2019: In League with Dragons
Early in 2006, Darnielle was listening to Little Walter’s “Hate to See You Go” and loving it like he had back in junior high, “when the blues ripped the sky clean open.” Then it came over him that he had “no idea what Little Walter is saying at the end of the first verse.” And then, just before he looked it up, he realized that he “didn’t want to know what the lyric was.” The song
took power from this one moment of received obscurity: this one moment which, and this is the kicker for me, repeats itself some five times before vanishing into the distance. Part of the mystery of the song’s feel for me would die if I learned what Little Walter was saying.
The point of the story is just as obscure: “It’s not just ‘mystery is good’; it’s not just ‘preserve your memories’; it’s something about how refusing to understand something may carry its own sort of understanding, though I hope it runs a little deeper than that too.”
I’m writing this two years after the release of In League with Dragons, the Mountain Goats’ seventeenth full-length album, and I’m thinking about the Little Walter story because I’m sensing, in my response to the album, a lack of something. I passionately love three of the songs (“Done Bleeding,” “Younger,” and “An Antidote for Strychnine”), but I mostly don’t have that feeling of eventfulness, of one-of-a-kind-ness, that Mountain Goats songs usually give me. It feels like the songs don’t have as much remoteness from ordinariness in them, and that means that I can’t do as much with them—that I can’t approach them by means of remotenesses of my own.
It’s mostly because of the production. The band decided to hand over the reins to Owen Pallett, a musician they had worked with before, and he made a series of decisions that had an enormous impact on the album. He told Darnielle that he should include “Passaic, 1975,” an Ozzy song that was composed back in 2015; he took Darnielle off guitar and piano, replacing him with three Toronto-area musicians; and, as he told Now magazine in a May 2019 interview, he asked the band for
performances that were trimmed of any superfluousness. I asked Jon Wurster to play no fills. I asked Peter Hughes to play no disco octaves, to stick to the simplest line possible. I started using “grains of rice” as a unit of measurement for how many gestures I wished for each player to contribute to a performance—I’d say, “Johnny, on that pass, you gave seven grains of rice. Let’s bring it back to four grains of rice”—the idea being that if you limit the number of gestures you perform, it gives added weight to the gestures you retain.
Wurster still crushes “Sicilian Crest” and the end of “Younger,” but he is, for the most part, under wraps.1 Hughes, working against his penchant for melody, is similarly taken out of his game. And I just don’t like the sound of Darnielle singing into an empty 20-foot-long room in Blackbird Studio, joined, in the mixing process, by Thom Gill’s guitars, Johnny Spence’s keyboards, Bram Gielen’s guitars and keyboards, Douglas’s woodwinds and guitars, Dan Dugmore’s pedal steel, some strings from the Macedonian Radio Symphonic Orchestra, and lots of people singing harmony.2 Darnielle is capable of taking a song—a recessive, fragile, hard-to-sense thing—and, by means of his almost inhuman energy, projecting it into a space where it can hold together long enough to be taken in. Pallett wanted to hold these songs together by other means, though, and Darnielle, who was in the mood to experiment with giving others more control, gave him his blessing.3 That’s not a problem in itself; it’s good to try new things and make things in new ways. The problem is that the sharp reduction of improvisational energy often leaves the songs at a distance from me, and that means that I can’t get inside myself enough to get inside what Darnielle is singing. For instance: in “Doc Gooden,” there’s a four-bar acoustic riff that’s played eight times over the course of the song in exactly the same way. It’s a fairly low-energy song to begin with, and the unusually mechanical phrase, repeated an unusual number of times, makes it hard to sense the reality of Darnielle’s imaginative relationship to Dwight Gooden, a man with spectacular gifts who suffered terrible things. “The critic’s job is to locate the heart of the thing, launch an expedition thereto, and report back on what he did or did not find down there,” Darnielle wrote on Last Plane to Jakarta in 2003.4 In many of the songs on In League with Dragons, though, the heart of the thing is hard to find.5
On a few tracks, however, something does click and come forward. “Younger,” a live take of eight people playing together in separate recording booths, works incredibly well; you can feel everybody listening hard for the center of the song and kind of champing at the bit, so that when Douglas and Wurster explode in the sax-solo outro, it’s ecstatic.
It also works because the song mostly consists of a simple three-chord progression, Em7-Bm7add6-Am7, played over four bars, with the Am7 getting the last two bars. The second beat of each bar is stressed (dah-DAH-dah-dah), and pretty much all of the song’s lines are sung right after it. In the first two verses, Darnielle sings evenly metered trochees: “CRANK that SIren HIGH.” In the third verse, though, he switches to iambs (which makes it sound like the lines are starting a half beat later) that he complicates with three-syllable bursts:
It neverhurts to give thanks to the localgods
You neverknow who might be hungry/ …. /
It neverhurts to scan the windows on the upperfloor
I sawaface there once before when I was younger
After a D major in the last line, the progression resumes, and for the rest of the song, Darnielle shifts at will between verses that are defined by the type of two-syllable unit that is most dominant in them: trochaic (SET the TORCH aFLAME/CALL the NIGHT by NAME) or iambic: (it NEVer HURTS to GIVE THANKS to the BROken BONES). Words like trochaic and iambic are such a big problem; they can make metrical composition seem like something you need a degree for. But “metrical composition” is just being interested in, and playing with, where the stresses go. And once you’re composing like that, semantic content—the meaning of the words and phrases—can start to float away from the center of your attention. From a semantically oriented perspective, “Younger” is a song about an older warrior who is leading men into battle, a song that was originally going to be part of a D&D-ish rock opera about an aging wizard defending a seaside town from attack. Put the headphones on, though, and you know otherwise: the story is the occasion for the syllables and the syllables are the occasion for an experience of the rhythmic dimension of language. “It never hurts to give thanks to the navigator,” Darnielle sings in the last verse, “Even when he’s spitting out random numbers.”
It’s like there’s a chain that goes <neutral speech>—<rhythm-centered speech>—<speech you can’t quite understand and don’t really want to>. And it’s like songs are our best way of getting from point A to point B to point C, or of being in all three places at roughly the same time. After the possum in “Possum by Night” has stated his ultimate intentions as plainly as possible—“Grow fat and grow old and grow blind and be content”—he walks off into the woods. “Moon in the trees my guide,” Darnielle sings, and then, with an Am-G-F on the last three syllables, “Walk with my JAW HINGED WIDE.” It’s one of the lines that the audiences at the Mountain Goats’ 2019 shows sang loudest, a line that you sort of understand with non-cognitive parts of yourself (it’s an anti-predatorial display, but there are no predators in sight). “An Antidote for Strychnine” opens like this, over a cool, held-note, keyboard groove:
Dig around in the garbage
Save up some halibut bones in a jar
Scrape a winter’s worth of salt deposits
From the rusty frame of my car
Ask the experts
Maybe they'll know
After I had listened to the whole song a few times, I picked up on the fact that this is “a poisoner describing his strategy,” as Darnielle has said. And yet every time I play the song now, I listen to the words of the first verse as if I have no idea what he’s talking about, because that’s how I heard them first. Halibut bones, salt deposits, rusty frame—the tactile, almost tasteable details are like a circle with a strange feeling at the center, tinged by “winter’s worth.” It’s all I want, when listening: a mystery, an obscurity, that I’m as responsible for as the song is.
Sometimes, though, this two-way obscurity doesn’t come from syncopated syllables or associatively rich phrases; sometimes it comes from something mysterious in the subject of the song. In “Done Bleeding,” Darnielle, who used to cut himself, creates a speaker who keeps talking about the day when his addiction to cutting will have come to an end.
Sunny-sounding I-IV-V verses about what that day will be like—“Clean the floors well, sweep and swab/Do a thorough job/Leave the old place nicer than I found it”—dissolve into stark choruses, unfolding over strangely heaving chords (G-G#-F#-F, F#-F): “Grim-faced pilots back from the bombing run/When I get done.” The song doesn’t draw me into an identification with either one of those emotional states; it draws me into an identification with the state in which both are in play, in which both the cutting-dominated past and the cutting-free future are flowing into the present. It’s as if clarity clears away, over the course of the song, and the actual uncertainty of things is revealed. “Take a picture or two,” the speaker sings, “just to remember the view,” as if he’s grateful, deep down, for everything that he’s about to stop doing. And maybe, after all, he isn’t going to stop. “Let the crust form on my skin in the sun,” he sings (he’s just cut himself and it’s scabbing over), and then, “Red thread drying behind me, hand-spun” (he’s looking at a thin line of self-released blood). The song circles a yes-or-no question about quitting, in changeful moods, until I can hardly understand what’s happening in it. All I know is what I feel. Before playing “White Cedar” at a concert in 2012, Darnielle said,
There’s a feeling you get . . . when at some point you find yourself right on the cusp of engaging an old pattern that you recognize, and you know it’s a thing you do, and you know it’s not going to make you feel good, and it won’t lead you to good places. And there’s something in the rhythm and the vibration of the pattern that is irresistible and seductive, so you go there anyway. Six months later, when you start to right the ship, you ask yourself, what was the purpose of those six months? I don’t have an answer to that, that’s what this song’s about.
The speaker of “Done Bleeding” knows what it feels like to be attracted to something in the rhythm and the vibration of the pattern (SOMEthing in the RHYthm and the viBRAtion of the PATtern), and he can share that feeling, musically, but he can’t explain it. He just lets it wash up against us, four times (whenigetdone, whenigetdone, whenigetdone, whenigetdone), and then vanish. It’s big, bigger than us, and the hum and shake of it is in our bodies. “[It’s] like a secret being shared in public which, miraculously, will still retain its mystery,” Darnielle writes in a 2005 Last Plane to Jakarta entry. “Hear and hear but never understand.”
“If there were no drum fills on ‘Sicilian Crest,’ what a dire world this would be,” Darnielle told an interviewer. “That song needs a big old fill.”
“At Blackbird Studios in Nashville, Darnielle utilized an echo chamber, harnessing natural reverb by singing into a 20-foot long room,” a reviewer wrote.
“He had a vision for how it would be with a lot of focus on playing the actual song as written, as opposed to going in and seeing where it goes,” Darnielle said, speaking of Pallett, in a 2019 interview. “He wanted us to adhere, bringing a sort of krautrock diligence to playing our parts. That was cool because often you go in and your expectation is that the song will evolve from how it was written. Owen was holding me to the text, saying these were the songs I wrote.”
“When I hear, say, terror in Thom Yorke’s voice throughout [Radiohead’s] Amnesiac (to use the most readily available example), I write about it in the hopes that other people will be able to listen and hear what I heard,” he went on to say. The kind of criticism that I’m doing here is partly inspired by passages like that in Darnielle’s own music criticism. Especially this one: “Lavish praise is my stock in trade. It’s why I write these little essays in the first place. Exciting music calls for excited analysis; so-called objective criticism is dullsville, and dishonest besides; there's nothing more immature than a would-be grown-up; fuck the haters. These are our maxims around here, and we live by them most of the time. Even complex tracts like Smog’s “Anniversary” or Antaeus’s Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan are, in the end, communications seeking response. All I do is report on how the response felt.”
Every time I say something like that I have to add that I’m not saying that “real” people are about the heart, life, love, etc. and that everyone else is about form and structure. It’s a false choice: everything exists most vitally in its expression and expression is always a finding of form, so the only question is how you make use of the forms you choose. “Let us not forget that James Brown’s band used to routinely locate the burning nexus of ecstasy not in wild abandon but at the outer reaches of control and discipline,” Darnielle wrote on Last Plane to Jakarta in December 2002.