Going to Georgia - The Mountain Goats
From the first notes to the first lines “the most remarkable thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again” to even the title, this entire song seems to insist that you be in motion when you listen to it. This is a song for tearing up the asphalt, of driving until you can break the line of the horizon or your engine gives out— whichever comes first. All I know is that your speedometer jumps at least 10mph when the first insistent notes come through your semi-shitty car speakers. You’ll wait ‘til those notes align with the fence posts flying by or the street lights overhead. It’s always summer when you hear this song— the heat is always as desperate as your voice singing the words “a busted safety catch” because there’s something dangerous in not just the speed of your car, but in the way you feel like your ribs have cracked open and your heart rate is rising to meet the tempo, rising to transcend whatever shit demands this song. Because this is a song for when you need to pretend that you aren’t headed to work or to home or to class, to pretend that you can escape, that you can through the entire concept of a destination into the forever you feel. This song is those beautiful lines: “the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you and you’re standing in the doorway.” Because originally when I heard this song I looked for meaning in the doorway, in symbols of places of transition, but it’s not about the words, it’s about when you are paradoxically aware of the infinite nature of the moment and the limited nature of you. When you are so present in a moment that you are beyond it, so deep inside it that you are outside of it, looking in, noting the most remarkable thing is..
And how do I explain that this song fills the space it leaves. Your heart may rise from the outstretched hands of your ribs but the water rushes in to fill the cracks. And I’m frozen with joy right where I stand. The world throws its light underneath your hair. And even as everything should be flying away, going off the rails, you’re tied right there in that moment, hand wrapped around the steering wheel, pinned by the weight of the song. All 2 minutes and 19 seconds of it, you’re there.
THOUGHTS ON the MOUNTAIN GOATS
Thoughts and Feelings on everyone's favorite singing ungulates. This is a submissions-based blog open to any and all. You can talk about tMG in general, an album, a song, a single line. The only requirement is that you have a lot of Feelings.
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omg i am listening to that recording kit mentioned where john darnielle sang no children at a concert and the audience sang SO LOUD AND WELL that they DROWNED HIM OUT and i am almost in tears i just
i just????
i want to stand in the middle of a crowd that’s shouting “i am 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”
i can’t even imagine what it must be like for that electric second that you know every last person in the room has that same suffering ache that you do, at least for that momentjesus christ
thoughtsontmg submission from soundingonlyatnightasyousleep:
I will forever remain convinced that the characters of the Mountain Goats’ songs coexist with the characters in The Hold Steady ‘verse. John’s live substitution in The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton of “Satan’s Fingers, THE HOLD STEADY, or The Hospital Bombers”? Yeah, fuels my thoughts of Jeff and Cyrus opening in a bar for the fictional Hold Steady. Holly obviously briefly dated William Stanoforth Donahue. And the song Girls Like Status’ reference to tMG, “It was song number three on John’s last CD, gonna make it through this year if it kills me,” means that there is a fictionalized version of tMG running around somewhere. IT ALL FITS!
Also, I will forever ship Jeff/Cyrus.
What a beautiful theory! Apparently Quentin Tarantino’s films are all consistent within some imagined alternate universe, so why not the same for the Mountain Goats?
#97. The Mountain Goats - “Color In Your Cheeks”
I know that it’s kind of a random and ridiculous leap to go from The Killers to the Mountain Goats in back-to-back entries, but this fits here. Or at least I think so. Anyways, I first started listening to The Mountain Goats during late winter of my Junior year. I’m not quite sure what made me decide to listen to them, but I’m glad I did. Naturally I came across This Year and No Children first, and while both are great, they weren’t quite great enough to make the cut for this countdown. That’s where this song comes in.
By fall of my Senior year, I downloaded The Sunset Tree, Tallahassee, and We Shall All Be Healed and called it good (since The Mountain Goats have such a huge discography, there was no way I was going to t track down every album.) After I got to the point where I adored the hell out of the three albums I mentioned above, I finally decided to download more albums, but I had no clue what to get. I got the recommendation from either Ross (or Burnie, maybe?) through Ross and Kyle’s friend James to try some of the lo-fi albums, namely All Hail West Texas. So that’s the one I downloaded. At first, I was admittedly put out by the low quality sound because I didn’t think I wanted to listen to an album that wasn’t “polished and clean sounding.” Boy was I wrong.
I remember listening to the album just for the heck of it, and I didn’t think a whole lot of the first two songs. But when the third song started (Color In Your Cheeks), I was sold. This song single handedly saved this album for me. If it wouldn’t have been for this song, I would never have bothered to listen to the rest of the album or discovered how great it really was. And boy is it great. And it definitely gave me even more appreciation for John Darnielle’s lyrics. (Because he’s definitely one of the greatest lyricists of all time. And I’m totally not afraid to make that claim.) On top of that, it solidified the band’s place in my top 5 favorite artists.
But yeah. This song. Oh man. I admit that the fuzzy vocals with just a guitar strumming in the background is far from the prettiest of songs out there, but the lyrics are amazing. John Darnielle can tell some great stories with his songs (especially The Sunset Tree, but more on that in a future entry…), and this song is a prime example.
Notes:
- If you haven’t guessed already, there will be more Mountain Goats on the countdown, only quite a bit higher up.
i am the worst at talking about songs
yellowcars replied to your photo: i have no regrets
ooh i’ve never listened to them, do you have a recommendation for any songs to listen to first or something?IF YOU MEAN THE MOUNTAIN GOATS omg my heart just, like, swelled.
obviously, a great place to start out is this post because it’s a really good introduction to them as a band, with their two pretty distinct sounds (low-fi and what they have now). BUT. I SHALL GIVE YOU MY OWN PERSONAL FAVOURITES.
(brief band members-introduction: john darnielle is this band’s constant. he’s the vocalist, the lyricist, etc. until tallahassee it was pretty much just him and his amateur guitar skills, just rocking out, but then peter hughes came on board to play bass & other things, and there’s been a rotation of drummers/other instrumentalists since then.)
from tg&y: this is a live version of the song, just fyi. and it’s quickly become one of my favourites of all time? it makes me so brilliantly sad and nostalgic and weepy and just. the repetition of “hang on to your dreams until” and the variation at the end of the phrase? gets me every time. which is to say: this song is absolutely stunning, and i’m not doing it justice at all. just listen to it.
love love love: this is the first tmg song i ever fell in love with, fittingly enough. i think john green used it in one of his videos, and then ALL WAS LOST. each time i listen to it, it feels new — because of the lyrics, because of the beautiful piano, because of his voice, no sé.
no children (and the magnificent acapella version): this is the first song of theirs that i fell in love with that wasn’t that quiet, melancholy kind of style that i tend to drift towards (see: from tg&y, love love love, ezekiel, never quite free, etc). it’s a really angry song and remarkably fun to sing along to, but it’s still lyrically gorgeous. this entire album (tallahassee — a personal favourite, the first tmg i listened to in full) is about a couple (known as the alpha couple) constantly on the edge of divorce, and this is like the explosion of their relationship, the moment every part of the anger and resentment comes out, and it’s brutal, absolutely brutal, but so so stunning.
ezekiel 7 and the permanent efficacy of grace: this is the last track on tmg’s bible concept album “the life of the world to come” (which is an absolutely flaw-free record. it was incredibly difficult not to just recommend every song off of it, in all honesty), and it’s just. breathtakingly gorgeous. i can’t even put into words why i love it and how brilliant it is, but. absolutely amazing.
this year: another song that’s perfect for singing along to. it’s up-beat and tailor-made for blasting during exam week because YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE IT THROUGH THIS YEAR IF IT KILLS YOU!!!!!!
dance music: very much the compatriot of ‘this year’ in its tempo, theme of abuse, etc. jd’s phrasing in it is absolutely astounding to me (the start of the second verse — “ok look / i’m seventeen years old / and you’re the last best thing i’ve got going” — is my personal favourite example). he’s said in interviews that he tries so hard to make his songs seem like something someone could have said, with all of the inflection and intonation that involves, and i think he really nails it here.
game shows touch our lives: “people say friends don’t destroy one another / what do they know about friends” is one of my favourite lines of all time, and it comes from this song. what more needs to be said? (that it’s melancholy and melodic, poignant and lyrically complex, that it’s about that same alpha couple as in ‘no children’ but reflects an entirely different facet of the relationship, “maybe everything that falls down / eventually rises”, etc.) ugh, i love.
damn these vampires: this is the opening track on their latest album (“all eternals deck”, which is quite good? but not my favourite tmg album by any stretch of the imagination). it makes me feel so many feelings, but i can’t quite put my finger on what feelings, exactly, and why? it’s a great song; not my favourite, but really, really good.
never quite free: also from “all eternals deck”. it’s oddly hopeful, for a tmg track? idk, i really like it, but i don’t have all that much to say about stuff from aed. definitely worth listening to, though.
the best ever death-metal band in denton: omg so low-fi. but, like. endearingly so. HOW COULD YOU NOT LOVE A SONG THAT INCLUDES “HAIL SATAN” AS A LYRIC, THAT’S WHAT I WANT TO KNOW. idk, this could be an acquired taste? like, i never used to love this song as much as i do now, but “when you punish a person for dreaming his dreams / don’t expect him to thank or forgive you” is now in my pantheon of favourite lyrics, so.
genesis 30:3: OH GOD, THIS SONG. john green quoted it when henry was born, and. like. it’s just so quiet and small and beautiful. “i will do / what you ask me to do / because of how i feel about you” runs through my brain when i try to sleep, sometimes, and it’s just. this tangible devotion is threaded through each lyric and it’s an emotion that isn’t represented in culture enough, i feel? so this song, it just. it gets me in interesting and ineffable ways.
1 john 4:16: another freakishly beautiful, touching, quiet song. (i think i have a type.) the way the music swells at “but i won’t be afraid of anything ever again” and then drifts back into the slow piano alsdfsfdkjsdf i’ve talked so much about lyrical content in this post, but the actual instrumentals are stunning as well, in most of these songs. but especially this one. the slow procession of the piano and the strings and the sparse, simple vocals are just. breathtaking.
up the wolves: NOW FOR A CHANGE OF PACE!!!!! this was probably the second tmg i ever fell in love with, and 80% of that is because of what happens after the first verse ends. “our mother has been absent ever since we founded rome” starts one of my favourite sequences of lines of all time, climaxing in “it’s going to take you people years to recover from all the damage”. i think john himself says it best, so i’m just going to copy/paste from some random site:
“I’m always trying to figure out what to say about this god *&@# song. Part of me wants to say look it’s about revenge, but as soon as I say that… no, that’s not quite it. Part of me wants to say it’s about the satisfaction of not needing revenge… and i say no, that some new age stuff. I think it’s a song about the moment in your quest for revenge when you learn to embrace the futility of it. The moment where you know the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you’re headed is not the direction you want to go, yet you’re going to head that way a while longer cause that’s just the kind of person you are.”
yeah. just. yeah. ♥
hast thou considered the tetrapod: continuation of the abusive step-father theme, aka the one that kills me every time because johnnnnn :(. the lyrics of this one always get me, and “one of these days i’m going to wriggle up on dry land” is so bizarrely hopeful that it makes me teary.
[zip here]
………
i have a lot of feelings about the mountain goats. sorry. D:
The Mountain Goats - The Anglo-Saxons (MP3)
John Darnielle on this song:
“I blush with shame every time I hear it: the liberties this lyric takes with matters of historical record are inexcusable. The Picts painted their bodies blue, not the Anglo-Saxons. The Romans, visiting England with a view to expanding the empire, took note of this unusual practice. Centuries later, a singer in California would note that ‘Yeah, the Picts!’ didn’t have the same ring to it as ‘Yeah, the Anglo-Saxons!’ One hopes, perhaps vainly, that the ‘all you’d get/alphabet’ rhyme offsets the glaring inaccuracies at play here.”
I, for one, will forgive John Darnielle anything, thanks to rhymes such as:
Yeah they were men on a mission,
preserving their poetry by an oral tradition.
Yeah an oral tradition is all you’d get
until St. Augustine brought them the alphabet.
Things I Want to Remember #18
Life is too short to refrain from getting tattoos of jam jars.
The sun above me and a concrete floor below
Scratch at the chain links maybe bare my teeth for show
Fed twice a day I don’t go hungry anymore
Feel in my bones just what the future has in store
I pace in circles so the camera will see
Look hard at my stripes, there’ll be no more after me
Laze by the shoreline while the sailors disembark
Scratch out a place to sit and rest down in the dark
Smell something burning downwind just a little ways
They set up camp and sing and sweat and work for days
I have no fear of anyone I’m dumb and wild and free
I am a flightless bird and there’ll be no more after me
In Costa Rica in a burrow underground
Climb to the surface, blink my eyes and look around
I’m all alone here as I try my tiny song
Claim my place beneath the sky but i won’t be here for long
I sang all night the moon shone on me through the trees
No brothers left and there’ll be no more after me
Deuteronomy 2:10 / John Darnielle
First verse: the Australian Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine), the largest known carnivorous marsupial of modern times which became extinct during the 20th century.
Second verse: the Dodo (Raphus cucullatus), a flightless bird related to pigeons and doves which became extinct by 1681, killed by Dutch sailors in Mauritius either for themselves or domesticated animals.
Third verse: the Golden Toad (Bufo periglenes), which has been extinct since 1989, owing to either disease or vast habitation loss.
(via deuteronomy210)
The Mountain Goats - Love Love Love
“The point of the song is we are very well damaged by the legacy of the romantic poet, that we think of love as a thing that is with strings and is this force for good and then if something bad happens that’s not love…I don’t know so much about that, I don’t know that the Greeks weren’t right, I think that they were, that love can beat a path through everything, that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its objective which is just its expression of itself. You know my stepfather mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us and well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing a lot of what I perceive is terrible damage, yet we talk about love as this benign comfortable force: it is wild.”
John Darnielle.
The Mountain Goats Reissue Old Cassettes (!!!!!!)
“The songs you find on this compact disc originally appeared on two cassettes. To elaborate further about that—to say, for example, that the songs originally appeared ‘on two cassettes that were released in ____ and ____’—would misrepresent the spirit of their time. These tapes did not have release dates. No one anticipated their coming into the world, and very few noticed or cared. All previous eras cross at some point into the territory of the unimaginable, and so it is with the days of tape-trading. The obscurity in which these songs were incubated and born and brought into their faint light is a state of being which has passed into history.”
In which JD writes the most romantic lines (we will recognize each other and see ourselves for the first time the way we really are) in songs that start with the narrator shooting someone in self-defense.
An introduction to The Mountain Goats
A: Dance Music (studio/”hi-fi”) / B: Source Decay (lo-fi)
44 tracks is DEFINITELY far too long for a primer, so my advice would be to go for Dance Music first, even though most of my favourites are probably on Source Decay. DM is far more accessible (hell, I started it off with that song that EVERYBODY loves), and it’s an easier in to the wonders of John Darnielle. But once you’re in, you sure as hell won’t want to come out any time soon, so Source Decay’s your best bet from there. Or you could just go for both of them just now.
Dance Music: http://www.mediafire.com/?ntde1b426h6s3sf
Source Decay: http://www.mediafire.com/?udxtmhclj2t9wdw
The files may look jumbled in the folder, but they should be correctly tagged once you import them into iTunes.
Tracklistings:
DANCE MUSIC
- No Children
- Oceanographer’s Choice
- Going to Utrecht
- Autoclave
- Genesis 3:23
- Your Belgian Things
- Michael Myers Resplendent
- Nova Scotia
- Genesis 30:3
- Matthew 25:21
- This Year
- Cotton
- In Corolla
- Love Love Love
- Heretic Pride
- Never Quite Free
- Game Shows Touch Our Lives
- Outer Scorpion Squadron
- Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod?
- Dance Music
- Letter From Belgium
- Pale Green Things
SOURCE DECAY
- There Will Be No Divorce
- The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton
- Elijah
- Cobscook Bay
- Color In Your Cheeks
- Jenny
- We Have Seen The Enemy
- Anti-Music Song
- Riches and Wonders
- Weekend in Western Illinois
- Shadow Song
- The Sign
- Evening in Stalingrad
- Source Decay
- “Bluejays and Cardinals”
- Prana Ferox
- Twin Human Highway Flares
- Going to Georgia
- Alphabetizing
- Golden Boy
- Snow Owl
- Yoga
Sorry that I keep posting songs (especially because the album pictures are so big [mostly because the album pictures are so big]), but I need this song. I need it need it need it. Need it.
I am drowning, there is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unloveable hand
I gave this song to my high school boyfriend long before we broke up, and it became one of his favorites. His friends thought the song was a joke and loved it, too, before they realized it was sincere.
But that’s not why I’m listening to it today.
I’M LISTENING TO IT BECAUSE I AM EMOTIONAL, HIGH ON CAFFEINE, AND UNSURE ABOUT WHAT I AM SUPPOSED TO DO. I AM SUPPOSED TO SPEND THE NEXT 48 HOURS DRUNK. I CANNOT HANDLE THESE EMOTIONS RIGHT NOW. GET THEM OUT, GET THEM OUT, GET THEM OUT NOW.
