The Mountain Goats weren’t Darnielle’s only project in 1994-95. There was The Bloody Hawaiians, a goofy, angry band made up of Darnielle and his high school friends Joel Huschle and Mark Givens, who had founded Wckr Spgt back in 1982; they released their last EP in 1994. There was The Congress, which consisted of Darnielle and Givens only; they released their last album, Full Term, in 1995. And there was The Extra Glenns, a band that merged Darnielle’s lyrics and vocals with the distorted, unpredictable guitar work of Nothing Painted Blue’s Franklin Bruno; they released a CD single called Infidelity + 2 in 1993 and later released two full-length CDS: Martial Arts Weekend (2002), and (as The Extra Lens) Undercard (2010). Darnielle was finishing up college, too, writing a thesis in classics called “You Sure Look Pretty When You’re Drunk with Power: Seneca’s Atreus and the Notion of Permanent Change through Cruelty” and a thesis in English on Joan Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays.1 Finally, he was applying to Ph.D. programs. “My whole plan had been, I’m going to get a Ph.D. in English or classics, depending on where I get in, and I will be a professor,” he says on the first season of the I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats podcast. “It seemed obvious to me that that’s what I was going to be.” But in the spring of 1995, he learned that he had been rejected by all four of the schools he had applied to: Brandeis, Brown, SUNY-Buffalo, and Notre Dame. “I was a little bit crushed,” he says, “but as these people were rejecting me, I was getting my first offers to play in Holland.”
In April 1995, he flew to the Netherlands, together with Rachel Ware, who was now the band’s full-time bassist and backup vocalist. In their new incarnation as a duo, the Mountain Goats played shows in the Netherlands and Germany, culminating in a set at the second Fast Forward Festival in Nijmegen, part of which was captured on video. Before the clip of their performance of “No, I Can’t” (from Transmissions to Horace [1993]), there’s a clip of Darnielle and Ware backstage, playing Ace of Base’s “The Sign,” which was at that point a staple of Mountain Goats shows.
As if in an effort to escape the self-consciousness trap set by the videographer’s bright light and microphone, Ware sings toward Darnielle and Darnielle sings from within an impassionedness that makes it seem like he’s not all there.2 The clip isolates and magnifies a crucial part of Darnielle’s performance aesthetic, one that works within and against his powerful orientation toward form. In the video’s Youtube comments section, someone wrote, in 2016,
The only reason I was convinced that that was a younger version of John Darnielle was John's expressions... Just... Do they ever change? Always so somehow filled with emotions, very strong emotions... Passion, and love towards the words, and almost inhuman energy, I’m not sure how to describe it... Is it just me?
I’m not sure how to improve on that. Everything in the twenty-eight-year-old Darnielle’s expressions—emotions, very strong emotions, passion, and love towards the words, and almost inhuman energy—is like a window opening onto the place where things are made. In the interview segment of the video, which aired on German television, Darnielle says, “I want to teach. I think it’s important to be a real person, and music is a different aspect, an important aspect of life, but . . . I wouldn’t want to live like musicians live.” But that’s not the story that his performances tell.
Case in point: the first song on the Internet Archive recording of their set in Nijmegen, a solo Darnielle cover of Carole King’s “One Fine Day.” He makes his way into the song in a gradual, awkward way, getting the chords wrong at first, and then descending bit by bit into the character of the song’s speaker. In the amazing tension-and-release bridge, which stays on a D7, the key-of-G tension chord, for as long as it can, he sings, “And though I know you’re the kind of girl/Who only wants to run around/I’ll keep waiting, and someday darling/You’ll come to me when you want to settle dowwwn”—and the word “down,” as it extends, curls into a “yeaaaah,” and then
One fine day, we’ll meet once mooore
And you’re gonna want the love you threw away befo-o-ore
Yeah one fine day, you’re gonna want me for your own
Yeaaah!
Listening to him sing it makes it possible to hear what the song’s speaker is actually saying, which is, I loved you, I had my arms open for you, I thought you would be proud to have me with you, but you threw my love away, like it was garbage, like I was garbage. But one fine day, we’ll meet once more—the melody steps just a little higher—and you’re gonna want the love you threw away before—the melody steps up again, and a terrible grief and rage enters his voice—yeah, one fine day, you’re gonna want me for your own, and the whole thing explodes in a “Yeaaah!” Music isn’t just a different, subordinate aspect of life. It is, according to this performance, a way of approaching something that’s pretty close to being life itself.
The Mountain Goats’ next CD, Sweden, came out later that year (they finished it before leaving for Europe).3 All nineteen of its songs—even “Tollund Man,” sung by someone who is being prepared for sacrifice in the fourth century BCE—are about a couple whose relationship is loving and doomed (it’s not the Alpha Couple, though, according to Darnielle). In the opening song, “The Recognition Scene,” one of them recognizes that everything they’ve done has been taking place not in the relationship-story that he’s had in mind, but in a totally different story, one whose endpoint is now in view. (The term for this kind of moment in classical Greek drama is anagnorisis, which translates as “recognition.”) The two of them break into a store, look around lazily, steal all the candy in it, and head out to their getaway car for a “three-month ride.” (What they stole might not actually be candy.) On their way out of town, the speaker sees “something written in tall clear letters” on his partner’s face, something he can’t decode. And yet he kind of can. “We had hot caramel sticking to our teeth/And the only love I’ve ever known burning underneath,” he sings. “I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone/I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone.” The moment “points toward the aftermath,” as Darnielle will sing in “Sax Rohmer #1,” and the speaker senses, somehow, exactly what that aftermath is going to be like.
But he doesn’t want to say what he sort of definitely knows. And so, in the songs that follow, every good thing has a crack in it, or happens as if in a dream. There’s a romantic encounter in “Downtown Seoul”—but the song has extracted the speaker from that moment and he can now only perceive it as if through glass, or as if from the future (I remember your eyelids/I remember your body now). He feels “the blood between us churning thick as motor oil” in “Some Swedish Trees”—but his partner is standing in the doorway and might be about to leave. Occasionally, though, the weight of their very real love seems to press everything else down and out of sight. This is “Going to Queens”:
The ghostly sing-song
Of the children playing double Dutch
I felt the wind come through the window
I felt it turn around and switch backIn the second-story room
In Jamaica, Queens
Your hair was dripping wet
Your skin was cleanAnd the children skipping rope
Tripled their speed
You were all I’d ever wanted
You were all I’d ever needIn New York City, in the middle of July,
The air was heavy and wet
The air was heavy, your body was heavy on mine
I will know who you are yet, I will know who you are yet
Ware takes the melody; Darnielle speaks the lyrics along with her in a low voice. It’s beautiful, and the bright, chiming guitar (it was recorded in a 12-track studio) carries it forward with a simple three-chord pattern. Time passes: (I felt the wind come through the window/I felt it turn around and switch back). Time passes some more: the children who were singing and skipping rope in the first verse reappear in the third verse, jumping faster than before. First a, then b. I see your hair is wet . . . I see your skin is clean. The air is heavy and wet . . . the air is heavy and your body is heavy on mine. This is what it’s like to be in the process of going to Queens; this is what it’s like to approach, a click at a time, a here-and-now that no one ever really gets to.
There’s more like this; if you can roll with the sound of the Casio electronic keyboard that Darnielle uses on “California Song,” you’ll hear one of the most romantic songs he ever wrote (you can also get hold of a recording of him playing the song live on the guitar). But Sweden is pointed toward something else. This is from the late-night-sounding “Snow Crush Killing Song,” five songs from the end:
I know you’re changing
Damn you
I know you’re changing
God damn you for that
This is from the bouncy, bass-and-harmony “Neon Orange Glimmer Song,” three songs from the end:
I, I am a monster
I can’t believe the thing I’ve done
I can’t believe the thing I’ve done
Two songs later, the change is complete. In “Prana Ferox” (Sanskrit/Latin: fierce vital energy), over guitar and bass (which sounds like it’s being played by Peter Hughes) and with Ware on backing vocals and Bruno on lead guitar, Darnielle sings of two people who are now only in the loosest sense of the word a couple.
The speaker, who is apparently now a moonshiner, goes down to the basement to check up on the sour mash (a yeasty mixture used in whiskey-making) and sees that it’s bubbling away in the non-reactive ceramic tub. Fine clouds of dust are cut in half by sunbeams, a shadow passes across his heart. The song switches to a basic rock riff—you drop from A to G, swing from G to D, and land back on A—and Darnielle and Ware sing the chorus:
You were upstairs in the kitchen
With your head against the sink
Trying to cool down
Trying to cool down
Bruno goes into a solo (a rare thing in a Mountain Goats song) and when Darnielle re-enters, an octave up, the song’s now-fierce vital energy intensifies. The speaker’s hearing is preternatural (I know you don’t believe me, but I could hear you breathing) and in the tub, the yeasty mixture is “seething/With new life, new life all around.”
There’s nothing reassuring, nothing remotely comforting about a world that behaves like this, a world in which life just seethes forth (that’s why “Cold Milk Bottle,” the last song on the album, is called “Cold Milk Bottle”). And yet it feels weirdly good to be in the song’s version of that world. Maybe because it’s such an extreme place. Maybe—I don’t know—because it’s a place where the long, harmonized vowel in the phrase “cool down” can supersede what’s being said and then become, once it’s been repeated, the thing you’re always kind of looking forward to. Let the world seethe and be tragic, Sweden tells me. Those are never going to be the only things that the world will do.
Many thanks to Prof. Ellen Finkelpearl for her generous help with my questions about the classics thesis.
“John Darnielle—the person—seems to vanish the moment he strums the first chord of a song. His eyes glaze over, and then comes a thousand-yard stare as he channels his songs: ‘I know you're changing. Damn you. I know you're changing. God damn you for that.’ In his press photo, he looks blind because of this loaded vacancy in his eyes” (Roy Kasten, St. Louis Riverfront Times, January 20, 1999).
In case you’re wondering about the title, here’s what Darnielle said about it in a November 1996 interview in Hamburg, Germany: “Well, I was raised on Ingmar Bergman movies and August Strindberg plays. Running through all Swedish literature, there’s a great strain of a sort of a thirst for pain, a thirst for the extremes of bad experience—not the sort of thirst for pain we get in German and in French and in American art, where people want physical desolation and behavioral extremes to accompany these sorts of ugly corners of the mind we can go to. In Bergman and Strindberg nobody has to do anything to get to those dark places—you don’t have to become a junkie, you don’t have to start whoring yourself, all you have to do is find the place in your brain that you don’t want to admit exists.” (Kazi Stastna, “The Mountain Goats,” Discorder, July 1997).
This was never aired, it was supposed to be on a documentary DVD which never materialized. I was de interviewer. And the promotor at Simplon where they performed. Full show is on YT.
This is an absolutely incredible article/analysis. Amazing work!! Cannot wait for the next installment. :)