1997: Full Force Galesburg

Nothing for Juice was the last album that Darnielle and Ware made together. In September 1995, Darnielle moved to Chicago, which more or less ended the collaboration. By the time that Nothing for Juice finally came out, in August 1996, Darnielle had already moved on again, to Grinnell, Iowa, where he was living in an apartment with his new girlfriend, Lalitree Chavanothai, and a couple of roommates. Near the end of 1996, he and Peter Hughes went on a disastrous, money-losing tour of Germany, and after that, the shows were few and far between. In February 1997, Darnielle played an open mic night at Grinnell College and got invited by some students to play a set at Bob’s Underground, which was in the basement of a campus dorm.

Main Hall, location of Bob’s Underground

On the Internet Archive recording of that show, you can hear the trickling handclaps of about ten people after each of his songs. Each time, the applause lasts for about five seconds. “Oh well,” Darnielle says after the handclaps that follow his performance of “Alpha Gelida.” He asks for coffee at one point. It’s like he wants to get worked up and warm up the room, but he also realizes that this isn’t the kind of environment in which such things are possible. In the aftermath of “One Fine Day,” he says, hopefully, “I always thought a psychotic edge in that song was sort of missing from the studio version.” Nobody makes a sound.

The next Mountain Goats album, Full Force Galesburg, didn’t make much of an impact upon its release in June 1997.¹ It’s much quieter than the previous albums and Darnielle sings with a younger-sounding voice, a voice partially drained of its aggressiveness.² But there’s a vividness to the things he shows us, lyrically, and a new depth of sadness in the record’s mood, and that makes its relative lack of centrifugal energy feel like a strange kind of gift. It’s hard, in a culture of achievement, to experience states of being like confusion and emptiness as opportunities, as ways of knowing things that you wouldn’t otherwise have known. But that really is what those kinds of states are (in addition, obviously, to everything else they are: painful, isolating, brain-flooding, etc.). In Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Maria Wyeth, waiting for an appointment for an abortion, sits in her idling car in a parking lot at the intersection of Sunset and La Brea, watching

a woman in a muumuu walk out of the Carolina Pines Motel and cross the street to a supermarket. The woman walked in small mincing steps and kept raising her hand to shield her eyes from the vacant sunlight. As if in a trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing. (67)

Cars stopped at the intersection of Sunset and La Brea,1965

In her cut-off, frozen state, Maria is capable of witnessing the intersection of two nothings—sunlight and a solitary person—at the dead still center of the world. It’s not obviously a good thing, health-wise. But it’s always possible for such things to be good, or at least valuable, in ways that have nothing to do with health. 

It’s maybe useful to start with Full Force Galesburg’s basic mood, which is hard to name but has something to do with the feeling of falling to pieces. The album is full of lines like these: “You took apart the alphabet letter by letter” (“Snow Owl”); “We are for some reason all the time bleeding” (“Weekend in Western Illinois”); “Hurricanes in from Australia/Tore up the neighborhood” (“Down Here”); “I am losing control of the language again” (“Masher”); “Things are happening here while we sleep/I can feel it in my boiling brain” (“Evening in Stalingrad”); “It’s all coming apart again/It’s all coming apart again” (“It’s All Here in Brownsville”). There are no “Going to . . .” songs on it, but there are a lot of songs about sticky “heres” (Here, where it all stops for good/Where the cool waters run . . . It’s all coming down, down here . . . We are burning up all of our choices up here where the tall grass grows/Up here in Galesburg). Several songs end with a slow-down on the outro, which had never before been a typical way of bringing a Mountain Goats song to an end. And then there’s “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood”:

Lying in the hot sun today 
Watching the clouds run away 
Thought a little while about you 
The sky was a petrifying blue

And while the geese flew past for no reason at all 
I let the sky fall 
This is an empty country and I am the king 
And I should not be allowed to touch anything

I picked myself up off the ground 
Shook the grass from my hair and I walked around 
Felt the warm sun in my eye 
Strangers were passing by

I shinnied up the black walnut tree  
Let the hard blue sky fall right through me 
And I saw the sad young cardinals trying to sing 
And I should not be allowed to touch anything

It’s a major-key song, but the C-F shift at the heart of it gets a minor shimmer from the open A in the bass of the F chord, and in the second line of the pre-chorus, a tritone, the most unassimilable note in the scale, flickers in and out of an F. You can feel in the lyrics and delivery, too, a sad, subdued, alienated quality. And after you’ve felt that for a while, you can start to pick up, along with it, something else: a desire for the end of things.³ The end of holding up the sky; the end of imagining that there’s a reason for things; the end of making eye contact with people; the end of hope for young lives. And most of all, the end of all the horrible nothingness that he projects into the world when he’s consumed by his inadequacies and failures: “This is an empty country, and I am the king/And I should not be allowed to touch anything.”

Every mood makes certain things possible. The most important thing that the mood of Full Force Galesburg makes possible, I think, is a sustained occupation of these kinds of diminished psychological states. “Original Air-Blue Gown”—the title comes from Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice”—mostly rocks back and forth, on a tuned-down guitar, between broken C# and F# chords, with weird, scrapy overdubs from the violinist Alaistar Galbraith.

Things don’t happen in the song; they take place. “Rain all burned away/The horseflies are an iridescent green,” Darnielle sings in the first verse. “Plums boiled down to pulp/Drying on a screen.” Hot humid place, lit-up horseflies, some kind of cooking or canning going on. Then a slight expansion of the frame and a surrealization of the color palette: “Bright red air inside the house here/I can barely draw a breath/Dark blue shapes pop behind my eyelids/I am not afraid of death.” Now the “action” begins, up on a G#:

And on the television 
Black and white footage of the young Cassius Clay  
My God, my God, my God 
He was something

Fists flashing as he comes toward the screen 
Sailing headlong into nothing 
And disappearing 
Reappearing 
Out there in the clearing 
Floating down a slight breeze 
That plays along the edges of the leaves 
It's you, it's you, it’s you

No cause and effect, no explanation: just the disappearance of a moving image from a TV screen and the reappearance of that image as a specter, floating in a clearing. The “it’s you, it’s you, it’s you” in the final line makes it hard to know whether the specter is still Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) or whether the speaker has drifted into a vision of some other “you.” But the song isn’t trying to get you to figure things like that out. It’s just trying to get you to fall into a state, a state in which you’re moving slightly forward and backward but not initiating any action, other than the associative action of deepening your relationship to a specific place and time.

The same kind of thing happens in “Ontario.”

We descend pretty quickly into a condition in which you feel things that you don’t say to other people, if you know what’s good for you. You don’t say, for instance, “The orange tree blossomed last Saturday, there was nothing in it but pain for me,” or “I saw the sun fall down out of the sky the other day, there was nothing in it but pain for me”—or at least you don’t if you have the suspicion that people are going to use it to draw conclusions about your mental state. But in “Ontario”—a city in California near Claremont—that’s exactly what the speaker says, as if Full Force Galesburg-type songs are exceptions to that rule. And then, in an increasingly beautiful and terrifying series of phrases, the speaker brings the song not to a point of resolution or a place of rest but to an emotional, expressive peak:

Squirrels climbing trees in bloom 
Soft yellow light spilling into the room 
My favorite records 
My favorite books 
The people I love 
The people I almost love

Light beckoning 
Wind whistling 
Hey, hey 
Hey, hey 
Day breaking 
River rolling  
Hey, hey 
La la la la la

Verbally, everything’s happening by means of plain words and parallelism; musically, everything’s happening by means of simple chords (A, Dmaj7sus2, Esus4), and a two-note pull-off riff on the G string.⁴ The lyrics may seem confusing, but only if you’re just reading them; when you listen to the song, it’s pretty clear that the items in the first part of the list are like the blossoming orange tree and the plunging sunset: things so beautiful and adored that they hurt. And in the second part of the list, it’s pretty clear—to me, anyway—that the light, the wind, the day, the river are all calling him to come drown himself.

Why are we being invited to find a way into this troubling song? What is it possible for our minds to do, where is it possible for our minds to go, once we’re in it? Here’s where mine goes, most of the time. I start to think that maybe the attraction to beauty can lead to the desire to explode the consciousness that feels it, because it’s too much. I start to think that maybe the speaker just wants to kill himself—“I spent a lot of time assuming I would die by my own hand,” Darnielle said in October 2012—and is excruciatingly sad about what he will be leaving behind. And I start to think that maybe it’s ultimately both, that the song is “about” how closely related the intense love of the world and the intense love of dying can be. Or, better, that the song lets us hear how closely related those two things can be. In “US Mill,” which starts off by letting us know where we are, four times in a row, referring to someplace different every time—

Way up north 
Down the road a little 
Back in New England 
Right here in the middle

—we are finally jerked “all the way out west,” where a bunch of people have their ears to the ground. “All of our dreams resting in the same spot,” the “we” narrator sings, “Listening for the old sound.” And then they do hear the old sound, the deep heart of the old songs in “1 Corinthians 13: 8-10” and “Song for Cleomenes,” “ringing as clear as crystal” and “shining as bright as gold.” Or a different old sound, a death-song sound, charming away their bodies’ heaviness and heat (we were spring-heeled and we were real cold). Whatever it is, it’s both strengthening their attachment to the world and weakening their attachment to their existing selves.

“I don’t just play a song, I burn a building down,” Darnielle once said. “Present a gale force to effect change.” The gale force winds on Full Force Galesburg are coming from diminished states and distant places, and they carry a lot of sadness and desperation with them, but they vitalize the atmosphere.⁵ “Galesburg, to me, was a spot that I saw for seven minutes looking out of a train window,” Darnielle said during a 2014 concert there. “Somebody had some clothes on a line, and a couple of dogs were barking in a yard, and I thought, you know, I could get off the train here and disappear forever into this town. . . . It’s one of those moments you get where, like, vast infinities and possibilities open up for you for just a second.” Full Force Galesburg can give you moments like that too, if you’re willing to entertain the kinds of feelings that will get you there.

1. It did get some very good reviews, though. Jonathan Maier wrote in Ultra that it was "easily the best album of the year thus far.” And the reviewer at CMJ perceptively observed that “each song on Galesburg is a site-specific reverie that pieces together a bit of scenery, a message, a man's expression, a woman's voice, all to encapsulate some moment of great love, or doubt, or of being overcome, that is as unique as the chord progressions are repetitive.”

2. “I wanted to get better at [sad songs],” Darnielle wrote on Tumblr in the early 2010s, “so I put most of my eggs in that basket and started writing Full Force Galesburg, which hopefully has a little humor but is pretty pointedly the fewest laughs-per-kilobyte of the early records. . . . There’s more to the story of why I was leaning toward the sadder stuff in 1997 but the point here is that that’s where I was at.”

3. On Twitter, Darnielle wrote, in response to a question about “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood,” “MSDB is not about a romantic relationship, I hate to say, but that's all right.” “What's the narrator so worked up about then?” the questioner wrote. “Death,” Darnielle wrote.

4. The notation is complicated but the fingering is easy: A: 0-0-2-2-2-0, Dmaj7sus2: 0-0-0-2-2-0, Esus4: 0-2-2-2-0-0.

5. I’m saving “Minnesota,” the best example of this, for later.