Single piano notes and a simple, shuffling rhythm from a brushed drum and an upright bass. Then Darnielle’s voice, starting falsetto and slowly traveling down the scale:
I leave the house as soon as it gets light outside
Like a prisoner breaking out of jail
And I steal down to business 15-501
Like I had a bounty hunter on my tail
The chords cycle quietly under the melody: G-A7-C-G. On business highway 15-501, which connects Durham to Chapel Hill, “somebody stops to pick me up/But he drops me off just down the block,” and then, in the chorus, there’s a slight zooming out: “And along the highway/Where the empty spirits breathe/Wild sage growing/In the weeds.”
Small haunting things. The sweet, major-scale melody makes it seem like everything’s fine, but why does the driver who stops for him drop him off so quickly? Something’s wrong, but then there’s a quick bump upward, because in the ditch-region of this ghost-ridden no-place, something meaningful is growing. (Sage smells good, tastes good, and is associated with health and cleansing.) He walks down the soft shoulder, counting his steps, headed vaguely eastward, sun in his eyes (SHOULder, STEPS, EASTward, EYES). He loses his footing, skins his hand breaking his fall, laughs to himself, looks up at the skies (FOOTing, FALL, SELF, SKIES). Misattuned to his body, misattuned to the world, every syllable in its right place. The clattery, mirror-cracking voices of angels are in his ears; sage is still growing, somehow, “along the highway where unlucky stray dogs bleed.”
Then we sink deeper. “Some days I don’t miss my family,” he sings in the bridge. “And some days I do/Some days I think I’d feel better if I tried harder/Most days I know it’s not true.” His disintegration is picking up speed—walk, count, head, lose, skin, laugh, look—and maybe you’ve started to edge away from him, emotionally, but all of a sudden he’s saying things that sound, as soon as you hear them, like you’re saying them to yourself. Then you’re down in the ditch:
I lay down right where I fell, cold grass in my face
And I hear the traffic like the rhythm of the tides
And I stare at the scrape on the heel of my hand
’Til it doesn’t sting so much and until the blood’s driedAnd when somebody asks if I’m okay
I don’t know what to say
And along the highway, from cast-off innumerable seeds
Wild sage growing in the weeds
“And” is such a sad, frightening word when you experience it in contexts like this. It’s a kind of noise between phrases; it says, “here comes another thing like that,” not “here’s how these things go together.” But in its strange world, a world of infinitely even distribution, everything comes out of nowhere, everything is new. The speaker doesn’t know how to respond to the question “are you okay?” because in the state he’s in, things aren’t okay or not-okay, they just are. Each moment is a seed from which something in particular, weed or sage, springs.
“If you see the Mountain Goats live in a setting with a piano and with a crowd that can handle it, you will be crushed under the weight of ‘Wild Sage,’” Alex Russell wrote on the blog A Few Things, Maybe Several Things. “I saw it once in Chicago where the room was actually totally silent other than his performance. No ‘woo’ yelling or singing, just a group of people picturing their own moments of quiet fear.” Because the song is so thoroughly about one distinct, extreme person, it can be, for the people in the room, thoroughly about their own distinct, extreme moments. Which is maybe why Darnielle often sings the last pre-chorus like this: “And when somebody asks, ‘John, are you okay?’/I don’t know what to say.” The crowd goes out onto a limb, listening silently to the song, and that means that Darnielle can do the same—can maybe even go out a little further than usual, deeper into his own attachment to this imaginary person. A forest-like inwardness opens on to a secret clearing. Then the song is over and it’s gone.
This is a beautiful analysis/appreciation of one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs. Thank you.