Ab Urbe Condita: An Introduction to The Mountain Goats.
1. Mountain Goats Mix CDs - spoken clip from a live show, courtesy of the Live Music Archive.
2. Alpha Incipiens -- The most lo-fi and user-unfriendly track in this mix, so of course I put it first. From 1994's Zopilote Machine, the first (narratively if not, I don't think, chronologically) song about the "Alpha Couple," a husband and wife who can't let go of each other even as they destroy themselves and each other. Bits and pieces of their story appear throughout The Mountain Goats's first five hundred or so records.
3. Grendel's Mother -- from the same record as track 2, despite the very different sound. First-person from the perspective of, yes, Grendel's mother. (There's a reason this is critic catnip, people.)
4. Rules for the Set -- another spoken-word bit. At least a third of the fun of the live shows is John Darnielle's stage patter, so I thought I'd share it.
5. No Children -- from Tallahassee (2003), the album that served as the culmination of the Alpha Couple's story. The song's title is an ironic counterpart, not directly related to its content, as so often happens with Mountain Goats songs. Mean and funny and surprisingly cathartic.
6. Dance Music -- At the Halloween show, Darnielle was dressed as a priest, and introduced this song by saying "This is a song about God's plan for the salvation of humankind. No, really." From The Sunset Tree (2005).
7. Hellhound on My Trail -- Darnielle is also a music critic, writing about anything from Thai pop to death metal to John Prine on his zine-turned-blog, Last Plane to Jakarta. He'll play covers in concert, but this is one of the few he's recorded, from 1996's Nothing for Juice.
8. Going to Port Washington -- In a recent New York show, Darnielle admitted he wrote this song to get to use the name "Throg's Neck Bridge." Part of the "Going to..." series of songs from the first umpty million records, which are all about dreams of escape. This is the sweetest one of the bunch, and the most uncomplicated love song in his canon. Originally appeared on a CD that served as a wedding invitation for a small record label owner - reissued in 1999 on Ghana, one of three rarities-and-B-sides collections.
9. Jenny -- From the last lo-fi album, 2002's All Hail West Texas. A crowd-pleaser of a song about escape and piracy. As a grammar nerd, I love the fact that in concert he always corrects the grammar of the line that begins "We were the one thing..." to "We were the two things..."
10. This Year -- The anthem, if you can call it that, and the single, from The Sunset Tree.
11. My Favorite Things -- Unreleased. If you don't have iTunes, I apologize for the extry banter at the end. Joe! you want this one!
12. Palmcorder Yajna -- From 2004's We Shall All Be Healed. A yajna is a Hindu ritual of sacrifice in which gifts are burned for the Devas. Don't say you didn't learn anything from this exercise.
13. Oceanographer's Choice -- I don't know what the title here has to do with the action of the song, but it's one of my favorites on
Tallahassee.
14. Dilaudid -- Don't listen to this one while driving, I'm just saying. (
Sunset Tree
)
15. Your Belgian Things -- From
We Shall All Be Healed.
Not a song I can talk about, really.
16. You're In Maya -- Unreleased. Maya is another Hindu concept; roughly, it's the world without the spirit: the illusion of a limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. The chorus and I think part of the tune comes from a Gaelic drinking song: the Gaelic means "the milk of the cow is good for the calf." The only explicitly autobiographical song until 2004, and something of a precis for
We Shall All Be Healed
and
The Sunset Tree
, which are inspired by and directly based on Darnielle's life, (continued...)
( continues...) respectively.
17. Up The Wolves -- There are a lot of classically inspired songs in the TMG canon, including at least two directly based on Greek and Latin sources. This one is more allusive, but did inspire the T-shirt for the Sunset Tree tour that in turn inspired the title for this mix.
18. Letter From Belgium -- I had to spend a night in an emergency room for something that turned out not to be an emergency - this song was the perfect soundtrack for that night. (WSABH)
19. Peter's R. Kelly ringtone -- More stage business, and another cover of sorts.
20. See America Right - On Halloween, I was close enough to the stage that Darnielle pointed right at me when he started in on "I was driving down from Tampa..." It's an intense enough moment that I was freaked. (
Tallahassee
)
21. The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton - From All Hail West Texas. One of the best of the 400+ they've recorded, and in this live version it has a majesty that turns out to suit it perfectly. If you know it, he needs you to sing, and when you figure out the end of it, he needs you to holler.
The mix was made to fit on a CD, and so comes with a CD case cover with track listing. The cover illo makes more sense after you've listened to it once through.
And as a PS, there's the live version of "No Children" I mentioned for Tina. There are some great, rocked-up versions of old songs in a few shows from the end of the last tour, presaging the fuller rocking-out they did on this last swing through, but Gmail is just being a pain in my ass, so I didn't post them. Look for recordings of the last tour to get posted to the Live Music Archive starting around Xmas, though, I'm told.
Yeehaw! Great mix. There were about six tracks I have not heard (oh, and muchas gracias for the "No Children" live track - Singing that song outloud is soo cathartic - I've thought the same thing many times). My next-door co-worker is a big MG fan as well and we are both geeking over your liner notes.
OK. I am listening to that No Children track for the second time. It just makes me smile to hear the crowd singing along. I'm a dork.
goldheart mountaintop queen directory - guided by voices
That's my favourite GbV song. The quiet melancholy giving way to desperate melancholy, the whoot noises at the end that sound like a train whistle, the faded quality that makes it sound like it's being played on a gramophone: it evokes in me the same feeling as the one I get when I read Carson McCullers. Sunbaked loneliness or something.
I haven't listened to Bee Thousand in a while. Might do something about that.
Will do.
Muchas gracias senora!
Yep, but that 's not how I know it. They played it live the first time I ever saw them and I got a bootleg of that show and for many years after it was "my favorite R.E.M. song" (I didn't know it was a cover).
I knew of it from my days on the Murmur mailing list -- they covered it a lot during the Green/Out Of Time period. Unfortunately, I never did join the fanclub, so I never got any of the Christmas singles. Last year I had a lot of trouble scrounging for any MP3s of the REM Christmas songs for my Chrismakwazakah CD.
And sadly, I never saw REM until Bumbershoot in 2003. I had a chance to see them in OKC in 1989, but the parents forbade me from driving down there because I would be "alone." Me? Still bitter?
In order to put that song up on buffistarawk, I have to plug lePod into my computer which will mean I will lose my spot in my mega-playlist.
Now I feel really bad.
the legionnaire's lament - decemberists
I really like the opening to this one.
I'm a legionnaire
Camel in disrepair
Hoping for a Frigidaire to come passing by
I am on reprieve
Lacking my joie de vivre
Missing my gay Par-ee
In this desert dry
The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton
The first time I saw the title I thought, "Old 97s? Chomsky? Death Metal????"
Now I feel really bad.
No - not at all. I was going to do it anyway - I was only saying that as an excuse (like I need one) to post my last dozen Pod-Plays.
ION, I have a feeling I am going to be listening to Mountain Goats bootlegs all afternoon.
OK. I am listening to that No Children track for the second time. It just makes me smile to hear the crowd singing along. I'm a dork.
If you're a dork, I'm a dork, too -- I find it incredibly cheering.
The first time I saw the title I thought, "Old 97s? Chomsky? Death Metal????"
Darnielle is a huge metal fan, and it's charmingly bizarre to read his thoughtful, well-informed writing about it when I don't, myself, hear its influence in the Goats's stuff. But my knowledge of the genre is, uh, limited to some adolescent exposure.
(I did get to sing along to the song at Halloween, which was a blast and a half. Horns were up!)
That's my favourite GbV song.
Mine, too, although I spell "favorite" differently. I think "Smothered in Hugs," "A Salty Salute," and "A Good Flying Bird" may be tied for this position, too.
On the recent Jandek tribute, Darnielle's contribution was pretty much the best, combining a love of the original material with a brave attempt to make it more accessible. I'd be happy to post that to buffistarawk for the interested.
