2002: Tallahassee
Within four months of recording All Hail West Texas, Darnielle had a new regular bandmate, the bassist Peter Hughes. He had a new three-album contract with 4AD, the label that had signed the Pixies. And he had an album of new songs, all of them about the Floridian end-times of the Alpha Couple. “A long, long time ago,” Darnielle says in an interview that was published in November 2002, just before the album, Tallahassee, came out, “I started writing these songs about a young married couple who a) were doomed and knew it, b) were barreling headlong toward divorce, and c) were as in love with alcohol as they were with the memory of the love in whose murder they were presently conspiring. Which is to say: they were songs about people who saw which way the wind was blowing in their lives and opted to go down with the ship rather than save themselves.”
Tallahassee is for some Mountain Goats listeners the band’s peak moment. It’s their first all-studio album (it was recorded at Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York) and their first album with a record-industry producer (Tony Doogan, who had produced Belle and Sebastian, Teenage Fanclub, and the Delgados).
It’s got their first song with a full-on rock lineup (“Oceanographer’s Choice,” saved for later), and one of the best songs that Darnielle ever wrote: “No Children” (saved for later). And it’s got a powerful creative interplay between Darnielle and Hughes, who had known each other a long time; Hughes grew up in Chino, played with Franklin Bruno in Nothing Painted Blue, and briefly toured with Darnielle in the mid-90s.
There was a fair amount of tension between the two of them during the recording of the album, largely because Hughes, whose tastes ran to Joy Division and New Order, wanted to open things up to a broader audience.1 The end result, though, was an album that sort of vibrates between widening and focusing, between a harder-core commitment to musical expansion and a harder-core commitment to a situation-based poetry. There’s no way that that would have happened without Hughes.
The first song, “Tallahassee,” sets the stage: an “I” and a “you” in a cheap house on the outskirts of a Southern city.
Over a two-note bass loop and a hard strum on the first beat of each measure, Darnielle sketches the scene:
Window facing
An ill-kept front yard
Plums on the trees
Heavy with nectar
Prayers to summon
The destroying angel
Moon stuttering in the sky
Like film stuck in a projector
“And you,” he continues. “You-ou-ou-ou-ou.” After all those rich descriptions, the word “you” just appears, unmodified, and then drifts away as melody. The rest of the song follows the same pattern: the situation expands—“Half the whole town/Gone for the summer/Terrible silence/Coming down here”—and the lyrics return to “you”; the song springs forward, like prose, but falls back, like poetry. There’s nothing conventionally romantic about the presentation of that “you”; someone’s trying to summon the destroying angel, after all. But it’s still at the song’s attractive core. “What did I come down here for?” Darnielle sings in the last verse. “You/You-ou-ou-ou-ou.” On All Hail West Texas, the songs had tended to emerge (barely) from a series of particularly desolate places. On Tallahassee, the songs tend to emerge from the energy that is generated by that melismatic “you,” or, especially as the album goes on, from the tense, sad, angry, loving space between that “you” and its corresponding “I.”
In the next song, “First Few Desperate Hours,” we advance a little further into the world of those two characters (I like to think of them as Alpha Couple One and Alpha Couple Two, AC One and AC Two for short).2
The chords repeatedly rise from E to F# to A, played with the E, B, and E strings open, while Hughes counterpoints the changes with a thumping E. “Bad luck comes in from Tampa,” Darnielle sings, and then, blues-style, he sings it again. The night that the bad luck arrives at their house, they have “bad dreams . . . bad dreams,” which they fend off with something like positive thinking: “We try/To keep our spirits high.” But then, thank God, their spirits “flag,” and when they do, the guitar slides up to a seventh-fret E, the vocals touch the upper octave, and the bass, cutting its speed in half, starts alternating between tonics and fifths. It happens again in the second verse: the driver drops his cargo at the curb, twice; cloven hoof-prints turn up in the garden, twice; “we keep up the good fight,” the speaker tells us, “we keep our spirits light . . . But they DROP”—and the song ascends into a quick expansive thrill. It’s as if fighting to keep your spirits light is, for the Couple, a kind of nightmare, a fluorescent flooding of an unfurnished room. That’s why it feels so good when the repetition eases up, when their forcibly optimized spirits wane, when they’re free to stop thinking, “if we just tried a little bit harder . . .”
Out there in the space beyond hope, there’s at least a little pleasure. You can feel it, at times, in their language. “We raise up a little roof/Against the cold/On Southwood Plantation Road,” the speaker sings—and then, in the space of elaboration that the chorus provides, adds, “Where at night the stars blow like milk across the sky/Where the high wires drop/Where the fat crows fly” (“Southwood Plantation Road”). It’s like the insanity of alcoholism + sexed-up near-dead relationship is bringing out the physicality of the words (high wires drop . . . fat crows fly) and allowing the speaker’s imagination to just rip it up (the stars blow like milk across the sky).3 The gorgeousness throws the awfulness into relief and vice versa, and the no-hope sometimes feels, as a result, sustainable.4 But then it gets bad:
Take what you can carry
But let me tell you brother
Still waters go stagnant, bodies bloat
And the cellar door is an open throat (“The House That Dripped Blood”)
Your face, like a vision straight out of Holly Hobbie
Late light drizzling through your hair
Your eyes, twin volcanoes
Bad ideas dancing around in their (“Idylls of the King”)
Then it gets worse (“No Children”). And then, seven songs into the fourteen-song album, the emphasis shifts. Everything is still divorce-bound, but a weird sense of discovery starts to build. “This gets complicated,” Darnielle says in that November 2002 interview, “but what could deepen a love more than the shared knowledge that all is lost?”
It’s not an epiphany or anything, though. It sometimes seems to me that when people want to speak well of Darnielle’s songs, they praise them for their “literary” qualities, and that when they say “literary,” they’re thinking about short stories. But the songs on Tallahassee don’t actually constitute a story; there’s no resolution (the Alpha Couple had already split up back in 1995, in a song called “Alpha Omega”) and no transformational events (“One day . . . “). There’s not even much beginning-middle-end sequencing. There’s just a situation: me and you, drunk, in a decrepit house, near the end of our run. So when a different kind of energy starts to amass in Tallahassee’s second half, it’s because that situation has deepened over time, not because anything in it has changed. Things are clearer: “Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp, and the weather’s getting warmer” (“See America Right,” saved for later); “My love is like a Cuban plane/Flying from Havana/Up the Florida coast to the Glades/Soviet made” (“International Small Arms Traffic Blues”). The end is near. “I can feel it in the rotten air tonight,” Darnielle sings in “Old College Try.”
In the tips of my fingers, in the skin on my face
In the weak last gasp of the evening’s dying light
In the way those eyes I’ve always loved illuminate this placeLike a trash can fire in a prison cell
Like the searchlights in the parking lot of hell
And yet, in the song’s two-line refrain, there’s an echo of the kinds of promises that are made at weddings (I will walk down to the end with you/If you will come all the way down with me). It’s as if anger, paranoia, and self-destructiveness, carried to their logical conclusion, are revealing, beyond themselves, an almost nonsensical pain and beauty.
And it really is beautiful. This is the first verse of “Have to Explode”:
Tile floor of the bathroom, scrubbed clean and bright
Checkerboard white and gray
Towels from the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Kingston, Jamaica
I can still see the rust-colored stains today
Like most of the album’s other songs, “Have to Explode” has a trace of a drone in it, a D that gets repeated in each of the chords, which makes it feel as though we’re not going anywhere, or as though there’s nowhere to go. The song’s mood is hungover and sad, but also, in an even sadder way, anticipatory. “The stage is set,” Darnielle sings. “Someone’s gonna do something someone else will regret.” The stage is the house’s bathroom, obviously, with old bloodstains on the hanging towels and, on the vigorously scrubbed tiles, the ghosts of other stains. The stage is, as well, the Couple’s poor communication skills: “I speak in smoke signals and you answer in code.” And it’s very clear what’s going to happen in this milieu: “The fuse will have to run out sometime/Something here will eventually have to explode, have to explode.”
They’re so far out to sea now, so far from the way they were when they first loved each other, so far from the early apartments and motels. They’re on their backs on the floor of the bathroom, “staring up, up at the hundred-watt light that burns above,” restless, sweating out the poisons, trying to keep cool. Then Darnielle’s voice, already defeated, sheds another layer of hope: “Name one thing about us two anyone could love.” The guitar is being lightly, quickly downstroked in various D-A-G patterns (with two incredible Bbs), but Hughes’s bass is walking melodically through the changes and resignifying the chords (to make it sound like the record, you have to play Dsus2, A7sus4, G/B, G/A, D/F#, A7sus4, G). Accents from Franklin Bruno’s piano keep dropping into the song, almost chiming with reverb. And yet the guitar, the bass, and the piano are not there to cheer the listeners up. They’re there because their tender accompaniment really is a part of the house’s mood, or the mood’s house; they’re part of what it feels like to find yourself lying next to your spouse, sick and unlovable together, waiting—“Five, four, three, two, one”—for the moment when you’re each going to have to start being sick and unlovable alone.
“I listened to a lot of Joy Division and New Order when I was a teenager,” Hughes said in a 2012 interview, “so I think that really led me to pursue that type of sound when I picked up a bass when I was sixteen or so.” In another interview from the same year, he said, “There were ten years of [Mountain Goats] albums, singles and EPs recorded [mostly on the boombox]. By the time I came aboard for ‘Tallahassee,’ just as a fan I was really wanting to hear something bigger and a move to a bigger stage.” Darnielle, in a 2004 interview, said that collaborating with Hughes “was very hard on Tallahassee. . . . But this worked somewhat to the album’s benefit, I think, giving it a pretty formal feel.” (Hilary Snow, “Mountain Goats Not Gruff,” Wilmington Star, 7 Oct 2004)
“[W]hen I started getting serious about writing songs, in college, I always tried to keep gender pronouns out it so that there’d be a permanent ambiguity to it. people hear a masculine voice and tend to identify the singer as male, but it is more fun from a writing/performing standpoint (for me, I should say) to keep things loose. also, that way anybody can sing your song without having to go switching pronouns around. on occasion I’ve introduced/deployed some gender-specific word or phrase kind of for the shock of it: ‘one of us/I’m not saying who/has got rocks in her head’ in ‘Orange Ball of Hate,’ ‘…and tell everyone you were a good wife’ in ‘No Children.’ But for the most part the idea with Tallahassee is that either partner could be singing the songs most of the time. Because they are truly partners, one flesh, of one accord, two spirits sailing aboard a doomed ship toward the same bleak end.” (Darnielle’s Tumblr)
The poetry is, in general, bumped up several notches on this album. A big part of what I look forward to when I put it on are lines like these:
Look beyond the broken bottles
Past the rotting wooden stairs
Root out the wine-dark honeyed center
Not everyone can live like millionaires (“The House That Dripped Blood”)
And I dreamed of vultures
In the trees around our house
And cicadas and locusts
And the shrieking of innumerable gibbons (“Idylls of the King”)
Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania
Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania
Trucks loaded down with weapons
Crossing over every night
Moon yellow and bright (“International Small Arms Traffic Blues”)
“Many people are perfectly happy for this unredeemed, self-destructive couple to be in their own black hole of self-hate,” Darnielle said in a 2018 NPR interview. “It’s sort of this darkness that eventually glows with its own power. Which, I suspect, if you’ve ever dwelled on some resentment long enough, you know that they all do have their own little glow.”