2003: We Shall All Be Healed

The Mountain Goats performed at least 61 times between November 2002, when Tallahassee came out, and May 2003, when they went into Bear Creek Studios, in the woods outside Seattle, to record We Shall All Be Healed.¹ In several of those shows, Darnielle appeared solo, but he probably played more two-person Mountain Goats shows, in this six-month period, than in the band’s whole stage history to that point. He also tried out, in those concerts, several songs that would be on We Shall Be Healed: “Slow West Vultures,” “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent,” “Your Belgian Things,” and “Cotton.” The new album’s distinctive sound is, in part, the sound of a working band, a sound that comes out of the musical relationship that Darnielle and Hughes had been building on the road.

The drums make a difference too, of course; the session drummer Chris McGuire sat in on six of the thirteen songs on We Shall All Be Healed, and even though he’s not particularly prominent in the mix, he gives songs like “Palmcorder Yajna” (saved for later) and “Against Pollution” (saved for later) a denser rhythmic floor. And the rawness of the production—“a lot of distressed vocals and distressed drums and distressed guitars, everything in the red”—has a huge impact on the album’s feel. But what’s most noticeable to me, musically, is Hughes’s bass, which is on the attack much more than it had been in Tallahassee and totally in on the joy of the songs’ tension-and-release moments (like the phrase “COMing down the LINE” in “The Young Thousands,” which is followed, after an increasingly agitating two-bar delay, by the opening line of the chorus: “Here they COME”). Together with McGuire’s drums and Nora Danielson’s emphatic strings, Hughes sends something pumping through We Shall All Be Healed that had never really been in a Mountain Goats album before: a beat with depth and staying power. Singing and playing against that beat, Darnielle is able to become a different kind of performer.

You can hear it most clearly in “Letter from Belgium.”

An electric guitar, run through an industrial bleating box or something, carves out the space for Darnielle’s voice, and when the guitar steps back to let him go, Darnielle sings,

Martin calls to say he’s sending old electrical equipment 
That’s good, we can always use some more electrical equipment

It may sound like the most throwaway of prose lines, but it’s one of the most ecstatic moments on the album—the phrases are just pieces of coal, nothing’s getting compressed into diamonds, but there’s more coal in the world than diamonds, and Darnielle is loose, ramped-up, and in love with everything that you can do with bits of language (eLECtrical eQUIPment). The eight bars in which he sings the lines are followed by eight bars of guitar, bass, and drums, and then there’s another barely metered burst of nonpoetic/poetic language:

In the cold, clear light of day down here, everyone’s a monster 
That’s cool with all of us, we’ve been past the point of help since early April

The “we” of these lyrics is what Darnielle calls elsewhere his “speed freak cast,” a group of meth addicts that’s based on the group of meth addicts that Darnielle had been part of in Portland, Oregon, back in 1985-86. The “here” of the lyrics—a mythical Belgium, the “chemical land of milk and honey”—is the place that he’s singing from within, as much as he possibly can.² The band is helping him do it: no longer solely responsible for establishing the beat and singing against it, Darnielle can shout long phrases that don’t rhyme and make it work, partly through the force of his personality, or the personality that he’s adopted for the song.

“You meet some very deep, rich people,” Darnielle told an interviewer in 2004, “who are very young, and very desperate, and very wounded and, you know, they’re not deep in the romanticized sense of that they have anything great to say, that you can hear and take and apply as a philosophy, but there’s an energy and a power to that kind of desperation of being young and on speed and hopeless and certain that you are going to die within the next couple of years and so why not do anything.”³ We Shall All Be Healed is like a delivery system for the kind of energy and power that Darnielle is talking about here, an energy and power that spring from somewhere deep in your desperation, an energy and power that are end-states, that can’t carry you beyond their own limits. “We’ll be awake until Thursday,” he sings in “Deserters,” the unreleased 2003 song that was his gateway into the writing of We Shall All Be Healed. “The future’s disarmingly bright.”⁴ The cast’s future is the bright epitome of its energy and power, but nothing more, which is both really awful and an almost Gospel-like good news.

To get how that works, you have to be willing to think about We Shall All Be Healed not just as an album about addicts, but as an album about young people, people who are not at all sold on the idea of becoming adults. “Nothing you can say or do will stop me/And a thousand dead friends can’t stop me,” Darnielle sings in “All Up the Seething Coast,” and then,

White sugar by the spoonful 
Cantaloupes and grapes and watermelons 
I force it down like it was medicine 
Anybody asks, you tell ’em what you want to tell ’em

But the best you’ve got is powerless against me 
And all your little schemes break when they come crashing up against me 

If your back is turned against the adult world, if you’ve come to the conclusion that nothing in that world is worth wanting, then you’re a free creature, seeking brightness, indifferent to their threats and plans. “You’re going to do what you’re going to do,” he and Hughes sing in the last song on the album, “Pigs That Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of,” “no matter what I ask of you/You think you hold the high hand, I’ve got my doubts/I come from Chino, where the asphalt sprouts.” People with a little brief authority are going to do what they’re going to do; let them. Nothing in you has to respond to anything in them. And the fact that you come from some Chino or other is one of your greatest advantages. If you have very little to begin with, you care less about whatever your brightness-seeking costs you. “Let it all go,” Darnielle sings in the chorus of “Cotton.”

All of the things that could have mattered but didn’t: the rats on the doomed cargo ship, the deep-down toxic soil, the people who apologize to their families for things they don’t feel sorry for, the injection supplies in the storage-lockered desk, the cars headed blankly down the highway. “Let them all go.”

And yet it’s so clear, at the same time, that something in him wishes it could be otherwise:

I saw you waiting by the roadside 
You didn’t know that I was watching 
Now you know 
Let it all go 

The “you” by the roadside in “Cotton” is discarded like everything else, a casualty of the “I”’s non-caring. Your waiting didn’t matter, my watching didn’t matter, your knowing won’t matter. “We are what we are/Get in the goddamn car,” Darnielle sings, almost snarls, in “Slow West Vultures.” But the singer in “Cotton” was watching the person waiting by the roadside, paying extended attention; something had to have been taken in, otherwise there would be nothing to let go of now. In “Your Belgian Things,” Darnielle sings, “I saw the mess you left up in the east bedroom/A tiger’s never gonna change its stripes”—and then, with a painful mid-line dip into a minor chord, “I guess, I guess/But Jesus what a mess.” Something in at least some of the light-bound characters that he’s imagining—“a lost group of lost people who are engaged in the act of losing themselves”— isn’t okay with where all this is going. Something in them can feel the value of what’s being damaged and destroyed. “I got five minutes sleep, it was an accident,” Darnielle sings in “Duane Allman Slept Here,” a 2018 song whose lyrics came from the We Shall All Be Healed notebook.

My eyes look like grapes, sticky and overripe
I get the dates and times wrong all the time, I’m too young to get the dates and times wrong
Up for three days, lips around the pipe

And in “Rescue Breathing,” which comes from the same notebook and was first performed in 2020, the overdosing speaker sings, in the final chorus,

I had a blanket wrapped around my shoulders
You had a dream of all the oceans in your eyes
No thing on earth could quite nail our coffin shut
Every time that we went under we would rise

It was the warmest feeling in the world
And you were the warmest thing to walk its surface
Easing me painlessly all the way down to the furnace
All the way into the furnace

Shall we all be healed? In spite of our sins, through the revelations that our excesses can supply, or through somebody’s determined efforts? It’s an open question, obviously.⁵ Shall our inversions of self-preservative behavior take us to the gates of a deeper, truer, brighter world? Shall we be filled, at the moment of passing through those gates, with new knowledge and power? Those are open questions too.⁶ Sometimes it doesn’t seem likely. “Your Belgian Things” is about an overdose, “Mole” is about overdosing and waking up in a hospital room, “Home Again Garden Grove” is about driving around high, looking for dealers, and basically begging to get arrested (Shoving our heads/Straight into the guts of the stove). And “Duane Allman Slept Here” and “Rescue Breathing” are almost frighteningly unblinking visions of where addiction can take you. But when I listen to We Shall All Be Healed, it feels exploratory, not cautionary. The songs feel like cryptic signs of unknown things. “You knew that they were out there from the signs they’d left behind,” Darnielle sings in the unreleased “Tribe of the Horned Heart,”

On old abandoned buildings, just some X’s and some lines
Half-circles in the concrete, crescents in the snow
You could find the little beacons almost everywhere you’d go

Only people who were sick enough
Knew how to read them right
I got sick when I was seventeen
And I’d hunt down signs all night

The sickness that leads you to hunt down signs all night is a sign in its own right, an indication of something in you that will never be nurtured by the good, right, daylit world. “All teenagers know instinctively that there is something wrong with adults,” Darnielle says in a 2008 interview. “That somewhere along the way, the adults lost the plot. . . . [T]eenagers are living as captives in some colony where the androids have all taken over, and where they’ve made it clear that they intend to turn their captives into androids, too.” Is the adult world of mandatory health designed to exclude a basic existential message, encoded in signs that the sick, the young, know how to find and read? On We Shall All Be Healed, that question gets more open all the time.⁷

1. All hail the Mountain Goats wiki at Fandom.com for its startlingly rich info about shows and setlists.

2. “Belgium is sort of my speed freak cast’s, their Kubla Khan, you know, that they have in their mind, that they’re all going to go to Belgium, but actually, their own personal Belgium is a sort of hellish place,” Darnielle says in a 21 May 2004 interview on Seattle’s KEXP. A little bit earlier, he says, “Speed freaks, like everybody else, but with a particular vengeance, talk about how they’re gonna get the hell out of wherever they’re at, right, and go to someplace where, you know, it’s sort of like the chemical land of milk and honey.” Both quotations transcribed from the transcription on Kyle Barbour’s no-longer-with-us The Annotated Mountain Goats.

3. From the VPRO (Netherlands) radio show that Darnielle did on March 27, 2004, transcribed from The Annotated Mountain Goats.

4. “‘Deserters,’” technically a “demo,” though the word has always given me fits, is the song that sparked the We Shall All Be Healed album, and has a number of images that are sort of touchstones for me.” (Darnielle, announcement of its release on the band’s website, 13 December 2005)

5. “This is from an album called We Shall All Be Healed,” Darnielle said during the introduction to “Home Again Garden Grove” on 2 April 2011 in Ithaca, New York. “I spent a long time trying to decide whether the title of that album was sort of a dark irony, or is God’s own truth, right? It’s hard to say, when you’re talking about heroin addicts and speed freaks. You cross your fingers. You want to believe, but you have seen the signs in the sky.”

6. Before playing “Quito” in Austin, Texas on 27 September 2003, Darnielle informed the crowd that “the secret title of the next album is ‘Drug Abuse Will Save Your Wretched Souls.’”

7. “In the great heat of the old motel I could feel the part of me that had been resisting the final disconnect beginning to wither. The kind of shrinking we practice turns us into invisible towers of strength. I'm sorry I brought you into this mess but I'm sorrier still that I'm not dumb enough to sink my arms in past the elbows. I have this sick feeling there's something really great past the point of no return. Stupid, huh?” (Liner notes, We Shall All Be Healed)