2006: Get Lonely
“Can I ask the people who are talking to shut their fucking mouths?
Sorry about that.
I had
too much to drink this afternoon
I don’t dislike people, but
I sort of,
I wind up feeling uncomfortable and weird
if I’m around people too much
In your better moments, obviously you don’t want to hurt anybody. . . .
But you have this point of rage and powerlessness where you think,
‘I wish you could see what it feels like this anger could do to a person,’ you know? . . .
Then it sits there and festers and starts to sort of glow
Like, ‘Oh my God this guy feels
so bad
he’s gonna burst into
flames’
Somebody calls you and says, ‘Hey man, I was thinking about
going to breakfast at Larry’s. You want to go to Larry’s?’
and you just immediately, without thinking about it,
go, ‘Nah, I don’t think so’
People who don’t feel like they’re part
of the world. . . . People who others
talk down to. . . . People
who’re just a parenthesis now
People who are as damaged as you are or will shortly become as damaged as you are. . . .
People who are seeking some force far beyond themselves to engage with. . . .
People who’re so used to being on the outside that they don’t give a shit whether anybody else in the room is feeling what they’re feeling. . . .
People who got thrown to lions and had to listen to tens of thousands of people applauding while the lions ate them alive
Sally in the back of the pickup
screaming
‘Go!
Go!’
We’re all in a big family, a large and terrible family
That mistreats one another terribly daily
And never learns any lessons
From any of it ever
If this doesn’t
sound like it’s your thing,
rest assured that it
isn’t.”1
You put the pieces together in a certain order and a certain rhythm and something starts to cohere: a mood, a milieu, an atmosphere. Here, the pieces are lines from things that Darnielle has said or written. What starts to cohere, I think, or hope, is something that begins to approach the vibe of Get Lonely, the Mountain Goats’ follow-up to The Sunset Tree.2
It all started in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where Darnielle and Hughes were staying in a Holiday Inn Express for three days between shows in October 2005. In their room, while Hughes showered, Darnielle wrote “Maybe Sprout Wings.” In the hallway outside their room, Darnielle sat with a guitar and wrote “Woke Up New.” When he got back to Durham, he looked at some songs about monsters that he had been writing a little earlier and “found a couple from a year or so ago that had sort of been waiting around to find their friends” (“New Monster Avenue” and “If You See Light”).3 Over the next six weeks, he wrote the remaining songs on Get Lonely, which was released in August 2006, sixteen months after The Sunset Tree.
For a lot of listeners and reviewers, it was a letdown. Prepared by much of the Mountain Goats’ previous work for a high level of animation and accessibility, the slowed-down mood and rhythm of Get Lonely, along with Darnielle’s soft, often falsetto singing, put them off. It wasn’t the topic; plenty of bands had turned loneliness into songs with a widespread appeal. It was the immersion in the topic—the 42 straight minutes of sticky, hallucinatory loneliness—that did it. The album was a means of getting lonely—of sinking deeper into it and thereby understanding it in a different way. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Catherine Linton says to Nelly Dean, “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”4 Get Lonely can be that kind of dream. But when it “aggressively announced its shape” in King of Prussia, it also announced, just as aggressively, that it wasn’t for everybody and that the band wasn’t either.
There’s a series of five songs in the middle of Get Lonely where that shape becomes especially clear. After the riveting, hypnotic opener, “Wild Sage” (saved for later), there’s a paranoid, percussion-forward song about a creature fearing death in the suburbs (“New Monster Avenue”) and an unusually four-square post-breakup song (“Half Dead”). And then comes the quiet, moody suite: “Get Lonely,” “Maybe Sprout Wings,” “Moon Over Goldsboro,” “In the Hidden Places,” and “Song for Lonely Giants.” On most album, the slow stuff is a change of pace, a one- or maybe two-song break. In this stretch of five songs, by contrast, you have the feeling of finishing an intense, sad, high-attention experience and then encountering another instance of the same thing, over and over. Darnielle sings from the perspective of a barely functioning person trying to be okay in the first three songs: “Get Lonely” (Trying to stay strong, spirit willing), “Maybe Sprout Wings” (Try to think good thoughts/Trying to find my way clear), and “Moon over Goldsboro” (Tried to get close to you again/Always wake up alone). Then, in “In the Hidden Places,” he sings from the perspective of someone who has been driven deeply inward by an apparent breakup (I turned my face away/And I shut my eyes tight) and, in “Song for Lonely Giants,” from the perspective of a giant in a treetop who, after years of loneliness, lets go and falls. There are solitary instrumental scales separating the verses in all the songs and an unnervingly high, metallic cello sound in most of them, but the most important common element, musically, is the space between the lines. Here are the first verses of the five songs, with en-dashes representing the beats of vocal silence:
---- I will rise up early --- ----
---- And dress myself up nice --- ----
---- And I will leave the house --- ----
---- And check the deadlock twice --- ----
- A bad dream shook me in my sleep ---
-- And I woke up sweating ---
- Ran through the dark to the shower ----
-- Already forgetting ---
-- I went down to the gas station ---
-- For no particular reason ---
-- Heard the screams from the high school ---
-- It’s football season ---
Autumn came around like a drifter to an on-ramp --- ----
---- There were wet leaves floating in gutters -- full of rain ---
---- Took to walking barefoot around town --- ----
-- Melodies from grade school --- -- kicking in my brain ---
-- No one washed ---
-- Behind my ears --- ---- ----
-- High in the trees ---
-- Alone for years --- ---- ----
On average, Darnielle is silent for 20 of the first 32 beats of these verses. The effect, in most cases, is that the sentences break into fragments on their way to us. You’re aware at a different depth, after listening to all five songs, of the phenomenon of slowed and frozen speech, and of how far away from other people it’s possible for any one of us to fall.
When someone you know is in this state, you can find yourself wanting to say, or maybe actually saying, “Try harder.” And if it’s you who’s in this state, you’re almost certainly going to be saying that over and over to yourself. Until maybe you get so lonely, so sad and frightened, that the concept of “trying” starts to make less sense to you. “Some days I think I’d feel better if I tried harder,” Darnielle sings in “Wild Sage.” “Most days I know it’s not true.” When the singer in “Woke Up New” has his first post-breakup morning, the part of him that had been trying and trying and trying to make the relationship work has no idea what to do.
For a little while, he wanders around the house taking what seem like appropriate actions: making coffee, drinking it all (even though he had made enough for both of them), putting on a sweater, and turning up the heat. But he’s is in the terrifying, arousing grip of total newness: you can see it in his eyes, hear it in the way he’s talking to himself, sense it in the way he runs out into the street. Once he’s out of the house, though, something changes:
the wind began to blow and all the trees began to bend
And the world, in its cold way, started coming alive
And I stood there like a businessman waiting for a train
And I got ready for the future to arrive.
The world keeps coming alive and the future keeps appearing, in spite of everything he tries to do. “Oh, what do I do/what do I do/what do I do?/What do I do/without you?” he asks in the chorus, as if there might be an answer, but it doesn’t feel like there is. It’s a tightly wound circuit of musical phrases, starting at “Oh” (D), going up the scale to “do” (A), up further to “do” (G), and still further to “do?” (D), and then, after a couple of rests, going down to “do” (A) and to “you?” (D). It’s easy to remember, easy to sing, easy to play; you could do it forever. Which is kind of the point. Asking fundamental questions—what do I do?—is a counterweight to trying, to fixing/solving/answering, to the common sense of ruthlessly socialized people. And asking those questions repeatedly, or having them resound in you repeatedly, is a way of getting somewhere.
But where? The monster in the next song, “If You See Light,” is in a house, waiting, panicked, for the front door to splinter and the villagers to pour through it (I will breathe shallow breaths from high up in my stomach/Ah hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah). The singer in “Cobra Tattoo,” at war with God (You will bruise my head/I will strike your heel), is in a car, which seems to go off the road; at the end of the song, he’s lying in the wet underbrush of a pine forest, eyes on dew-prisms and skates’ egg cases. And the singer in “In Corolla,” the final song, is in the Outer Banks village of Corolla, North Carolina, walking toward Sanders Bay, the shallow, grassy stretch of the Atlantic that lies between the Outer Banks and the mainland.
Then he’s in the marshy water of the bay. “I let my head sink down beneath the brackish water,” he sings. “Felt it gumming up my hair.” I see where this is going, every time I listen to the song, but a part of me is still never prepared for what comes next:
The sun was sinking into the Atlantic
The last time that I turned my back on you
I tried to summon up a little prayer as I went under
It was the best that I could doAnd I said, “Let them all fare better than your servant”
The reeds all pricking at my skin
“Here’s hoping they have better luck than I had down here with you”
All that water rushing in
There are some things that you wish you didn’t have to explain, but you do, so you wind up explaining them just a little. Down, slowly, goes his body; up, like bubbles, go his thoughts. Soon the tips of the reeds growing up from the bottom of the bay brush his body. His silent prayer is coming to an end. On the brink of the last line, I feel a sadness that’s unlike any sadness I’ve ever felt. Then he sings it, really quietly, as if the song is making him do it.
“There was a point in the show when he talked about his upcoming record Get Lonely,” a blogger wrote after seeing the Mountain Goats in Portland on 10 June 2006, “and how, basically, it is an exploration of sadness, how sometimes we feel sad, sort of, but we don’t feel all-the-way-sad and we need that one certain record to help us follow our sadness down the rabbit hole to see just how far it (the sadness, the rabbit hole, take your pick) will take us, which is past the bottom because it’s bottomless.” That’s where all of Get Lonely’s counterintuitive steps lead, to a place where an all-the-way-sad light bathes everything, where fear takes hold. “I deal with hard times by going as far down into my sadness as I can stand and staying there as long as I can stand it,” Darnielle wrote on Tumblr. On Get Lonely, he extends, to anyone who’s listening, an invitation to come along.5
References by stanza: I: interview with Matt Hauser, Science Geek #4, 1998; II: interview with Jerry Gorin, Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 October 2014; III: interview with Terry Gross, NPR, 17 September 2014; IV: interview with Alex Denney, Drowned in Sound, 15 January 2008; V: introduction to “In Memory of Satan,” Bottletree, 22 June 2013; VI: interview with Charlie Jane Anders, Gizmodo, 27 March 2008; Darnielle, “My Five Favorite Mountain Goats Characters,” eMusic, February 2008; interview with Jer Fairall, popmatters, 2 November 2009; VII: introduction to “This Year,” Bowery Ballroom, 30 March 2011 (Annotated Mountain Goats); interview with Erin Lyndal Martin, The Quietus, 16 January 2013; interview with Jer Fairall, popmatters, 2 November 2009; interview with Sam Means, largeheartedboy, 19 February 2008; VIII: interview with Elijah Taylor, Birth Movies Death, 2 April 2017; IX: introduction to “No Children,” Bottletree, 22 June 2013; X: Darnielle, “Hate Eternal—King of All Kings,” St. Louis Riverfront Times, November 6, 2002.
When Darnielle talks about the album, he tends to focus on its vibe. “The feeling of this one is dark, but also soft,” he said in a 2006 interview. “Everything’s just this dark autumn day for 35 or 38 minutes,” he said in 2011. “I . . . felt a pretty deep connection with the people who’d write me or talk to me at shows about The Sunset Tree,” he said in another 2006 interview, “and I felt like there was a sort of dark cave we might all flee to in the wake of that album, if that makes sense.”
BBC 6 session, 4 August 2006, transcribed from The Annotated Mountain Goats.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; rpt. London: Penguin, 1995), 80.
“[Loneliness] has something to teach. A life without loneliness is incomplete. . . . It’s not something you can get in everyday life. It’s like something from a totally different time, or another planet. . . . On Get Lonely I wanted to try exploring these kinds of thoughts in detail. Where does loneliness end? Does it eventually end? Or, I think, is it something that's always somewhere?” (Darnielle, interview in liner notes of Japanese version of Get Lonely, transcribed from The Annotated Mountain Goats).