The Mountain Goats' Tallahassee

We’ve been writing about music almost as long as we’ve been writing professionally, e.g. getting paid. In that time we’ve heard so many great artists deserved a bigger spotlight. A few got it.

Neko Case was extraordinary and you could tell. That she grew to be appreciated on wider scale has been such a treat. We did a cover story on her for The Big Takeover, then attended a packed sold out show at the First Avenue. Not only was she typically outstanding but it was a delight to imagine back to seeing her as half of the Corn Sisters a quarter-century hence, just weeks after 9/11 playing to a few dozen at the Knitting Factory. We knew even then one of her shows were not to be missed. How gratifying to see her reach this level.

The same could be said of John Darnielle and his band, The Mountain Goats. We were already late to the party, it seemed, when we jumped on the bandwagon with this album. He felt like an established artist, a decade in, with six albums to his name. This was the first album he’d done that wasn’t recorded directly into a boombox, which was a primitivist approach even at that time, if punk AF. This album was the soundtrack to my move to North Carolina where, as it turned out, he settled not far from my house. We weren’t neighbors, and he wasn’t at the bars, but we did have occasion to play Scrabble with him for the local alt-weekly and meet his lovely wife. We still adore this disc.

Though there’s no strong recollection of it, we’re pretty confident we saw them perform at the Cat’s Cradle while we were there. But we saw them again at Oberlin maybe four or five years after leaving Durham, in the school cafeteria, it seemed for a rabid crowd of a hundred and some odd dozens. The next time we would see them, it was at the Hard Rock Cafe behind Fenway Park for a few thousand fans. Someone got Tik Tok famous for the absolutely outstanding song, “No Children.” Well deserved. The arts is only intermittently a meritocracy, so seeing some of the most talented people succeed is some salve for seeing so many worthy people fall by the wayside.

We spent a dozen years in Tallahassee, as long as we’d been anywhere before Cleveland (nearly two “cycles,” about 13.5 yrs) and that appealed, as did the song’s promise of new beginnings. Of course, in the album it’s a sort of false promise. If we are able to finagle another interview with John, we want to talk to him about his characters’ destructive impulses. In the terrific “Palmcorder Yajna,” he hopes that if someone should break into their room in the night, “I hope they incinerate everybody in it.” There’s a little latter day Kurtz, exterminating all the brutes in this album’s centerpiece, “No Children,” (can you imagine creating “outsider” art heard 81 million times, just on Spotify?), where he suggests that if he drowns, she’s “coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand, and I hope you die, I hope we both die.”

We pray for you – expecting what you get for this token measure, though show knows, maybe there is some benefit for the prayer, if only in lower cortisol – that you never are in a relationship like that, or that you get out before it reaches that pitch. We are sad to say we’ve been in a stubborn relational game of chicken, and are glad that when we finally walked out that door she stayed the hell out of the way.

Oftentimes in life we have to believe we are worth more before we can ever have more. That’s what we are hoping for at the end. There is a kind of nobility in a consuming conflagration so long as it’s figurative. The idea is to step free – burned clean like the phoenix, to rise again, free from the psychological baggage that may have yoked you.

Of course, there is the concern, which is the nature of are flailing human project, that when he offers to lift his voice and “you’re stirring from your slumber, we’ve got something hateful on our minds / oh sing, sing sing, for dying of the day / sing for the flames that will rip through here and the smoke that will carry us away / sing for the damage we have done / and the worse things we will do.”

As abject surrender goes, it doesn’t get much worse, and that’s hitting home as the midterms approach and democracy feels much like a wing and a prayer, a phrase coined during our last battle with fascism, further from home.

There are too many highlights here, but we can’t help ourselves, the newsprint’s cheap!

It begins with an ode of love, a moment that doesn't quite fit – "moon stuttering like film stuck in a projector." And it's true, as he sings on the title track, "half the whole town, gone for the summer." Not only is college out and the "terrible silence" that descends on a town of impoverished culture but also unbearable 100% humidity and 90+ degree heat.

We don’t know how much time you need to have spent in Florida to appreciate the Redneck Riviera aspect of the peninsula. There's a wild too-much to the freedom there in the stix that breeds Florida men. When he sings “Bad News came up from Tampa, in the back of a truck, doing 90 up the interstate,” on “First Few Desperate Hours,” it's essentially Tuesday.

It’s the first of an album of ill-tidings and dark forebodings ignored. It’s a new start that begins with the story, which you, as a veteran of narrative knows will soon go tragically awry or we wouldn’t be here. (If something bad it isn’t coming from Tampa, it’s still mired in Jacksonville.)

The beautiful use of the humid, over-drenched environs. The Devil rolls in during a misting “light spring rain” and their hopes sag (flag, wane) like withering flowers, to sun peeking into the hungover house “like a killer thru the curtain.” More references to the redolent surroundings, but those are cloven footprintts in the garden.

We’ve neglected to mention until now that this is the tale of a new start for two alcoholics, which already tells you how previous attempts at sobriety have gone. So when their spirits drop “like flies” (shelf life: 15-30 days), you can bet “there’s a stomach churning shift in the way the land lies.” The last image is so resounding, “a hillside struggling to stand.”

There isn’t a “Southwood Plantation Road,” but if you could composite the omnipresent, winding, canopy roads, dripping Spanish Moss like stalactites that surrounded Tallahassee, it would be called just that. Sadly the town is losing that character, but that’s another story. The fuzzy distorted keyboards is a nice pairing for this jangly racing riff, and this is one of my three favorite songs on the album.

The series of metaphors about dangerous conversations has to be familiar to anyone in a fraught relationship. “Our conversations are like mine fields, no one’s found a safe way through one yet.” So many war metaphors on this album, culminating in perhaps my all-time favorite couplet of all time, later in the album. The idea of this buzzing keyboard sound beneath “where the high wires cross / where the fat crows flock.”

Such a great implication. This is where hungry crows go for a good meal. What a benighted place. Later he compares the house to a Louisiana graveyard: “Where nothing stays buried.” Ouch!

There’s a sweetness to “Game Shows Touch Our Lives” that works perfectly in this thematic arc. We should mention that the alcoholic couple starring in this concept album were known as the “Alpha Couple,” because they often appeared in songs Darnielle wrote with Alpha in the title, (such as "Alpha Incipiens" and "Alpha Desperation March"). The song includes this savage description of their co-dependent spiral: “I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing upon which our survival depends / People say friends don’t destroy one another, what do they know about friends?”

Just writing that phrase gets me moist at the sort of desperation one endures when your self-esteem is shit.

“The House That Dripped Blood” is a claustrophobic little number that helps set up the house as a third character in their drama, the sort of melting pot they never leave as the flames raise higher cooking their dreams. It’s followed by the absolutely diaphanous “Idylls of the King.” Before this song I had never heard of Idylls, but as it sounds, it’s an idyllic setting a peaceful joyous space or time. We didn’t realize it was Tennyson, but it’s about the rise and fall of Arthur and the fragility of all endeavor.

It’s the carefree cousin of “Game Shows,” and features yet another killer metaphor: “This day, full of promise and potential, more clay pigeons for you and me: all of them, all lined up.” Even without the dysfunctional relationship, there’s a beauty and subtle gratitude to the foolish dream, before disaster descends (from their own hand, naturally, they’re awful!). “How long will we ride this way about? /
How long 'til someone caves under the pressure?”

Killer subtle line: “cicadas and locusts And the shrieking of innumerable gibbons.” Yeah this is some apocalyptic shit, but it’s funny because there were so many sounds at night in Tallahassee because it used to be in the middle of the woods more than 45 miles from the shore. Almost no big cities were built in Florida that far from the shore. (It’s one reason why Orlando is a circle of Hell in the summer.)

This sweet song is followed by the blow up of all blow ups, the heavyweight champions of all songs that exist to say, “Fuck me? No, FUCK YOU,” the fatal rural one-car accident of relationship songs: “No Children.” Man is this darkness alluring, and Darnielle, who listens to black metal, is perhaps some kind of gateway drug to nihilism? Still gathering evidence. Too many exterior factors pointing in similar direction.

As thoroughly delightful as this song is, our favorite part might be how it opens with a hate pact against the people who didn’t take their destructive cry for help seriously enough and forgave them. We’ve argued with John that there’s something alluring about their twisted camaraderie.

Raising a cheers to the idea that maybe a lot of cheery aphorisms were written by people who later did kill themselves: “Our friends say it's darkest before the sun rises / We're pretty sure they're all wrong.”

The slew of foreboding metaphors that begin with the vaguely Fear & Loathing-style rave-up “See America Right,” will come to fruit in the following song. Hats off to “Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp and the weather’s getting warmer.” Also, dude is waking two miles to a Greyhound carrying a case of Vodka. Also, not an unfamiliar sight in Florida.

Another pretty, folk tune about “Peacocks” on the front lawn touches on the random beauty and wildness of Tallahassee once upon a time. The song’s epitomized by this idea of lazy (drunken) indolence captured in this line: “Hands grasping and groping / Seizing opportunity right where it lies.” Real entreprenuers these two. What kind of opportunities are there lying at your feet?

This is followed by the terrific, "International Small Arms Traffic Blues," an inspired title for a series of dark relational metaphors. We marvel at Darnielle’s capacity for this kind of stuff. “My love is like a powder keg in the corner of an empty warehouse, somewhere just outside of town, about to burn down.” “My love is like a Cuban plane flying up the coast from Havana, up the coast to the ‘glades, Soviet-made.” All just appetizers.

“Our love is like the border between Greece & Albania / Trucks loaded down with weapons, crossing over every night, moon yellow and bright

There is a shortage in the blood supply, but there is no shortage of blood / the way I feel about you baby can’t explain it, you got the best of my love.”

Just devastating. As someone whose love was bested in marriage, we can relate. At some point the battle of ego was more important than the union. That’s my favorite couplet of all time. Such a dark but maybe more honest portrait of our world.

“Have to Explode” is pretty dark too. “Name one thing about us that anyone could love,” he sings. “We put out the red carpet when rotten luck comes down the road.” The sad truth contained in the last lines, “Something here will have to explode,” as the piano tinkles out ahead of the strummed guitar.

Having survived my own codependent relationship(s) there is little room for us to talk, and we’re somewhat embarrassed that we asked Darnielle if there wasn’t something heroic in the self-immolating flames they ended their relation. He was pretty much aghast, which is why that’s one of the main things we remember about our discussion. Our poor self-esteem making it’s gun-on-the-wall appearance.

Yet some two decades removed from that unfortunate suggestion, we still believe there’s something sweet amidst the bitterness of their relationship’s death spiral. They’re like Romeo & Juliet, if both were kind of disgusting people who make epically bad choices, and we're sort of relieved when they're gone.

Imagine a song about Olivia Nuzzi & RFK Jr. if they had loved each other and not their reflection in a stream? And there love was so self-destructive and easy that they took themselves out, to the relief of just about all their friends, and even people who don’t know them? Just speaking fancifully and metaphorically. We’d all be a bit happy and even for them like, “Wow, those two morons found someone to destroy themselves with. Not everyone is so fortunate as to have someone to form a long-term suicide pact with.”

That’s probably just the loneliness talking. But there is the idea as we go bowling alone of a certain allure to setting your life on fire if you have someone next to you to share in the fireworks display.

Not setting our life on fire any more than doing a webzine without any income in a field that is only involved with propaganda and public relations anymore. It’s all a matter of degrees, once it's above 150.