1. The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton

[This is it! Thanks so much to everyone who has been reading this, I’m incredibly grateful to you.]

You sometimes want the things that come last to bear and balance the weight of the things that have come before them. I have a large poster in my bedroom of Michael Jordan’s Finals-winning jumper in 1998, which wasn’t his last shot—he played 142 games for the Washington Wizards after leaving the Chicago Bulls—but feels like it, to me and to a lot of other people. The vertical elevation after a fake that left his defender skidding on the floor, the total focus on the basket, the downward extension of the fingers on his right hand. There’s a part of you that’s expressed perfectly by the things you do thoroughly and well, and by “you” I mean everyone. I see a near-perfect expression of that part of everyone when I look at that photograph. Bury it under all the weight you can find; it’s a beautiful thing that draws love toward it, and it will hold up beneath it all.

People who really love things can sound a little unhinged, I know. I don’t care. I love John Darnielle’s songs. This is the one I love most.

The best ever death metal band out of Denton 
Was a couple of guys who’d been friends since grade school 
One was named Cyrus, and the other was Jeff 
And they practiced twice a week in Jeff’s bedroom

The tuning is double drop D (D-A-D-G-B-D), so the song’s three chords—D5, G/B, and A7sus4—have up to three octaves of Ds ringing through them. Darnielle’s voice is mainly on an A the whole time, though, so the G/B feels more like a Gadd9/B, which is kind of like a mixture of a G and a Bm7. It sounds inaugural, like a IV chord (G), but unavoidably sad, like a relative minor (Bm7). You might wonder a little bit, the first time you hear the song, if the speaker/narrator is going to be mocking Jeff and Cyrus, but the pain-pleasure feel of that G/B on “a couple of guys” and “practiced twice a week” tells you different. And the mode of the professional musician is nowhere to be found; Darnielle’s voice is just the one that he woke up with, and the boombox’s wheel grind at the beginning of the recording is especially loud.

The second verse repeats the ballad-like structure of the first verse (The best ever death metal band out of Denton . . .) but drops a little deeper into the experience of creating a death metal band: Jeff and Cyrus never settle on a name, but they brainstorm and debate for a long time, and three possibilities eventually rise to the top of their list: Satan’s Fingers, the Killers, and the Hospital Bombers. That leads to enthusiastic dreaming (Jeff and Cyrus believed in their hearts they were headed/For stage lights and Learjets, and fortune and fame), which leads to an experiment in self-promotion (So in script that made prominent use of a pentagram/They stenciled their drum heads and guitars with their names), which leads, in the bridge, to disaster:

And this was how Cyrus got sent to the school  
Where they told him he’d never be famous 
And this was why Jeff in the letters he’d write to his friend 
Helped develop a plan to get even

The bridge starts with a G/B (this), cycles through the A7sus4 (sent) and the D (told), and lands on the G/B (famous). After another pass through that structure, the G/B on “even” has even more of a home-chord feeling. But it’s only the bridge; Darnielle switches to the D, the real home chord, for the beginning of the last verse:

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream
Don’t expect him to thank or forgive you
The best ever death metal band out of Denton
Will in time both outpace and outlive you—

and in case that wasn’t clear enough—

Hail Satan!
Hail Satan, tonight
Hail Satan!
Hail, hail

What did everyone who participated in Cyrus’s punishment expect? Probably, as the narrator speculates, to be thanked for their participation, or at the very least forgiven for it. When in fact all they should have been expecting was a blowback from the building that they had helped to set on fire.

“I never wrote ‘Hail Satan’ on the paper I was writing [the song] on,” Darnielle said in 2009. “It just seemed like there was something more to say. And I’m playing it and I’m like, ‘How do I feel right now? Hail Satan is how I feel right now.’” What does it mean in the context of this song?

[It] means, all the things you tell young people they have to feel? Fuck you. All those things that you tell young people that they have to be, you know. All the ways in which you try to make up for your own failure through the people whose dreams you should be guarding and cherishing.

When Darnielle sings that phrase, when he gives voice to what is in the spirits of these two teenagers, whatever distance there had been between the narrator and the characters is immediately closed. “Obviously—or I’d think obviously—the work I used to do in psych hospitals and residential treatment homes is what informs this song,” Darnielle wrote in 2008.

To take somebody’s adolescence away is to deny that person some of the closest looks at God’s face that we ever get on this planet; I try not to hate the parents who, as misguided as confused, take young men and women away from their friends and their lives to send them away. But it’s hard. I try not to excuse the destructive things adolescents sometimes do to express their pain, but in my gut, when I write a song in which a couple of teenagers vow to take revenge on the grownups who’re fucking up their lives, well, I cast my lot with the teenagers. They may do wrong sometimes, but their hearts aren’t rotten yet, and the light is strong within them.

That light is the central element of the whole Mountain Goats project. It’s what abuse and degradation dim. It’s what fuels, but also shines separately from, vengeance and ecstasy. It’s what illuminates each of our separate paths through the world; it’s what illuminates our shared endpoint (after singing, “Through the years we all will be together” in a 2011 performance of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” Darnielle stops to say, “In the grave, that’s where we’ll all actually be together”). And, in the brief but real space between now and death, it’s what brings us forward, causes us to become momentarily unhidden from one another. “I hold with the Gnostics who say there are two Satans,” Darnielle said over the opening chords of the song in 2009. “And one can’t help you, and is bad, and is the cause of illness and disease and pain. And the other is he that resists, and he that stands against those who would hold you back, and the pain that would keep you from advancing, and that is who we will now worship.” Michael Jordan, radiant, rises for his shot. Jeff and Cyrus, equally radiant, rise for theirs.