2020: Getting into Knives
Just as the pandemic was about to hit the U.S., the Mountain Goats recorded two full-length albums in two weeks. Getting into Knives, which came out in October 2020, was recorded March 1-6 in Memphis; Dark in Here, which came out in June 2021—roughly thirty years after Darnielle came up with the idea of the Mountain Goats—was recorded March 8-13 in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. When you add on Songs for Pierre Chuvin, recorded March 16-25, it gets ridiculous: three albums of new material in twenty-five days. Later in 2020, and again in 2021, the Mountain Goats live-streamed concerts from a studio in Pittsboro, North Carolina, and released them via Merge as The Jordan Lake Sessions, vols. 1-2 and The Jordan Lake Sessions, vols. 3-4, which means that if you wanted to, you could say that the Mountain Goats released five—or seven—albums in fifteen months.
I’m just going to focus on the albums of new material, though, one at a time. The first and maybe the most important thing to say about Getting into Knives is that it leaves the controlled aesthetic of In League with Dragons behind. The lead-off song, “Corsican Mastiff Stride,” starts with what sounds like pre-show chatter, in the midst of which an acoustic guitar enters, followed by Wurster on a tuned-down snare and then, after a pause, by Darnielle’s no-big-deal vocals and Hughes’s bumping bass line. The song says, “loose,” the song says, “give it what you’ve got,” the song says, “do a couple of takes and move on.” The next three songs say pretty the same thing in different musical idioms: late-show pop (“Get Famous”); storyteller-country (“Picture of My Dress”); and metal-leaning indie rock (“As Many Candles as Possible”). There are quite a few musicians on each of those tracks, but the new producer, Matt Ross-Spang, trusting that they’ll all be listening for the center of their collective sound, just lets them play. The unworried feel of the performances—including the performance of Charles Hodges (Al Green’s organist) on “As Many Candles as Possible”—is a big part of the songs’ appeal. The same can be said of Darnielle’s lyrics, which are funnier than they had been in a while. In “Picture of My Dress,” he sings “I’m in the bathroom/Of a Dallas, Texas Burger King/And Mr. Steven Tyler/Is on the overhead speaker/He doesn’t want to miss a thing.”1 Less obviously, in the chorus to “Get Famous,” he puts the title phrase on center stage, accentuates it with bright horns, and restates it with slight variations every four bars, until it’s hard to sing or think it straight. It’s fun to play music and it’s fun to listen to it, and if you’re doing both at the same time, as musicians do, why shouldn’t it sound like you’re having a good time? “[A] game in play is its own treatise on the nature of the world we live in and our interactions within it,” Darnielle wrote in 2002. A song in performance is a treatise of that kind too.
So, in miniature, is an electric guitar riff. When I first started listening to the Mountain Goats, I was really struck by the fact that there were no traditional guitar solos on their songs. (A few early songs have a lot of guitar noise, and occasionally, when Bruno is on guitar, there are sustained melodies that emerge from the noise, but that’s it.) My working theory was that Darnielle didn’t think it wasn’t necessary to share his front-of-the-sound space with the “voice” of a soloing guitarist, because an expressiveness was already present in his lyrics and his delivery (which is what’s most special about his songs). It wasn’t that Darnielle was totally hostile to guitar solos. “[G]uitar solos are God’s way of telling us He loves us very much and also that He invented sex, so we should not be miserable ingrates and hate on guitar solos all the time,” he wrote on Last Plane to Jakarta in 2005. It’s just that he thought they wouldn’t play well with the other aspects of his songs.
When that’s your implicit position for thirty years and then, in the thirtieth year, you put “Rat Queen” on your record, it’s a pretty significant thing.
There’s no mid-song solo in “Rat Queen”—I mean, come on—but there’s a ’70s-style two-guitar solo in the outro and the song ends on a high, bent, sustained guitar note. And in each of the three choruses, there’s a catchy two-guitar riff near the beginning that’s straight off an early Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers record. The thesis of the guitars’ treatise is plain: the world is a place to be dumb in and have fun with. Which is, not coincidentally, the thesis of the lyrics as well. “New dreams for the rat queen,” the phrase the song is built around, is just something that Darnielle thought he heard a news anchor say on a local broadcast in Ohio.2 And the way that Darnielle sings the song’s first words, “Meek subJECTS,” gives you the feeling that he likes changing the pronunciation to fit the meter, even though he had hardly ever done it before.3 “Brand new dreams, great visions,” Darnielle sings in the bridge, multiple keyboards mashing into noise behind him. “Something heady and threatening/On the boil in the kitchen.” The rat queen, a figure behind a shroud, takes dreams from her acolytes and brings them to a boil, the way you bring poetry to a boil in songs.4 In that bubbling state, barely intelligible but more forcefully real, the dreams and visions sort of freak people out. “Look how they jump when we show up,” Darnielle sings. And then the guitars say the same noisily inarticulate thing.
But the most stunning new loose song on the album is “Bell Swamp Connection,” which bears the name of a road in the far outskirts of Wilmington, North Carolina.
For his whole career, Darnielle had kept his life as a prose writer mostly separate from his Mountain Goats songs, which had always been more of a poetry-related thing. He told stories in his songs, and filled them with the kinds of details that you would find in novels, but he never really brought the rhythm and pacing of prose into his lyrics.5 Here, though, are the lyrics to “Bell Swamp Connection,” minus the line breaks:
Toward the tail-end of the age that’s almost finished, where the highway starts to crack and nobody fixes it, I was wandering through an undeveloped tract out near the ocean. “One hundred acres, we will build to suit.” See what there is to see before it’s gone. Somebody’s always just about to put some kind of awful plan in motion.
Eastern redcedars, and the pines, and suddenly an elevated stone slab in what must have been a clearing once. Try to recognize the signals and the signposts. My curiosity will likely always get the best of me.
It’s like that one thing my dad kept trying to tell me, as the twilight inched its way on up his body. “Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!”
Well of course I climbed atop the slab and I lay down on it. (I am a child.) I had my face toward the sky lying there in the sun with both my eyes closed. Woke up in near darkness. What the hell is wrong with me? Volunteer pines in the hundreds in the dusk like military tentpoles.
Let my eyes adjust, try to read the markings on the slab, weird alphabets I felt sure I hadn’t seen just before I passed out. Stars growing brighter, me looking up, like a lobster in a cage down in the depths beneath the bottom of a glass boat.
And I heard a voice from somewhere out beyond the free fall, like a captive soldier trying to warn his brothers. “Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!”
It’s not straight-up narrative prose, obviously, but it’s full of prose’s consecutive, falling-forward feel.6 The first clause is metrically regular (toward the TAIL-end of the AGE that’s almost FINished), but the next clause is a little longer and looser, and so is the one after that. Then there’s a little iambic pentameter (one HUNdred ACres WE will BUILD to SUIT) followed by some novelistic free indirect discourse, in which you hear something like what the speaker is thinking. And then, after the D-based groove shifts to G, the words just kind of fall out sequentially: “Eastern redcedars, and the pines, and suddenly an elevated stone slab in what must have been a clearing once.” But when the chorus arrives, the sense of meter revives (ONE thing . . . TELL me . . . TWIlight . . . BOdy) and the sad, simple phrases land in me one by one:
It’s like that one thing
My dad kept trying to tell me
As the twilight
Inched its way on up his body
Get out! Get out!
Get out! Get out!
At which point the speaker lies down on the elevated slab, lets the late afternoon light inch across his body, and falls asleep. When he wakes up, it’s nearly dark. Once his eyes have adjusted, he tries to read the markings on the slab. Then he lies back and looks up at the stars. Similes—the trees are “like military tentpoles,” he is “like a lobster in a cage,” a voice out there sounds “like a captive soldier”—break in on perceptions. (“It’s when connections get made between one world and another that I get excited,” Darnielle wrote in 2005.) And then his dad’s words start coming back to him as warnings from invisible companions: “Get out! Get out!/Get out! Get out!” It’s all so exciting, to me; in the midst of writing a novel (Devil House), Darnielle finds a way of writing a song that plays the rhythms and possibilities of those two genres off one another. It’s a song, just to be clear, not a novel-song or song-novel or anything, but it helps me hear and love the strangeness of novel-like speech more than any song I know.
A few of the other songs on Getting into Knives don’t have enough of this kind of strangeness in them, at least for me. Some of them are founded on general statements (“Not every wave is a tidal wave,” “Harbor me . . . Harbor me”), some of the rhymes are a little foursquare (“day/may/friends/ends”), and the chords and arrangements sometimes over-signal the meaningfulness of certain lines (“They don’t grow BACK/They don’t grow back”).7 There’s some pretty lush vocal reverb here, too, and there are times when it sucks the feeling of immediacy out of the performance (“The Last Place I Saw You Alive”).8 But Darnielle has never stopped wanting to be where the action is, and active energy—energy that adds something to what already exists—is always at least a little strange. That’s what’s at the heart of Getting into Knives for me. When I first heard the thick, dirty sound of all the guitars in the intro to “As Many Candles as Possible”—three acoustic and three electric, I think—the unexpectedness of it filled me with happiness. And when Darnielle sang, “When stray DOGS finally catch you in the alley,” hitting a stray C# on “dogs” and momentarily turning the thumping A5 chord into an A major (he drops to a C, and an A minor, in the next line), the happiness flung itself upward. The songs that Mountain Goats fans care about most are the ones that give them feelings like that, I think, songs where you’re getting more than usual and then, all of a sudden, you’re getting more. They’re the songs in which, as Darnielle put it in a 2020 discussion of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, “you feel the man’s vision. You feel like you are connecting with a person’s idea of something new.” Not with a person—with an idea of something new that is sort of taking place in a person. Screw persons, anyway:
When pigs gather in the sty to greet the sunrise
They all begin to squeal for joy
It doesn’t sound like joy to the untrained ear
And there’s plenty of distortion and it’s not real clearYou’ve got a friend downstairs
He howls all night
No one gets
Too much light
Only a person—only a well-trained, person-identified person—could mistake that sound for joy. The untrained can hear it for what it is: terror and rage, red-lined and crackling. And it isn’t just the sound of the pigs. It’s the sound that’s coming from the “friend” downstairs, the mad thing in the basement, which is me, maybe, or something in me. It’s the sound of stray dogs tearing into a person, the hollow, wild sound of burning paddocks. And it has something to do with the risen beast, out there in the streets and in here in my dreams. No hate for the stuff that doesn’t go places like this. Just a lot of love for the stuff that does.
The joke has to do with the over-repetition of the line “I don’t want to miss a thing” in Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (Steven Tyler sings it nine times). “Picture of My Dress” was written in response to this tweet from the poet Maggie Smith, who is best known for the poem “Good Bones”:
On 30 January 2021, Darnielle tweeted that “styles of interviewing go through phases, but the last few years there’s a lot of asking for basic interpret-the-action-and-any-metaphors-present questions, and it’s like, No, the song is not ‘about’ that stuff, it’s about this one phrase at the center of it and how that phrase produces any number of narratives but seems to have a fairly solid affective/emotional core, something that seems to convey/persuade/‘sell’ as they’d say in wrestling, without requiring any extra effort on the part of speaker or hearer, as for example ‘new dreams for the rat queen,’ which I heard a news anchor say in either Columbus or Cincinnati on a local broadcast, which, to my mind, was /thread.”
He once wrote on Tumblr that “[i]f you’re trying to force an extant text to fit music, you’re going to end up intentionally putting stresses on unstressed syllables to make them fit the rhythm, which in my Church-of-One is total heresy, so words and music have to be written at the same time, lest the heresy hunters come, with their eyes all shiny and their lariats a-crackle.”
In the midst of a replay-replay-replay relationship with Sarah Dougher’s “40 Hours,” Darnielle wrote, “I have that urge to broadcast the lyrics to the entire world by whatever means possible, even though they probably rely on the music somewhat for their emotional weight: which is as it should be according to my math, since that watch-what-happens-when-I-bring-it-to-a-boil quality is precisely what makes songs God’s special organic-android creatures.”
There are some pretty cool exceptions to this rule. The last couplet of “Straight Six,” for instance, lets the prose out of the cage for a moment and then drops back into the song’s intensely poetic sense of apprehension: “Sometimes the moon shines like a beacon to the weary and the sick in spirit/And sometimes, sometimes it's dark.” The same kind of thing happens in the couplet at the end of “Song for Dana Plato”: “And in situations like these, it’s sometimes useful to think of life as one long continuous evening that never turns into night/Hey hey!”
In poetry, the critic Franco Moretti writes, there “is a pattern that turns around and comes back: there is a symmetry, and symmetry always suggests permanence, that’s why monuments are symmetrical. But prose is not symmetrical . . . [it] has an orientation, it leans forwards, its meaning ‘depends on what lies ahead.’ . . . ‘The knight was defending himself so bravely that his assailers could not prevail’; ‘Let’s withdraw a little, so that they will not recognize me’; ‘I don’t know that knight, but he is so brave that I would gladly give him my love.’ I found these passages in a half page of the prose Lancelot, easily, because consecutive and final constructions—where meaning depends so much on what lies ahead that a sentence literally falls into the following one—these forward-looking arrangements are everywhere in prose, and allow it its typical acceleration of narrative rhythm.”
The lines are from “Tidal Wave,” “Harbor Me,” “Pez Dorado,” and “Wolf Count.”
Darnielle was maybe the world’s staunchest opponent of vocal reverb for most of his career. “[My] trust issues [in the studio] are largely rooted in the fact that everybody thinks reverb on vocals is just a terrific idea, when in fact there is nothing worse in the whole world,” he said in 2008. “The first time I heard all the reverb [in the In League with Dragons mix], I laughed,” he told an interview in 2019. “But Shani [Ghandi]”—who mixed the album—“was incredibly giving of her time. I would say, ‘Well, what if we dialed the reverb back about half?’ And she’d say, ‘I tried that, and it feels like this is the amount of space your voice wants in the track.’ She sent me multiple looks, and the one she had was right. So it’s an unusual sound for us.” Getting into Knives, which was mixed by Ross-Spang, is even more reverbed-up, to my ears.