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.

Jul 7

starksandrecreation:

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. 


Jun 25

fengon:

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 moment

jesus christ 


Jun 22

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?


Jun 5

camerontop100:

#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.

May 30

May 20

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

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

“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

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

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

  1. No Children
  2. Oceanographer’s Choice
  3. Going to Utrecht
  4. Autoclave
  5. Genesis 3:23
  6. Your Belgian Things
  7. Michael Myers Resplendent
  8. Nova Scotia
  9. Genesis 30:3
  10. Matthew 25:21
  11. This Year
  12. Cotton
  13. In Corolla
  14. Love Love Love
  15. Heretic Pride
  16. Never Quite Free
  17. Game Shows Touch Our Lives
  18. Outer Scorpion Squadron
  19. Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod?
  20. Dance Music
  21. Letter From Belgium
  22. Pale Green Things

SOURCE DECAY

  1. There Will Be No Divorce
  2. The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton
  3. Elijah
  4. Cobscook Bay
  5. Color In Your Cheeks
  6. Jenny
  7. We Have Seen The Enemy
  8. Anti-Music Song
  9. Riches and Wonders
  10. Weekend in Western Illinois
  11. Shadow Song
  12. The Sign
  13. Evening in Stalingrad
  14. Source Decay
  15. “Bluejays and Cardinals”
  16. Prana Ferox
  17. Twin Human Highway Flares
  18. Going to Georgia
  19. Alphabetizing
  20. Golden Boy
  21. Snow Owl
  22. 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.

(via funny-looking-deactivated201207)


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