I didn’t listen to The Mountain Goats until several years after someone introduced me to them because for a while everyone I knew who liked them kind of sucked. At some point, though, I heard “No Children,” and that was that. One afternoon I found myself in the bathroom of my apartment, screaming the song’s cathartic refrain at the top of my lungs: I HOPE YOU DIE! I HOPE WE BOTH DIE!
My friend Eva always tells me that getting out of a marriage is much harder than getting out of a non-marriage romantic relationship, regardless of the relationship’s length or quality or the relative done-ness with the whole ordeal of either party. There’s the often complex legal question of divorce, of course, but setting that aside, there’s also the following matter: marriage is both past and future, present and promise. The end of a marriage is not only the loss of what you had, but also of what you would’ve had. It’s the loss of forever.
Deciding to part with forever means that, at some point, you have to hit escape velocity. That’s what “No Children” is about. It’s about the moments right before the foot goes all the way down on the gas pedal — I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out / you’d stay the hell out of my way — and the nose of the plane points directly into the water — I am drowning / there is no sign of land — and you hope that you and everyone else on the plane dies — you are coming down with me / hand in unlovable hand — because it’s easier to imagine total decimation than it is to imagine surviving the end of something that was meant to last forever. Death was supposed to do you part, after all.
The plane crashes; we miraculously survive. Then, we either deal with the wreckage or go on carrying it around, half-living, unable to extend our arms for fear of letting it fall or else handing it to other people, saddling them with the weight until they inevitably drop it all off on our doorstep. Things end, and we don’t.
That’s The Mountain Goats in a nutshell, to me, a novice listener.
But don’t settle for that take. This week, I invited my friend Tyler Dupuis, a big-time Mountain Goats fan with fully formed opinions and a vast knowledge of their catalog, to write about the band. Tyler also has a beautiful newsletter called the monthly poem, where every month he writes about a poem that he also recites from memory. It’s a gorgeous practice, to carry poetry around in this way, and an act of generosity to share it as Tyler does.
The thing about picking the platonic ideal of a Mountain Goats song is that you have several hundred candidates to choose from. John Darnielle’s been writing and releasing music under the name since 1991, with the official releases, as of this writing, totaling six cassettes, 19 albums, three compilation albums, and 25 EPs — and that’s not counting the several dozen unofficial or unreleased songs variously catalogued on wikis and rare tapes. Even then, the band’s approach to music, in subject and in form, has varied widely over their thirty-year lifetime. Early songs sound wrought out of the air and howled onto tape via John’s Panasonic boombox mere minutes after their birth (and they often were), while the late 90s saw some four-tracked tunes with bass, strings, harmonica, or some other accompaniment all taking a turn, until the early 2000s opened up to a full band and studio recording, while John started shifting from playing guitar to more and more piano. The jarring, voracious chords of the early days gave way to longer, more carefully constructed songs with full choruses and bridges.
In subject and setting, Mountain Goats songs have been everywhere, all over the earth and throughout time, from Byzantium to 1970s Southern California, from Bombay alleyways to the streets of SoHo. In them, desperate characters fall into poisonous love; relationships surge and falter. There are drug runs and burning houses, tender love and pistol grips. Babies are born in San Bernardino on the same album that a Jamaican deejay is murdered in Kingston in 1983.
It would seem foolhardy to pick even a single album, let alone a single song to exemplify this band. Any selection will have its detractions. Regardless, I will attempt to do it, as there is a particular kind of song that characterizes The Mountain Goats. Making a choice like this is just what we would expect from a character in a Goats song after all: it’s a foolish act made from a place of love.
No one will be surprised to know I’ve not selected “This Year” or “No Children.” These songs are incredible, meant to be sung at highest volume, but their studio-recorded sheen would cause even a moderate fan to decry: we demand lo-fi! The Panasonic's familiar motor hum that begins well over half the songs in their recorded catalogue deserves our respect. We might consider then the similarly anthemic “Going to Georgia,” a favorite of those who’ve dug back to their first CD release Zopilote Machine. It seems a strong contender: there’s desperation, love, a hint of violence, and its chorus hollers out from a slamming down-strum D-Asus-G progression that cropped up often in this era. Even John admits, in the opening verse of another heavyweight, the unreleased “You Were Cool,” that
This is a song with the same four chords
I use most of the time
When I've got something on my mind
And I don't want to squander the moment
Trying to come up with a better way
To say what I want to say
...though he throws in an E-minor for good measure on this one. It’s a sound that captures a great deal of the spirit of the early-middle Mountain Goats: you could do well enough to write a fake Goats song of this era by playing a D chord, doing a little run on the high-e string, and then smashing down to a minor chord before resolving to G — a lift and fall, verse and refrain.
“You Were Cool” is more mature than that, and the laid-open earnestness of the song takes it to a different, more personal place, much like “This Year” did around the same time. Now, if you’re a more experienced Goats listener, I’m sure “You Were Cool” is the song you were expecting. Not too well-known, but terribly earnest, sad and hopeful and heartfelt, so much so that you can hear it in the tremor of John's voice on some of the unofficial recordings of the song. Lines like I hope the people who did you wrong / have trouble sleeping at night are so cutting that you simultaneously want to burst into tears and also have it tattooed, visibly, across your arm to remind you of how it makes you feel. But I think it only circles the outer edge of the innermost levels of Goats songs, and the fact it has no definitive recording still leaves the fuzz-heads out in the cold.
The list runs on. There’s always “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” a powerful two-minute survival ballad with its famous hail Satan! refrain. We could point to the EPs, finding glorious, oft-requested gems on Nine Black Poppies. Or maybe the wonderfully sad piano ballads from The Life of the World to Come or the more recent and equally melancholic “Picture of My Dress?” And we haven’t even dug into the 81 songs that make up the tape compilations on Protein Source of the Future...Now!, Bitter Melon Farm, and Ghana, on which there are numerous incredible songs such as “Golden Boy,” “Going to Port Washington,” or “Love Cuts the Strings,” all fair candidates.
We will set all of these aside. I am here to reveal to you the most Mountain Goats song there is. The platonic ideal of a Mountain Goats song, the one you should add to the top of a playlist you’re making for the curious new listener, from which stems every possible direction of exploration. From the 2002 Letter to Belgium single, I submit to you “Attention All Pickpockets:”
There’s John leading off the song by introducing it, still without a title at that point. Many early Goats songs began with a quick introduction (“Hello, it's The Mountain Goats, at 10:24 on Sunday the 20th of December, and this is a horror story!”) or at least, a random radio signal abruptly cut off by the record button. There’s no whirring motor here, but the roughness of this untitled demo speaks to these roots. Then there’s a count and the song begins, and we hear the chopped major and suspended chords ringing out that seem to say, “Prepare yourself, this is a Mountain Goats song.” Along with the whining melodica we hear the first line, In comes you / not the same person that I once knew, and now we’re thinking, “Ah yes, this is a Mountain Goats song.” Just in case it wasn’t clear, there’s a melodic lift on the next verse over the words peeking through / the fisheye lens at you — what would a Goats song be without a sharply sung phrase like that? — and then John hammers on the F chord before the gang-vocal chorus rings out:
And the cornet blows / where the oleander grows
And us two / Not the same people that our old friends knew
...hitting the word oleander just as an A-minor chord slips in. I dare you to not hear this in your head for days if not longer, prompting you to hum this strange refrain out loud to whoever’s around. Listen to this band enough and you’ll be singing all kinds of odd fragments at inappropriate times.
The story is clear though: here are two people who do not recognize each other any longer, whose relationship has dissolved irretrievably (around drugs, in this case, though this was only made clear to me from some stage banter that was captured on Goats wiki). She comes to his door one last time; in my mind, he doesn’t even open it to her. There’s nothing here of a meeting, a farewell, final words or demands. There’s just the fisheye lens, and then her walking away. Whatever used to be between them is gone, and now all he can see through the peephole as she leaves is her form, the way she dresses, something he once admired, though now his thoughts are only that I hope you’re happy with what you’ve chosen. I hope they take from you everything you’ve got.
And then, with less than a minute left, John’s voice jumps up, way up to that familiar yelp that characterized many of the early songs, telling us of the sadness and anger rising up from the narrator: I hope they’ve got / plenty of money where you’re going. The chorus comes in once more, and then after just a little over two minutes, the song takes its leave.
For The Mountain Goats, this is one of the classic stories: the couple who destroy themselves but can’t help watching the whole thing burn in slow-motion, or in this case, played out under horns and deadly-toxic blooms. It’s right up there with the 30-odd song cycle chronicling the shambles of the “Alpha” couple; it’s the ruined rooms and the bruised earth of “Your Belgian Things,” the fury of “Dilaudid” or the mess of “The Mess Inside.” It’s the drawn-out vowels of going to Georgia, ah ah ah! or the sure-as-hell table-pounding final verses of “Up the Wolves.” It’s a short anthem of loss, escape, or maybe both, which is to say, it is quintessentially a Mountain Goats song.