2009: The Life of the World to Come
“In 2008, my right ear started ringing and I lost my mind,” Darnielle told an interviewer in 2014. “I just got into this extraordinarily depressed mindset that said, you know, well, you’re not going be able to hear music right, so you won’t be able to make music.” But one morning,
while I was doing this thing I was doing, I was pacing around the house, crying, because that’s what I was doing all day, every day, it was really a hard time, I sat down at the piano . . . and I noticed that [the missing auditory range] . . . made me able to hear piano in a way I had never heard it before. . . . I would play a 6th or a major 7th and suddenly I would hear textures in it that I’d never heard before . . . and they would really reach me at an extraordinary deep level.
All of this happened in or around April 2008, when Darnielle cancelled a tour of Australia for “personal medical reasons” (he didn’t start playing shows again until mid-May). Within a couple of months, Darnielle was writing and releasing piano-based songs (“Satanic Messiah” and “Gojam Province 1968” on the Satanic Messiah EP and “Black Pear Tree,” and “Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is in Another Castle” on the Black Pear Tree EP). And on the Mountain Goats’ next LP, The Life of the World to Come, which was released in October 2009, the piano is even more prominent.1 Four of the songs—“Genesis 30:3,” “1 John 4:16,” “Deuteronomy 2:10,” and “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace”—are slow piano-and-voice compositions, sometimes backed by mixed-down instruments and atmospheric drums and cymbals. They’re a big part of the impression that the album leaves, not only because there had never before been a full-on piano song on a Mountain Goats LP, but because Darnielle’s way of playing the piano—strong fifths and triads, heavy on the soft and sustain pedals, with exploratory, one-or-two-finger additions and light melodic lines—was so emotional.2 It’s not just a collection of new songs; it’s the unveiling of a new kind of Mountain Goats song.
But it’s also not what people were initially talking about with respect to The Life of the World to Come, which is, as the reviewers often put it, “Bible-themed.” The songs are all titled after a verse or series of verses from the Bible, and Christian-sounding lines are threaded through them, like, “A kind and loving God won't let my small ship run aground” (“Romans 10:9”) and “If my prayer be not humble, make it so” (“Isaiah 45:23”). This led to a lot of uncomfortableness among listeners and critics; in one of the interviews that Darnielle did after the album’s release, a clearly drunk guy says to him, “You can’t take this shit seriously.” But Darnielle does take it seriously. “I’m as spiritual as a person who’s not sure there’s any such thing as ‘spirit’ can be,” he told Punk News. “I’ve had this lifelong thirst to believe, but I just don’t,” he said in another interview. But “the life of the spirit, that’s something worth letting loose in little songs, maybe. It’s bigger than [the songs] are, so maybe it can knock a few teacups off the shelves.”3
You can feel its force right away. In the album’s opener, “1 Samuel 15:23,” a song Darnielle wrote in the studio and quickly recorded with the band, the low-string downstrokes on an E—a chord that has a depth and finality to it, because it’s the lowest one that you can play in standard tuning—give rise to a quiet, menacing descent from D to A to G and back to E, over which Darnielle sings, “I became a crystal healer, and my ministry was to the sick.” 1 Samuel 15 is all about following God’s commands no matter what; in verse 23, the prophet Samuel tells King Saul that not following God’s instructions to the letter is as bad as witchcraft and idolatry. But the song named for that verse takes up the position that Samuel condemns, the position of someone who is living the life of the spirit as the spirit moves him—someone who is healing the sick in unsanctioned, crystal-related ways, not because he has been told to but because he has sensed the need for it (My house will be for all people who have nowhere to go).4 “There’s more like me where I come from/So mark our shapes,” he sings, without an ounce of penitence. And then, mysteriously and thrillingly, “Go down to the netherworld/Plant grapes.”
The feeling spills over into the next song, “Psalms 40:2,” another rebellious spirit’s cry.
Against the backdrop of slow-burning, repeated-note acoustic and electric guitars, Wurster and Hughes charge through the song’s thickly stressed measures (Feel BAD aBOUT the THINGS we DO aLONG the WAY, but not REALly THAT bad), transmitting the aggressive, exalted mood of two people on a church-desecration spree. No punishment is in sight for the people in the song; after they’ve unburdened their hearts with spray paint cans and driven off, “drunk on the Spirit and high on fumes,” they just head down toward Kansas for more of the same. In this atmosphere of unchecked, nothing-left-to-lose violence, a strange kind of breakthrough seems to occur. The last time through the song’s refrain—“He has fixed his sign in the sky/He has raised me from the pit and set me high”—the fury and joy in Darnielle’s voice makes me weirdly envious of what is, rationally, an unenviable position. “What is the use . . . in trying to convince our lovers that the road to ecstasy doesn’t pass through the valley of total damage?” Darnielle writes in the liner notes to The Life of the World to Come, a performance film directed by Rian Johnson. The spirit knows what it knows.
Really, though, it only feels what it feels. “Nice people said he had gone to God now,” Darnielle sings in “Philippians 3:20-21,” a song for David Foster Wallace. “Safe in his arms, safe in his arms/But the voices of the angels singing to him in his last hours with us/Smoke alarms, smoke alarms.” When you’re isolated by confusion or illness, it’s hard to know whether any of your transcendent experiences are happening anywhere outside your own mind (Hope daily for healing, try not to go insane). And once you start thinking “smoke alarms” or “tinnitus” instead of “angels,” there can be a thudding drop down to the level of the never-quite-transcended body. After its “high-spirits-on-fire” opening, The Life of the World to Come almost relentlessly takes the body, experienced that way, as its starting point. Most often, the speakers of the later songs try to put themselves under spells that will help them overcome their fear of what their body is endlessly telling them (“I will feel pain, I will be sick, I will experience extreme hunger and thirst, I will long for attachment, I will die”).5 “I won’t be afraid of anything every again,” the speaker of “1 John 4:16” repeatedly sings, even though he’s about to be torn to pieces in front of a crowd. “If you will believe in your heart/And confess with your lips/Surely you will be saved one day,” the speaker of the upbeat “Romans 10:9” repeatedly sings, even though he’s very clearly living a sleepless, depressed, paranoid life.6 And in “Isaiah 45:23,” the agonized, hospitalized speaker sings, three times, “And I won’t get better, but someday I’ll be free/’Cause I am not this body that imprisons me.”7 It’s a feeling, just a feeling, not a truth that the spirit infallibly knows.
In “Hebrews 11:40,” Darnielle amplifies that feeling and, at the same time, allows it resonate with some very deep body-related fears.
In the first verse, after the speaker has set the stage—I’m hiding out with witches in a mask-lined tomb, outside which the dry leaves are burning in the breeze—there’s a leap to an expression of spiritual triumph: “No ground is ever gonna hold me.” The chords burst into new territory, breaking from a strangled E-B-F#m-A progression into a beautiful, unexpected C#m that gradually makes its way back to the E. The second verse repeats the movement from fear (Bodies reassembling down where the worms crawl) to relief:
It gets dark and then
I feel certain I am going to rise again
If not by faith then by the sword
I’m going to be restored
Then the battle that the speaker has been fearing and not-fearing, fearing and not-fearing, gets closer (Blood calls to blood as the hours draw down), and the speaker’s efforts to pre-master the situation get wilder: “Invent my own family if it comes to that/Hold them close, hold them near/Tell them no one’s ever going to hurt them here.” “Sometimes when you’re young, or not so young, you do things to harm yourself physically,” Darnielle said before playing “Hebrews 11:40” in Melbourne in 2010. You enter “the solitary universe of self-mutilation.” “Take to the hills, run away/I’m going to get my perfect body back someday,” he sings in the song’s final chorus, and that’s the heart of the whole thing—cut yourself before they do, imaginatively separate yourself from your unprotected flesh, drift into a dream of transcendence. No one’s ever going to hurt you here. No one but you.
In the piano songs, though, Darnielle experiments with ways of musically signifying a kind of pain that you don’t transcend, a kind of pain that just changes, gradually, the longer you stay inside it. The one-or-two-at-a-time striking of the keys with the soft pedal and/or the sustain pedal down sort of blurs and spreads out the impact of the notes, and because the key signatures don’t change, those notes tend to gather in the neighborhood of a central tone. The song becomes a small model of existence, in which internal/external events strike and linger, strike and linger, until a distinctive atmosphere begins to take shape. Beauty can be experienced that way too, and sorrow, and love. This is a man, a baby, and the sunrise (“Genesis 30:3”):
I saw his little face contract as his eyes met light
Try to imagine anything so bright
You only see it once and it steals into the dawn
And then it’s gone forever
This is someone being brought out to face a lion in the Roman Colosseum (“1 John 4:16”):
In the cell that holds my body back, the door swings wide
And I feel like someone’s lost child as the guards lead me outside
And if the clouds are gathering it’s just to point the way
To an afternoon I spent with you when it rained all day
And in the last verse of “Deuteronomy 2:10,” in which the speaker is the world’s last golden toad, Darnielle strikes and holds an F#m and sings, “I sang all NIGHT, the moon shone ON me through the TREES,” switching to Asus4, D5, and G5 on the stressed syllables.
While the last chord rings, he adds a single note to it, changing it from a G5 to a G5sus2. Then he sings, “No brothers left, and there’ll be no more after me.”8
“We have to feel everything as deeply as we can,” Darnielle writes in the 2010 poem “new dance.” There’ll never be another first time that the baby sees sunlight, there’ll never be another moment in which the prisoner will travel back to that afternoon, there’ll never be another toad like that singing a song like that to the moon. You have to feel each of those things as deeply as you can; that’s what the songs are musically and lyrically telling us. Just before something vanishes, you can love it, you can sense its beauty, in a different way. In “Matthew 25:21” (saved for later), the speaker, in a group of people around a dying woman in a hospital bed, sings,
We all stood there around you
Happy to hear you speak
The last of something bright burning, still burning
Beyond the cancer and the chemotherapy
If you don’t know how to feel things deeply, you don’t get to have that experience. But you can always learn how to do it. Hear a tone and play it again just so that you can continue to chase the feeling that it gives you. Love the tone of someone else’s being and stay near it, hearing it, for as long as you possibly can.
“In English,” Darnielle told an Italian interviewer, the title is “the last lines of the creed we say at the end of Mass: ‘We believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.’ In the Latin it’s just ‘vitam aeternam’ but the English phrase is full of wonder and mystery to me.”
Darnielle had played piano on a few of his earlier songs, like “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones” and “Michael Myers Resplendent,” but in those cases, it had been one instrument among others, not the voice’s sole, or nearly sole, accompaniment.
He gets asked about his spiritual beliefs over and over, sometimes as if it’s part of a fact-finding mission to determine whether or not it’s okay to listen to him. “As I’m always saying,” he says in one interview, “I don’t really have any faith. I try, but in the end, I’m a modern like the rest of us. I just like to try to experience faith, and sing and think about it.” But his attraction to the experience of Christian faith is very forceful and (for me) very moving. Listen to the way that he talks about God and human frailty in this interview, between 1:45 and 2:05.
The speaker is a “necromancer or somebody healing in some witch-doctory sort of way,” Darnielle said in a 2009 radio interview. “[He’s] the person being attacked by First Samuel and is sort of making his case. . . . [I think that] a heretic and a devout worshipper are the same person in different lights.”
“Feel the fear in my chest all day,” Darnielle sings in the chorus of “Daniel 12:8 (third),” an outtake that appeared on a CD of demos called The Life of the World in Flux. “Praise you anyway.” In the chorus of another one of those demos, “Proverbs 6:27,” he sings, “I treat each crushing moment like a gift/And wait for the fog to lift.”
The speaker of “Romans 10:9” is just “grasping in the darkness for some small sign of hope and pretending to himself in the chorus that he’s been able to find it,” Darnielle told an audience in 2009.
“I think my relation to my body is going to be in constant flux,” Darnielle said in 2016. “I used to be a strict Augustinian: Body is just a cage for the spirit. But I don’t really believe that anymore.”
Several of the other piano songs from the 2008-09 period are like the ones on The Life of the World to Come: unflinching, but with hope or gratitude somewhere in them. “I dug a hole and filled it up with compost,” Kaki King sings on Darnielle’s “Black Pear Tree,” while Darnielle strikes triads or fifths and lets them ring. “Rested on the cool grass for a minute/I saw the future in a dream last night/There’s nothing in it”—and yet the verse’s shape is so beautiful, and the pain of the scenario (planting a tree in a world that feels futureless), ringing and mingling with that beauty, makes me tearful. At an arena where a sense of anticipation is building, in “Satanic Messiah,” the moment finally arrives, and as the F# major song moves through unexpected minor chords and flat sevenths, Darnielle sings, “We were all made young when he stepped onto the stage/Like an animal escaping from his cage.” And then, right away: “Raise the trumpet, sound the drum/He whom the prophet spoke of long ago has come.” The beast and the redeemer are sort of struck, one after another, like a pair of notes on the piano, and as they intermerge, you start to feel, in difficult-to-describe ways, their strange but real relationship to one another.