The Mountain Goats

I first encountered The Mountain Goats at a bit of a remove. At Kiki and Herb’s Carnegie Hall goodbye show, they performed “No Children,” a song that it is quite easy to fall instantly in love with. I tracked down the original and was surprised to learn that unlike how they performed it, it wasn’t a dialogue between two people, but sung by one man with a kind of nasal voice and flat affect. What was immediately funny as sung by a drag queen and accompanist made up to look like two elderly performers became a more haunting and angrier song when delivered as intended by John Darnielle who for all intents and purposes IS The Mountain Goats. I was intrigued.

Over the years, I’ve come to buy more and more of the seemingly infinite back-catalogue of MG albums. From the intensely personal The Sunset Tree to the bizarrely brilliant All Hail West Texas (recorded by Darnielle by himself on some really low-tech equipment) to the Biblically inspired The Life of the World to Come, the sounds have varied, but many things have remained constant: the output is prolific, the songwriting is sharply intelligent, and everything seems to be tinged with equal parts brilliance and madness. At least, that’s my take.

Though I’ve seen the band four or five times and have seven or eight of their albums, I cannot begin to compete with real Mountain Goats fans who seem to see every show and know every word to every song. It’s like they’re the favorite band of every autistic savant ever. It’s an impressive site to behold. And because among those fans, there are so many die-hard enthusiasts, the crowd at every show is reverent and wonderful.

All of that said, I didn’t have the BEST time at their show on Wednesday. It felt like a lot of it was focused on some of the group’s more moribund material, and while I do enjoy some sad-ass songs, there’s something anachronistic about standing around in a rock club listening to one man on a guitar sing quietly about someone dying. That is I-need-a-chair music. At least for me it is. But when he hit on songs with a rockier vibe or happier lyrics, the spirit soared. I can’t imagine it will ever not be thrilling to hear songs like “Love, Love, Love,” the aforementioned divorce anthem “No Children,” “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton,” or the incredibly beautiful “This Year,” a song about friendship and survival. “There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year//I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.”

Darnielle just has this wonderful openness that seems to invite anyone who has ever felt like an outsider (so…everyone) to revisit that moment while celebrating having moved on from it. It’s a strange sort of dwelling in the past as a celebration of the present, and everything seems rooted in such a deeply personal place for him that it’s absurdly easy to give yourself over to it.

I’ll close this by just quoting my favorite lyrics from “No Children.” The video’s above. It’s really worth checking out.

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow
I hope it bleeds all day long
Our friends say it's darkest before the sun rises
We're pretty sure they're all wrong
I hope it stays dark forever
I hope the worst isn't over
And I hope you blink before I do
Yeah I hope I never get sober