2012: Transcendental Youth
In a Minneapolis hotel room in June 2011, Darnielle started writing the song that would end up being “Until I Feel Whole.” The speaker, Darnielle wrote in a July 2012 essay, “turned out to be a person who felt lost and alone and only partially able to keep it together. He was living alone in the Pacific Northwest, and he was fighting the urge to just stop fighting at all, and I recognized his voice because, one, I used to work with a lot of people who spent long seasons in that guy’s shoes, and two, I have also been that guy.” The song “touch[ed] on some themes I’d circled but never set my claws fully into. So I kept writing through the summer, and in August the baby was born and I’d cradle him in my left arm while writing melodies at the piano with my right.” He and the band played a lot of the new songs live in late 2011 and early 2012, and by the time they went into a Durham studio to record Transcendental Youth, he had developed “a plan that was broad enough to let everybody contribute his own voice . . . but focused enough to keep dragging the songs by their hair back to the central point of the record, which has to do with whether anybody has the right to tell people whether their visions are sick or not. Spoiler alert, absolutely nobody has that right, what makes me broken also makes me whole, that is how it works and it’s like striking gold when you find that out so keep digging, don’t even get me started.”
NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO TELL ME WHETHER MY VISIONS ARE SICK OR NOT. WHAT MAKES ME BROKEN ALSO MAKES ME WHOLE. He’s right: it is like striking gold when you find that out—it means that right where you stand, broken and with a head full of visions, there are life-changing sources of power. “This is a song about finding the shining thing at your bedrock and embracing it until the light courses through you,” he told an audience in 2015, just before playing “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1,” the first song on Transcendental Youth. “Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive,” he sings in the first verse,
Do every stupid thing to try to drive the dark away
Let people call you crazy for the choices that you make
Find limits past the limits, jump in front of trains all day
And stay alive
Just stay alive
Be stupid, be crazy, or else you’ll die. “All the self-destructive stuff I did to myself when I was younger was vital,” he told Rolling Stone in August 2012. “I did it to stay alive.” You can hear that vitalizing self-destructiveness in his voice on “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1,” especially when he shout-sings “Just stay alive” for the last time, letting the word decompose into an open vowel and letting the vowel follow the course of the bass line. He’s in the presence of the shining thing at his bedrock, somehow, and the light is coursing through him. It’s like the song’s head-banging riffs and wild declarations have broken things open, and now a raw, open energy is spilling forth.
You can feel the same kind of energy in the performances. Wurster is at the top of his game, especially on “Harlem Roulette” (saved for later) and “The Diaz Brothers,” where he’s magically keeping time while getting lost inside an intuitive, beast-mode expressiveness. Hughes is playing with enormous confidence as well; he had always composed unusually melodic lines for himself, but in his contributions to Transcendental Youth, which are mixed higher than usual, he takes that to a whole new level. There’s the joyful up-and-down-the-scale run that fills out the verses in “Cry for Judas,” the rangy, punchy riffs in “Lakeside View Apartment Suites,” and above all, for me, “Counterfeit Florida Plates,” in which it’s almost impossible to guess where he’s going next. “People don’t seem to notice that we’re a good band now,” Darnielle told an interviewer in 2011. “We do a thing that is musical. It’s not just about me doing my lyrics. [It’s] about three guys playing together.” Hughes makes a similar point in a 2012 essay for NPR: “The writing, the arrangements, the performances, the production [on Transcendental Youth], all of it feels to me like the culmination of the work we’ve done up to this point—not just the albums, but the touring, the shows, all the time we’ve spent together learning to be a band and steadily getting better at it.”
The songs on Transcendental Youth were pretty clearly written with those steadily growing capacities in mind. Like most professional musicians, Wurster and Hughes would rather play songs in which the rhythm-and-chord patterns have something novel about them, where the beats and progressions hold your attention because they keep your consciousness in motion. In a song like “Lakeside View Apartment Suites,” which superficially resembles Darnielle’s 2008-09 piano compositions, they have a lot more to work with than they did on those earlier songs. After the first chord is struck and given time to decay, a jolting progression begins, in which the chord changes every two or three syllables (Bm-D-G-Bm, G-A-D). In the second half of the verse, a significantly different progression unfolds at a moodier pace (E-D-Bm, E-D-Bm, Bm-A-G-A, F#m-D-E). Then a catchy, familiar-sounding chorus (Gadd9-A-B, Gadd9-A-Bm) kicks in, and the song seems to be on firm musical ground, until, after the second time through the chorus, the hushed, haunting bridge (E-Bm x4) sort of collapses into a string of chords (Bm-A-G, Bm-A-G-F#m, Bm-A-G). Another one of the album’s piano songs, “White Cedar,” has a complicated chord progression but no firm-ground chorus, so the predominant effect is of stepping from chord to chord to chord, without a clear sense of what resolution would sound like. In the verses, Darnielle touches on each of the seven chords that accompany an E major scale with a flat seventh—E, F#m, G#m, A, B, C#m, D—in order to set up, in the chorus, a beautiful falling motion (E-D-C#m-B-A) that briefly lifts (Dmaj7) and then drops to the tonic (E). The only reason to write songs like this is if you have bandmates who can not only play them, but use them as the basis of their own forms of expression, and that’s exactly what Wurster and Hughes do.
The lyrics on Transcendental Youth are more complex too. In “Spent Gladiator 2,” over a progression with a surprise chord in it (C-Em-F-E!-Am), Darnielle just keeps coming up with new images of staying alive, until it starts to seem that inventing figures of speech, saying things in different ways, is itself a way of staying alive:
Like a spent gladiator
Crawling in the Colosseum dust
Who can count on his remaining limbs
All the people he can trust
Like the one who stands behind him
Cheering him on
Ecstatic when he stands defiant
Wild with abandon when he’s gone
Just stay alive
Keep your eyes on the pay line
Like a village on the steppe
About to get collectivized
When the men emerge with rifles from the haystack
Everybody looks surprised
Like the mice in the forgotten grain
Way up on the top shelf
Like someone who’s found a small town to escape to
Keeps one eye on his abandoned former self
Stay in the game
Just try to play through the pain
Like a fighter who’s been told it’s finally time for him to quit
Show up in shining colors and then stand there and get hit
Like the clock that ticks in Dresden
When the whole town’s been destroyed
Like the nagging flash of insight
You’re always desperate to avoid
Like the bloody-knuckled gunman
Still stationed at the breach
Like that board game with the sliders
And the children on the beach
Stay alive
Maybe spit some blood at the camera
Just stay alive
Stay forever alive
There’s no narrative; there’s no character at its center (the title of the song just refers to the first figure of speech); and there’s no effort to make the various scenarios cohere. “I have sort of these weird categories in my head that would be impossible to explain to you about which songs have forward movement and which ones are sort of more like throwing paint at a canvas,” Darnielle told an audience in October 2012, the month that Transcendental Youth came out. In “Spent Gladiator 2,” “throwing paint at a canvas” makes it possible for him to repeat a central phrase—stay alive—without getting repetitious, because the people or things that are trying to stay alive in the song’s ten similes (peasant farmers, nagging flashes of insight, children playing a game called Stay Alive!) are so wildly different from one another.
The “images that are banging up against one another without a clear forward narrative” generate an atmosphere of their own, and within that atmosphere, the meaning of “staying alive” gets harder and harder to pin down. (The way the song drifts between a feeling of C major and a feeling of A minor has a lot to do with that too.)
In other songs, like “Lakeside View Apartment Suites” and “The Diaz Brothers,” the narrative frameworks shift and blur. When you look at the Lakeside View Apartment Suites building from the outside, you see something brutally actual—“Three gray floors of smoky windows/Facing the street”—and not quite there: “A dream in switchgrass and concrete.” Inside the room, Michael has lifted the blinds and is watching the intersection for the guy who’s coming with the angel dust, and then, in a blink, that particular day turns into a day in a long sequence of days: “Days like dominoes/All in a line.” In a world in which time and reality aren’t stable (Emerge transformed in a million years/From days like these), the only narrative movement you can imagine is sort of dazed and self-erasing. “And just before I leave,” Darnielle sings, “I throw up in the sink/One whole life recorded/In disappearing ink.” The storytelling in “The Diaz Brothers” has the same hazy, in-between quality, in this case because the speaker, someone who has escaped from a locked psychiatric unit, is thinking about two characters who are killed off-screen in Brian de Palma’s Scarface, and you can’t always tell whether he’s referring to himself or to them. At the beginning of the song, I hear “Cops and robbers, strictly bargain line/Spent the wet night tracking visions through the pines” and I imagine a messy armed pursuit, but then I hear “Draw my arms into my hospital gown/See the sky open up and rain down/Rain down” and I have to reset: it’s actually that there are security guards from the hospital out there looking for him while he tracks his visions. After having his major vision—the sky raining down mercy for the Diaz brothers—he starts to identify with the brothers and all of the unseen, unheard, unmourned people like them. “Beam of the flashlight,” he sings in the bridge, “All night in the woods/Hunt us like dogs/And then string us up for good”—and then, in that “dude’s-gonna-come-unglued” voice:
Keep one step ahead of enemies
Foretell worse things than such frightful nights as these
Lead us to the beach by our hands
And bury us there in the sand
Hunt us, string us, lead us, bury us. When you sing along with it, in certain moods, you’re in there with that “us” too.
And sometimes that’s what you need most, a seat at the bottom, where there’s plenty of seats and lots of people filling them. At the Portland show on the Get Lonely tour, Darnielle had talked about how the album “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.” Transcendental Youth is, in the same kind of way, an exploration of mental illness—not mentally ill people, exactly, but states of mental illness that everyone is capable of experiencing, states that have taken some of us all the way down the hole.1 The first two songs from the Transcendental Youth period, “Until I Feel Whole” and “White Cedar,” take us into unwell perspectives on the world and just kind of settle down there.2 The same is true of “Counterfeit Florida Plates,” another early song, in which the “guy is so visibly unmedicated and in need of some treatment that it was sort of a nice radiant point for the rest of them.”3 Mental illness takes the shape of addiction in “Lakeside View Apartment Suites,” “Harlem Roulette,” and “In Memory of Satan,” where the speaker’s “paintbox” is full of supplies that lead up to stay up late and wreck the place. And cut-off people, like the Jenny-searching speaker of “Night Light” and the young lovers in “Transcendental Youth,” are part of this basement (abasement, debasement) crowd too. It would be pretty awful if Darnielle’s point was that depression, addiction, and attendant psychotic features are romantically liberating. But it’s not, of course. The point is that the deeper you go into states like these, the more you sense an array of shapes, colors, and tones around you—the more you sense, at an elemental level, the possibility of other worlds. “I don’t think any feelings are monochromatic,” Darnielle said in an October 2012 interview. “I think when you’re desperate and sad there’s always a feeling that there must be an exit somewhere and dreams of what lies on the other side of dark things. . . . Every mood or feeling is actually very rich to me so there’s always that aspect of jubilation or triumph in even the darkest things.”
The uncanny, somber beauty of “In the Shadow of the Western Hills,” a late scratch from Transcendental Youth, is, for me, the best example of what Darnielle has in mind here.
Over a haunting, exploratory minor-key progression (Dm-Dmin/maj7-G, C-C/B-Dm, C-Dm, C-A, G5-A7sus4-Dm, Bb-A-Dm), Darnielle sings,
Spread out the old maps on the floor
Plot the course of the infection
Trace from its beginnings to the present
Is there no one here who’s making this connectionFeral cats out by the trash cans
To the true believer, everything’s a signScrape the pigments from the baseboards
In the shadow of the western hills
And paint my vision on my body
In the shadow of the western hills
On the floor of his room, the speaker is using old maps to track the course of an epidemic, seeking truths in the patterns of signs. The noises of the feral cats are signs too, all things are signs, and they all merge into a vision that he’s going to paint on his body with the pigments in baseboard chips. What follows is one of the most vividly beautiful and sad song-sections of Darnielle’s career:
Bleak rose-petal sky in two dimensions
Black tree-line a blade that cuts across it all
Can’t seem to sleep or find my appetite
Since I got home from the hospitalCall up Rebecca, maybe try to explain
But she hangs up while I’m still talking, I walk out into the rainWander from the alley to the darkness
Sink down completely, leave no trace
Trapped beneath the surface of the ice again
Lie still with the moonlight on my face
Wait for the wolves to keep their promise
Listen for their footfalls on the snow
I can’t hear things clearly to be honest
In the shadow of the western hills
He gets most healed that waits the longest
In the shadow of the western hills
The winter sky bordering the tree-line at sundown is unreal, two-dimensional, and so is he, apparently, when he tries to talk to Rebecca. When she hangs up, it’s like there’s nowhere left for him to be. It’s night now, and raining, and he wanders into the darkness, where he sinks beneath the icy surface of some body of water. Then he’s under the surface, motionless, looking up at the moon, listening for the wolves who promised to kill him. A visionary conviction arises (He gets most healed who waits the longest) and the song ends.
“What I do is find dark things to sing about and try and infuse them with some sort of triumphant power,” Darnielle told Rolling Stone in August 2012. The eerie beauty of “In the Shadow of the Western Hills” is the emotional environment in which those dark, obscurely empowering songs can be sung, a space in which the bleak rose-petal sky speaks to the moonlit night sky and vice versa. It’s an environment in which Darnielle had composed and performed on earlier records, but he had never before occupied it so fully, or with such an intense focus on the darkness, the power, and the dreamlikeness that holds them together. In the bridge in “Cry for Judas,” the speaker dreams of hanging himself from a tree like Jesus’s betrayer while Matthew E. White’s horn section fills the song with bright melody. In “Harlem Roulette,” Wurster, Hughes, and Darnielle take the rumbling, rolling energy of the song up to its highest pitch right when Darnielle launches into its darkest, most desperate lines: “There’s nothing in the shadows but the shadow-hands/Reaching out to sad young frightened men.” “I'll be reborn someday, someday/If I wait long enough,” Darnielle sings in the last verse of “White Cedar,” and in the midst of the piano chords and accentual horns, a WHACK-WHACK signals that something is very right or very wrong, or both. “I don’t have to be afraid,” Darnielle sings, and then, less certainly, “I don’t want to be afraid.” And then the key lines, the lines that bring together, for me, all of the pain and unsurrenderingness that float through these twelve songs: “And you can’t tell me what my spirit tells me isn’t true/Can you.” My lip curls involuntarily and twitches. It’s not cool. I’m embarrassed and angry. Somewhere around me I can feel legions of like-minded spirits. NO.
“This next album is about mental illness,” Darnielle said when introducing “In the Shadow of the Western Hills” at a July 2012 concert in Claremont. “I worked in mental health here in southern California for a very long time but I’ve come to sort of think the way we sort of describe mental illness as unuseful to the people, to the population that we purport to serve, when we nurse or administer, because to put a person’s, individual’s daily experiences in a basket and to call it mental illness is to really minimize and uh, compartmentalize them in a way that isn’t helpful to anybody, I mean it’s hard not to do because it’s a big world and there’s lots of people, so being able to describe things in generalization seems really useful in the short term, but in the long term I think we wind up doing is dehumanizing a bunch of people who need more human services than we’re kind of willing or able to provide in our emotionally bankrupt culture.” In June 2013, he described “In Memory of Satan” as “a song about those periods that you go through in your life when you are totally mentally ill, right. But I’m serious, because I really strongly think that, like, I think there’s two—well I generally resist ‘there’s two kind of people in this world’ ideas, you know, because I think that can’t be true. If that’s true, then it’s just a football game and we should all play a gigantic football game and whoever wins gets all the toys. But I think there are people who struggle with feeling that they can’t keep it together and then there’s people who are lying.”
“I do think the album is drawing somewhat on [my] experiences of being unwell,” Darnielle said shortly after its release (Evan Serpick, “Mountain Man—John Darnielle on adding horns and offering advice on the new Mountain Goats album,” Baltimore City Paper, 10 October 2012). “The songs seemed to suggest scenes of emotional struggle, of real confusion,” he said in another interview. “I thought I knew something about that, about depression, about the edges of it where you start to lose coherence. That seemed like something I hadn’t written about, so I pecked away at the idea” (Ed Condran, “Mountain Goats frontman enjoys exploring options,” Raleigh News & Observer, 5 October 2012).
Quoted in Nick Johnston, “John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats on North Carolina, destroying demos, and twitter fame,” Boston Phoenix, 17 October 2012.