THOUGHTS ON the MOUNTAIN GOATS

May 30

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:

May 20

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

caligulablushed:

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.

May 3

Things I Want to Remember #18

tisket:

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)

May 2

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

theghostregion:

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.

May 1

The Mountain Goats Reissue Old Cassettes (!!!!!!)

emilywhereverimayfindher:

“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.”

“This is a song I always tell a very long story about at the beginning because I want to make sure that the one person who’s in the crowd who is actually experiencing the story at that exact moment knows that I have got your back. It’s hard for me to imagine that there’s anyone who hasn’t experienced that crushing loss of waking up one morning and having this brief moment where you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I’m waking up, it’s nice, I slept, I’m waking up, the light is coming through the window, it’s all right…oh fuck. I broke up with the person I love yesterday.’ And then suddenly, it’s really this amazing, cinematic thing where the darkness floods in from the corners of your eyes, and if you’re a big ol’ drama queen like me, you just start crying immediately….It sounds funny when you’re talking about it, but if you’re down in it, it’s like, seriously, you think nothing could be worse. If they’d cut off both my arms, I’d rather them do that than for me to feel this feeling that so-and-so is gone, and isn’t coming back, and it’s so horrible, and so whoever you are that’s suffering, I wrote this song for you. It’s called Woke Up New.” John Darnielle (via tr0n-c4t)

Apr 29

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

withoutmyth:

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.

Apr 28

cheerdown:

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

funny-looking:

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.

Apr 26

tempurabat:

New Chevrolet in Flames by John Darnielle

When it comes to TMG songs, I usually prefer it when the arrangement’s just JD playing solo, but this is one of the few TMG songs that work better with a full band setup (imo anyway). I haven’t heard this acoustic yet, buuut I’ve tried playing it on a guitar.

Then again, John Darnielle could probably play it solo and still blow me away. His cover of “Doctor Wu” by Steely Dan was amazing.

Apr 25

You should go and listen to the John Darnielle/Anonymous 4/Owen Pallett collab over at NPR now. It's got a bunch of new Mountain Goats songs and is crazy gorgeous. That's all.

Apr 24

mswolfpants:

You Were Cool- The Mountain Goats

Out of hundreds of beautiful, powerful, perfect songs, this is one of the most touching. I’m constantly wondering how I lived without The Mountain Goats.

Apr 21

oneweekonemix:

Mix 2 : Tracks 17-19

Theme: Illegal Activity

17. Palmcorder Yajna — The Mountain Goats

Has a song detailing a drug den ever been so lovingly described, or ever sounded so cheerful? It’s not as if the details shouldn’t give you pause. “Carpenter ants in the dresser, flies in the screen,” John Darnielle sings in his patent nasally voice, and later he explains the first of several dreams, a house haunted by “all you tweakers with your hands out.” This song was the first single from The Mountain Goats’ 2004 album We Shall All Be Healed, which was inspired by Darnielle’s experiences as a teenager in California and Portland, Oregon, hanging around a group of friends, all addicted to meth. When introducing the song live, Darnielle has referenced a “love-hate” relationship with meth, and one can get that impression here as well. Despite the gruesome details, he describes his companions, with laugh lines on their faces, reflective tape on their pants, occasionally screaming that they can’t take it anymore, and all this signifies a feeling of destructive commodore. And then there are those fascinating dreams, always punctuated with the image of “headstones climbing up the hills.” One gets the sense that Darnielle is fantasizing about him and his junkie friends being wiped out by a massive meth lab explosion, which, it seems, would suit him just fine. Is the final dream a reference to a professional meth lab where “shiny new machines” manufacture what the tweakers need? Or is it a reference to all the many factories that do exist, creating what any consumer could demand or want? I prefer this interpretation because it suggests that in the end, whether we’re destroying ourselves through drugs or in a slower way, those headstones will still be there waiting for us all.

18. Staggolee — Pacific Gas & Electric

Stagger Lee is a murder ballad that originated in the early 20th century and has been covered hundreds of times, often with the name changing with it (Stackerlee, Stack O’Lee, Stack-a-Lee, etc). The song was based on the murder of Billy Lyons by Stagger Lee Shelton, a legendary pimp who was part of a St. Louis group of crooks known as The Macks. In most versions of the songs, Stagger Lee is a figure so fearsome that his neck refuses to crack and goes to hell to take over duties from the devil (the recently departed Dick Clark made Lloyd Price change the lyrics so that nobody died, however, when Price was to perform his cover on American Band Stand). The song is so legendary that two of the artists on this mix also covered it; Nick Cave (on the same Murder Ballads album) and The Clash (a part of “Wrong Em’ Boyo,” a cover of The Rulers’ song of the same name, working a part of Stagger Lee into the fabric of the rest of the tune).

This version from late 60’s/early 70’s blues-rock outfit Pacific Gas & Electric just has this wonderful, bluesy, relaxed charm to it, with that hiccuping harmonica and casual beat. You get the impression of a village elder out on his porch telling you about a real bad guy he encountered at one time. Grab some iced tea or a beer and raise a glass in thanks that this bad guy is no longer with us.

19. Cocaine Blues (Live) — Johnny Cash

From one mythology to another, Johnny Cash has a lot of outlaw songs, but this is one of his most rousing, and there’s something especially fitting about it being sung to a room full of convicts, who respond with much enthusiasm. Cash was wise to bust out this cover of a 1947 tale of drug abuse and murder to his Folsom Prison audience (it was first recorded by country-western singer Roy Hogseed), but playing up his “Man in Black” stature while making clever edits (“Folsom” prison rather than “San Quentin”) allowed his audience to create even more empathy with him. Not only was this guy playing for them, he even seems to understand; and while Cash never lived the life of a criminal, he easily admits that he very well could have. This performance here suggests that he didn’t mind at least thinking about it, and to this day, singing about a horrible crime and subsequent trial to a room full of prisoners is quintessential rock n’roll attitude. I love hearing Cash’s voice relishing some of the more dramatic lines, playing up his bad boy persona. Sometimes, the stars align and there’s just a perfect mixture of song, singer and audience. This is one of those times.

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.

i am the worst at talking about songs

Things I Want to Remember #18

The Mountain Goats Reissue Old Cassettes (!!!!!!)

You should go and listen to the John Darnielle/Anonymous 4/Owen Pallett collab over at NPR now. It's got a bunch of new Mountain Goats songs and is crazy gorgeous. That's all.