. I’m pretty sure that the tuning I was playing with was a Jimmy Page tuning, possibly the one he uses on “The Rain Song.” I don’t remember the tuning string for string, but I know that everything was tuned way down — E down two whole steps, etc. On the Froggy Bottom guitar I was using, which by the way is a miraculous and wonderful guitar, it was possible to play in this tuning but just barely — too much action and you’d knock something out of tune. On the demo I recorded, you could hear the loosened strings responding to their lowered tension – wwwwowwww, wwwwwowwwww, wwwwwwowwwwww. I had a real dread of trying to get this one right in the studio, so I got the idea to send it to Erik Friedlander for arrangement, and he did the incredible thing we’re honored to have on Heretic Pride. During the west coast tour, though, I was monkeying around at soundcheck, and I thought: “Well — the voicing won’t be the same, but couldn’t the song still be sung just using straight chords?” We worked it up for trio, and I was reminded that I really enjoy singing it, which is how I wound up doing it at this session. My enjoyment of singing it causes me to oversing a bit on the first verse here, I think. What can you do, though? I am a somewhat excitable dude. Second song

02-75 (Mountain Goats) [2.10MB] [1837 downloads]





— unreleased

There’s a whole story behind this song, and what it means, and it’s a true story and a personal one, which is why I’m averse to telling it. You know those tiresome old cranks who bemoan the death of the private sphere on the editorial page of the Sunday Times? I am one of them. At the same time, I have blurry personal boundaries just like pretty much every other musician I’ve ever known, with the exception of Erik Friedlander, who seems not to have been touched by the “we’re all kinda stupid and also crazy” bug that got the rest of us when we were still young and helpless. Bless the Holy Name of God for your good fortune, Erik! Anyhow. My girlfriend’s post office box when she went to Grinnell College in Iowa was box number 02-75. I used to write her there before we had met. She used to write me back. Once she sent me a papier-mache’d cow that was totally cool and awesome. She is not my girlfriend any more; she’s my wife. As of 2008 we will have been together for thirteen years. Knock wood, right? This was the first song I wrote for her. Third song

Raja Vocative (Mountain Goats) [1.75MB] [1626 downloads]





– original version appears on Ghana

If you want to know a secret about this song I will tell you one. It is a heavily-coded response to some personal pain I was going through when I wrote it. There is maybe one person alive who would be able to do the decoding necessary to get at the truth of the matter, and she isn’t talking. Fourth song

There Will Be No Divorce (Mountain Goats) [2.80MB] [1694 downloads]





– original version appears on The Coroner’s Gambit

I wrote this one when we lived in Colo, Iowa, which is a town no-one reading this will ever see. 775 people lived there and we were two of them. Our house was tiny and the pipes froze every winter; one winter they burst. We ate a lot of potatoes because they were cheap, and I taught myself to bake bread from scratch. We were young in our love and not yet married and there was a shack behind the house where I’d experiment with my boombox and my guitar to see what different sort of atmospheres I could get on tape. “There Will Be No Divorce” was one of the songs on The Coroner’s Gambit that took a long time to get right, and the final version was recorded in that little shack on a rainy day. Originally it was a much more uptempo song than the one I ended up doing that day; it had a sort of vaguely half-rockabilly feel. It sounded, I mean, more like the one I played at this session.

It can be their balm, a way to wash over some chapped part of life. Darnielle and his recording name, The Mountain Goats, is a jittery guy both in person and as he sings, giving so much of the immediate state of the mood in everything he does. His words – the ones that are obvious and the ones that are beyond cryptic – are full of every color known to man, though there is a lien on the blues and the reds. There’s sorrow and extreme passion in all of the personal and completely fictitious storylines that have historically portrayed the lives of people dealing with skeletons and with each other in circumstances that are adverse in the strongest meaning of the word. The characters are at their wits ends, they are screaming at the top of their lungs, they are tearing their hair out, they are dismayed by words and actions, they are without options – or so they believe. They are thinking out loud, just letting the pent up storm clouds build and bulk into menacing thunderheads, opening the dams so the blackened hearts can spill out like ticker tape. These people that Darnielle has created are burning. The couple that has been a mainstay in a vast number of songs probably wouldn’t look it from the outside – if they were real, in fact. They would be your regular couple, going through some sour spells, but nothing that they can’t handle. They’ve stayed together and for most people, that’s the ultimate sign that things have a way of working themselves out, that those involved have everything under control. They might even be envied for sticking it out so long. These are commendable virtues, ones that are happily passed down through the generations, just as when a boy’s great-great-grandfather was a farmer, his great grandfather was a farmer, his grandfather was a farmer and his father was a farmer. He most certainly should try to be – and is encouraged – to be a farmer. It’s said to be in the blood. Well, those who come from families without divorce and visible problems tend to look at anything otherwise as failure, so they wipe up the misery with super absorbance and just keep mowing the lawn and sleeping in the same bed as their hated nemesis, who used to be the sweetest lover. As Darnielle shows over and over again – with simple chords and familiar strummed and complicated words of descriptive force, as if they were made out of impossible knowledge and voltage – there is no one way to handle a relationship. There are a few right ways, perhaps, but there is an endless supply of wrong ways. At his deepest depths, Darnielle is a romantic, if there ever was one. He cares so much for these troubled people he’s manifested out of thin air. He probably even cries for them after some episodes. They ache and work and slug it out, still finding themselves there at the end of the day, every day for the one that they vowed themselves to. The Mountain Goats discography is a staggering and fascinating documentation of the difficulties that two normal, regular people can find in love and the dissolution of it. One of the things that I wanted to ask Darnielle this week as an appendix to this piece was an absurd, random question: What passage of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking did you underline? There’s a chance that he’s never read it and the only reason the text even applies to the abstract thinking being done here is its gentle notions of love and marriage that the master Didion shares in her autobiographical book detailing her husband, John Gregory Dunne’s 2003 death. There’s one passage toward the end that seems to fit with the ways that Darnielle imagines his characters – these feuding and loving people, even if they don’t have the healthy relationship that Didion and Dunne did for over 40 years. He might have underlined it, if he does that with books.

“This will not be a story in which the death of the husband or wife becomes what amounts to the credit sequence for a new life, a catalyst for the discovery that (a point typically introduced in such account by the precocious child of the bereaved) “you can love more than one person.” Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time. “She didn’t know the songs,” I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience. Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others.”

Darnielle keeps people together for the long haul because that’s when it gets harder to leave and that’s also supposed to be when it gets easier to feel at home. When that doesn’t happen, we have intrigue. We get people who you could look into their mouths, like a dentist would, and see roaring fires licking up over those tonsils and wisdom teeth.

The Mountain Goats

Last Plane To Jakarta

4AD Records