2011: All Eternals Deck
One day Darnielle was playing a video game called Odin Sphere in a “get away from what’s going on in your life” kind of way and he made it to a cut screen in which the skeletal King Valentine, in the plains of the netherworld, says to Princess Velvet, “You and your brother escaped the curse. You can’t comprehend what it’s like . . . This pain and suffering. . . . Take a good look at me . . . All I want is oblivion.”
Darnielle cried. Then he went to his piano and started writing “Enoch 18:14,” a song that didn’t make it onto The Life of the World to Come but appeared in demo form on The Life of the World in Flux. The verses sketch a scene in which a cursed person approaches the gates of a city, sees old friends, and chooses, despite having been invited to come in, to return to the wasteland outside the city, where the ground is dry and the sky is nearly black. “You and your brother,” he sings in the chorus, “You both escaped the curse/You can’t comprehend what it’s like.”
Sometimes the best way of really feeling whatever’s in you is by taking in, with your guard down, something that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with you.1 You start watching a movie or a cut screen (or whatever) and at some unpredictable moment, you’re startled into strong emotions. For instance: on 25 May 2009, just before finishing the recording of The Life of the World to Come, Darnielle wrote, recorded, and posted, in response to the ending of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a song called “Bride.” In the film, Victor Frankenstein creates a bride for the monster, and after the bride repeatedly shrieks in horror at the monster, the monster (who is also called Frankenstein, obviously, but that’s too confusing right now) says “We belong dead” and throws a switch that demolishes the stone tower over the lab.
In “Bride,” which is sung from the perspective of the monster, the repetitions of that phrase in the chorus deepen its resonance, a resonance that extends, implicitly, to whatever Darnielle was feeling when he watched those last scenes. (I experience the same sudden closeness to the mood in which the song was composed when he sings “And I am too dumb/To tell you how I feel” over the verses’ beautiful G-Bm6-C progression.) First, the scenes mix with the feelings they generate in him; then, out of that mixture of moving images and powerful emotions, the song begins to emerge.
A series of amazing songs followed in the path that “Enoch 18:14” and “Bride” partially cleared.2 In November 2009, sick and briefly left behind in L.A. in the midst of a tour, Darnielle wrote “Liza Forever Minnelli,” in which the speaker ends up lying down on Liza Minnelli’s Hollywood Boulevard star, overwhelmed by the feeling that neither of them are ever going to get away from their scary, seductive starting points. On All Eternals Deck, which was released in March 2011, that song was joined by “The Autopsy Garland,” a Judy Garland song that was set in motion by a scene in Red Sun (1971); “For Charles Bronson,” a song that was also set in motion by that movie; and “High Hawk Season,” which is, as Darnielle puts it, “basically just a narration to the script to The Warriors.” The accompanying cassette of demos, All Survivors Deck, includes a song called “Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece,” which is sung from the perspective of Charles “The Butcher” Benton, the character played by Lon Chaney Jr. in The Indestructible Man (1956).
And it’s not just individual songs. The “signal piece” in the development of All Eternals Deck, according to Darnielle, was Burnt Offerings (1976), which he describes as “a movie that’s almost exclusively about mood. In it, there’s all this build-up to a chaotic last ten minutes. There’s this feeling of dread . . . [an] awful sense that something terrible is going to happen.” But “it’s not that you’re afraid of something; you’re riding that feeling.” The films and actors that were affecting Darnielle so strongly didn’t just make the Minnelli, Garland, Bronson, and Warriors songs possible; the moods that they initiated helped to make it possible for him write all of the other songs on All Eternals Deck too.3
“Damn These Vampires,” for instance. You never know, in that song, who the vampires are (for the record, Darnielle has said that he was thinking about the Portland friends that he had written about on We Shall All Be Healed). You just get three film-clip-like scenes involving cowboys on horses who are, at the same time, teenagers in a Trans Am:
Brave young cowboys
Of the near North Side
Mount those bridge rails
Ride all night
Scream when captured
Arch your back
Let this whole town hear your knuckles crack
Sapphire Trans Am
High beams in vain
Drive wild broncos
Down the plain
Push up to the corner
Where the turbines hiss
Someday we won’t remember this
Tie those horses
To the post outside
And let those glass doors
Open wide
And in their surface
See two young, savage things
Barely worth remembering
You don’t know where the story is going, or even what the story is, so you’re free to just take in the song’s heretic mood. Things are probably not going to turn out well for these two barely-worth-remembering people. But that’s why Darnielle is drawn toward them, why he creates a kind of song-memorial to their ghostly reflections in the door. “[I’m] interested in broken machines, obsolete technology, people who move and don’t leave a forwarding address, and the New York Islanders,” he wrote on Last Plane to Jakarta in 2002. “I love . . . unfinished novels, people who lie about where they’re from, towns you drive through but don’t stop in, and once-popular but now obscure varietals of apples,” he wrote later. Savage, future-indifferent kids. Undead skeleton kings in video games. Monsters who sorrow and say “we belong dead.” Double-crossed mobsters who die, come back to life, and die again.
Judy Garland. Sitting on a couch in the living room of the house that he and Lalitree had just bought in Durham, watching Red Sun, Darnielle feels a “vibe” from the movie and so he says,
“One clear shot or he gets away” because there’s a train robbery happening. I’m looking at the action there that starts to inspire it. Except that was a Charles Bronson movie, but it became a story about Judy Garland. If you look in the room where I wrote it, there’s a biography of Judy Garland on the bookshelf facing me, right? So it’s very much that I’m in this moment, soaking up visuals.
The magic of the song that materialized from this process, “The Autopsy Garland,” is in the transition from the train robbery to Garland’s life and death, and in all of the similarly oblique transitions that follow from it.
Bang-bang floor toms, a rough-edged bass, and a tight circle of minor-key chords (Em-Cmaj7-A7sus2, capoed up three frets) establish a emotional grounding for the song’s montage, which starts like this: 1) train robbery—“One clear shot or else he gets away/Red sun high in the sky tonight”—2) a 47-year-old Garland in her London town house—“Look west from London down toward Hollywood/Remember the first days in California”—3) a dread-filled chorus that could refer to either of those two scenarios: “You don’t want to see these guys without their masks on/You don’t want to see these guys without their masks on.” Terrible images appear: “Fat rich men love their twelve-year-olds.” Even more terrible images appear: “You don’t want to see these guys without their masks on/Or their gloves.” And then a rapid, snake-like rattling becomes increasingly audible as the song nears its end.
It’s one of the best examples in Darnielle’s catalog of his ability to “get off the subject,” as the poet Richard Hugo puts it in The Triggering Town, a writing-advice book that had a big impact on Darnielle.4 “Young poets find it difficult to free themselves from the initiating subject,” Hugo writes. If they’re writing about Autumn Rain, they feel “obligated to go on talking about Autumn Rain,” when they should really just “start talking about something else.” “Don’t be afraid to jump ahead,” he says. “Make the subject of the next sentence different from the subject of the sentence you just put down. . . . [A]ssume that the next thing you put down belongs . . . because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.”5 Darnielle had the feeling that he was “leveling-up” with “The Autopsy Garland,” and part of the reason, maybe, is that he felt even freer than usual to “jump ahead,” to trust the power of the fact that “the same person who said that, also said this.” He loved Judy Garland so much, after all. “I worship Judy Garland and can barely sing anything she sang without collapsing into a tearful heap on the floor,” he wrote in 2013. And identified with her so much. “Her life is a story of survival,” he said in a 2012 interview. “I’m a survivor of different things, but survivors can recognize in each other the same sort of cold burning thing underneath them.” The feelings she stirred in him were the adhesive force—the feelings that hold together lines like “Sweet spearmint and bitter tangerine/Bedside decked with roses,” the feelings that make it possible to write such lines in the first place.
However bad those feelings might be, they’re never purely bad. “[I]t gives me great joy to make music; even telling dark and horrible stories, I sort of feel the burning joyous affirmative righteousness of how awesome it is just to be alive, even on your worst day,” Darnielle wrote on Reddit in 2011. “It’s a sort of defiance. Suffering is seldom joyful, but expressing one’s capacity for survival almost always is.” In the case of “Liza Forever Minnelli,” painful feelings catalyzed it, held it together through its changes, and colored its finished form.
“There’s the part you’ve braced yourself against and then/There’s the other part,” the speaker sings, over a catchy F-F/G-Bb-Bb/C climb on a keyboard set to Fender Rhodes. “Steal up inclining northward streets with some/Weird sickness in the dark.” It’s not a joyful situation: the speaker is dealing not only with a threat that can never be seen or fended off, but with a weird sickness that is somehow related to it. Lyrically and musically, though, the expression of that situation is full of joy. The rhythm of the song, in particular, is addictive—Wurster plays a lot of triplets, Hughes goes into a slightly off-rhythm double-pluck pattern in the chorus, and Darnielle sometimes seems to pull the lines’ meters out of the air (AnyONE here MENtions HOtel CALiFORnia DIES beFORE the FIRST line CLEARS his LIPS). It’s the kind of song where the expression of a painful thought—“I’m never going to get away from this place”—is also a way of having fun with syllables: “Never get away, never get away/I am never ever gonna get away/From this place.” Some people might think that this means that the bad feelings aren’t really that bad, but those people are mistaken. Giving your deepest and most painful feelings some kind of expression is, among other things, a source of relief and joy, and that relief and joy can become—especially when music is involved—an integral part of what’s being expressed.
“Never Quite Free” is the album’s best example of this.
In the opening verse, Darnielle’s speaker sings, in a clear, undefended voice, about how much better things are now:
It’s so good to learn that right outside your window
There’s only friendly fields and open roads
And you’ll sleep better when you think, you’ve stepped back from the brink
And found some peace inside yourself, laid down your heavy load
The 4/4 measures are like exhalations: Wurster’s bass drum and Hughes’s bass hit the third beat together, each time, and then the drum rests and the bass rings to the end of the bar. Darnielle’s piano part is quiet and simple, and the chords (G-D/F#-Em-C) change slowly. Then, in the chorus, Hughes drops out, Wurster takes it down to a hi-hat, and over rudimentary whole- or half-note chords—one of which is an unsettling F—Darnielle sings,
It gets all right to dream at night
Believe in solid skies and slate blue earth below
But when you see him, you’ll know
He’s silent for the last three of the chorus’s eight bars and even though a pedal steel comes in to smooth things over, a tension builds in the open spaces left by the piano and hi-hat. The question of what you’ll know when you see “him” seems to hang in the air, and the second verse, even though it’s more up-tempo and the pedal steel is swooping through it, sort of bears that question’s weight:
It’s okay to find the faith to saunter forward
With no fear of shadows spreading where you stand
And you'll breathe easier just knowing that the worst is all behind you
And the waves that tossed the raft all night have set you on dry land
You have to find faith now, so as to overcome the fear of shadows outspreading from your feet, and the memory of being at the mercy of the raft-tossing waves is pretty strong in you. And then, at the end of the second chorus, “he” is suddenly, shockingly present: “But hear his breath come, through his teeth.” A hush falls. “Walk by faith,” Darnielle sings in the quiet bridge. “Tell no one what you’ve seen.” At this point, I don’t need to be told what the speaker has seen, or what the sound of “him” panting through gritted teeth has to do with it, I basically know, and when the drums mutter deeply in the bridge’s last two bars, I know it even more, and when the snare cracks and the cymbal crashes and the final verse begins, I’m in a different part of myself:
It’s so good to learn that from right here the view goes on forever
And you’ll never want for comfort, and you’ll never be alone
See the sunset turning red, let all be quiet in your head
And look about, all the stars are coming outThey shine like steel swords
Wish me well where I go
But when you see me, you’ll know
And then Wurster, totally on fire, takes us home.
There’s something about that cymbal crash at the end of the bridge that does me in. It’s all about context, obviously—about the nine-word, silence-filled bridge, the build toward the crash, and the way that the band hits the first stressed syllable, “good,” as the last verse begins—but when I listen to “Never Quite Free” now, it’s like the whole emotional force of the song finds its full, complex expression right there, in that crash. When the “crazy elegiac build” of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) reaches its peak, Darnielle wrote in 2012, there’s a strange harmony of sounds: Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) “scream[s] ‘Go! Go!’ and laugh[s] the most beautiful crazed laugh of survival while Leatherface spins and dances with the saw high in the air framed by the sun setting on Texas, the sound of the saw achieving its own weird ambient language.” I know, on some level, how those sounds go together as I watch that final scene; I understand, without knowing why, that they’re two different manifestations of the same sound, the sound of excitement without borders, excitement in its purest state. The Sunset-Tree-like pain that fills the bridge of “Never Quite Free” (Tell no one what you’ve seen) and the almost frighteningly counterfactual assertions of serenity that follow (And you’ll never want for comfort, and you’ll never be alone) meet and interfuse in the same way when Wurster crashes the cymbal.6 It’s so good to relearn, pretty much every time I hear that crash, that my feelings are alive like that, beyond my control, hooked up to what’s outside me in ways that I’ll never fully understand.
Listening to Mountain Goats songs, early on, was like that for me. Either I wasn’t expecting to experience things that drove me to tears, or I had the sense that I might be driven to tears but I didn’t know when or why, and then I would cry, and I would suddenly know a lot more about the things that I was on some level thinking about or keeping emotionally alive.
You could put “Minor Joan Crawford Vehicle,” a song from February 2009 with an intensely Joan-Crawford-B-movie vibe, in this category too (You there in your nightgown, head all full of dreams/All the things we'd sewn together splitting at the seams).
On All Eternals Deck, Darnielle told an interviewer in June 2011, “I was telling discrete stories, self-contained songs that felt like they had a clear visual narrative, like little cinematic moments. . . . [On] The Life of the World to Come, I had a specific set of ideas I wanted to confront and explore. . . . This was more like shooting a film.”
Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (New York: Norton, 1979), 5. On his Tumblr account in 2014, Darnielle linked to the Hugo chapter that I’m quoting from here and wrote, “this [was] really important to me back when I was first doing geographic-locations stuff.”
Hugo, The Triggering Town, 4-5. Elsewhere in the book, Hugo advises young poets to start from somewhere other than their own experiences—to write, say, about a town not their own, and to let its vivid, mysterious details trigger associative movements elsewhere. In the songwriting that led up to All Eternals Deck, Darnielle used a method that resembled Hugo’s method of starting from, and getting set off by, the details of an almost randomly generated “town”; he kept a list of three-word song titles in a pocket notebook and then, after enough time had passed to make them a little strange, he paged through the notebook to see which titles jumped out at him. That’s why the songs on All Eternals Deck have three-word titles: he was using them to gain access to things that were a little remote from his everyday self.
Sunset-Tree-type songs cropped up a few times in the All Eternals Deck era, most obviously in “Brisbane Hotel Sutra,” one of the bonus tracks (From the sunrise of my childhood/To its premature demise/From my mother’s best intentions/To my stepdad’s seething eyes). In another one of the bonus tracks, “Used to Haunt,” the extremely Darnielle-like speaker goes looking in himself for the traces of the adolescent self who had once haunted him in tormenting ways. “Tunnel down to the core,” he sings,
Climb through the trapdoor
Soft pink sky full of rumpled clouds
Radio up loud
There’s a pop in the speakers
Where I hear your voice come through
So brave and true
When did I lose sight of you
In the present, the adult is looking at a morning or evening sky, listening to music, and there’s a loud pop—at which moment his younger self’s voice comes, brave and true, through the speakers. “Come and rattle your chain,” the adult sings to his younger self, “All you want/You’re always gonna be welcome/Here in the hallways that you used to haunt.”