2020: Songs for Pierre Chuvin
Starting on March 16, 2020, in the confines of his Durham home, Darnielle wrote a song a day for ten days while reading the historian Pierre Chuvin’s A Chronicle of the Last Pagans. On the Mountain Goats Bandcamp site, he wrote that he worked, for those ten days, “in exactly the style I used to work in: read until something jumps out at me; play guitar and ad-lib out loud until I get a phrase I like; write the lyrics, get the song together, record immediately.” He recorded the songs on the same devices that he was using back in the early days: the Panasonic boombox, which miraculously overcame a fatal clicking noise when Darnielle stood it on its side, and the Marantz PMD-222. The subject was once again Roman history, loosely speaking, this time from the perspective of the pagans in the modern Mediterranean world and Middle East who were wiped out by Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. When the album, Songs for Pierre Chuvin, appeared on April 10, 2020, it was online only, but when it physically appeared, in June, it was in the good old form of a cassette tape. Something back in Darnielle’s musical past was suddenly exerting a powerful attraction on him, and Chuvin’s book was offering up the kinds of fragmentary facts, phrases, characters, and situations that Darnielle’s imagination was ready to seize on. It was a frenetic experiment, designed in part to create an income stream for everyone involved in the Mountain Goats’ canceled 2020 tours, but it was incredibly successful.
Darnielle’s return to familiar musical pathways had a lot to do with it. For the first twenty years of the Mountain Goats, he mostly used “the same four chords,” as he sings in “You Were Cool,” so as not to “squander the moment/Trying to come up with a better way to say what I want to say.” Under the time constraints of March 2020—he was only able to work for a couple of hours a day, locked in the bedroom of his locked-down home—he couldn’t “belabor the progression[s]” as much as he had in the 2010s. Instead, he says, “I went much more with my older, ‘Is that a progression you can sing over? Good enough.’” For him as for many of his listeners, “that lends an energy to the performance . . . that is totally missing in the studio.”1 In the first song, “Aulon Raid,” he makes everything happen with four chords (A-F#m-D-E) and a few simple fuck-you phrases, directed to Marcellus, Bishop of Apamea, who is riding into town with temple-destruction on his mind: (We will deal with you/Me and my pagan crew). It’s an old-fashioned method-acting song, where everything is subordinated to the project of fully occupying the character, and the joy in it seems to come not only from the character—who is going to succeed, together with his crew, in turning back the Christians and killing Marcellus—but from Darnielle himself, who is free to set his own rhythm and find his own phrasings.2 He stays in the moment in “Until Olympius Returns,” too, roaring into the retake after having discovered “a mysterious gap” in the original recording. There’s a spiky delight in his delivery of lines like these:
Profess keen interest in the welfare of the state
Taste everything they feed you, say it tastes real great
Spit it down your sleeve
Every time you get the chance
This is just a brief improvisation in the dance
For all three of the song’s verses and choruses, he again just uses four chords (Am-F-G-Em). Like the pagans, who are keeping their internal home fires burning while going through the motions of assimilation, Darnielle is remembering things fiercely: just listen to the “Yeah!” at the end of the song.
The energy that he brings to Songs for Pierre Chuvin also stems, pretty clearly, from his identification with the up-against-the-wall situation of the pagans. They’re fighting off invaders, waiting out occupations, revolting in cities, hiding outside cities. They’re hated, mocked, wasted, abused. They’re the kind of people that Darnielle had felt connected to for his entire teenage and adult life, and in March 2020, in the midst of the maybe-uncheckable pandemic, the maybe-uncheckable Trump presidency, and the definitely uncheckable climate crisis, all of the old griefs and angers seem to have risen in him, responsively, with new force. “These are songs of defiance by people who were not going to win,” he told an interviewer. None of us are going to win: we’re all going to die and everyone we know is going to die and the culture we belong to is going to vanish and the ruins of our buildings are going to be slithered over by snakes from dark quarries. Darnielle’s awareness of those facts is a big part of what makes the lyrics on this album crackle, in ways that are often hard to capture through quotation. “Smell the ocean . . . breeze . . . /We will never run out of trees,” he sings in “The Wooded Hills along the Black Sea,” a Casio-type song about tree-worshiping pagans deep in a massive forest in what is now Turkey. The Christians will “stab you in the back,” he sings in “Hopeful Assassins of Zeno,” but you “gotta turn the other cheek/You gotta learn to love Jesus . . . /So to speak.” In the pauses in those lines, I feel the presence of “hidden rhythms on the air” (“Until Olympius Returns”), the presence of something bright burning, still burning, even as everything is going dark. I feel it even more powerfully in the album’s next-to-last song, “Going to Lebanon 2,” which takes the love-song imagery of “Going to Lebanon” (I saw your sash come untied/Blue water, white sky) and reimagines it with extinction in mind: “Take note of what will be gone/In the blink of an eye/The blue, blue water/The bone-white sky.” Knowing that there’s no time or place for that kind of love anymore, for a love that feels secure in itself and enveloped by the abiding presence of ocean and sky, is, for these pagans, a vicious, vivifying thing. Water can look very blue, sky can look very white, when the sense of finality in you is strong enough.3
That might sound like the end of things, for the pagan-song project, and it was, until Darnielle added “Exegetic Chains.”
Playing root notes with his thumb and block chords with his fingers, Darnielle sings a two-note line that rises for its final syllable (he slides from A to C#m in the process): “Look closely at the shadows on the ground beneath the TREES.” He goes to D, waits, and then says what he sees in those shadows: “The labors of HERcules” (dropping back to A). He repeats the process, transitioning again from what he sees to what he imaginatively sees: “Wild grasses on the hills, rippling in the WIND/CYbele unchained.” It’s as if the speaker is an assimilated pagan who can’t stop seeing the old forms, even when he’s looking at the most ordinary things. Or a musician who can’t stop hearing old songs, even when he’s writing new ones. “The songs you sing at Christmastime, the stories that you tell,” he sings over a new, equally simple progression (E-D-F#m-D-F#m), “Well, I knew them well/Yes, I knew them well.” In the songs you sing at Christmas time, you can hear the ghosts of the pagan songs that they grew from, and in the last two lines of this pre-chorus, you can hear the refrain from Bon Iver’s 2009 song “Blood Bank” (which the Mountain Goats had covered in 2018).
It might seem obvious that songs grow from previous songs, but in a world where songs are copyrighted products, where people seem to believe that art must start from the nothingness of pure originality, you have to be a little bit explicit if you want to keep the actual intermixture of things in view. Otherwise you begin to lose touch with some absolutely essential things: what it feels like to see shadows and the sculptured images of the labors of Hercules, for instance, and what it feels like to be someone and someone who once was. Or someone and someone who has not yet come.
“I really, firmly believe . . . that your perception of something is limited only by your creative power,” Darnielle says in a 2009 interview. “Anything you look at or listen to that you say, ‘Well, I’ve heard all there is to hear about it,’ I doubt it.” “Make it through this year/If it kills you outright,” he sings in the chorus of “Exegetic Chains,” as if to say, by stressing the actuality of the death that is imagined in the chorus of “This Year,” “let it kill you, for real, nothing matters more than the defiance that keeps your ‘I’ alive.” As if to say, “there’s more to hear in the chorus of ‘This Year,’ no matter how many times you’ve heard it.” And, most astonishingly, as if to say, “I, John Darnielle, am the speaker of this song.” In the video of the song, he sings, in the second verse:
The coins they toss at dancers whirling in the city square
Music on the air
The places where we met to share our secrets now and then
We will see them again
—and looks straight into the camera for the last two lines, because he’s telling his audience that he will see them again, live, when all this is over. “Change will come,” he sings. “Stay warm inside the ripple of the Panasonic hum/It grinds and it roars/Headed somewhere better if I have to crawl there on all fours.” It’s a strange, shocking, exhilarating moment. After 29 years in which he had never done anything of the kind, Darnielle is singing directly to his fans, reminding them of what they’ve all shared together. “Make it through this year/If it kills us outright,” he sings again, then climbs up the neck from a D5 to an A5/D and stays there a little while.
I’m quoting from the 15 June 2020 interview on WNYC’s Soundcheck: https://www.newsounds.org/story/john-darnielle-mountain-goats-takes-it-back-boombox
The basic source for “Aulon Raid” is the following passage from Chuvin’s A Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990): “Marcellus wanted to begin the systematic destruction of all the temples, ‘thinking that this was the easiest way to convert’ the population. He was killed shortly after, while attempting to destroy a temple at Aulon, in the district of Apamea. He was captured and burned alive during the assault” (60). Here are the snippety sources for some of the songs that follow:
“Until Olympius Returns”: “On February 24, 391, an edict published in Milan and addressed to the prefect of the city of Tome prohibited all blood sacrifices. This was tantamount to a general interdiction of pagan cults. . . . This caused an uprising, and the Serapeum was turned into a fortress commanded by the Neoplatonist Olympius. . . . Olympius, discouraged, secretly fled before the sanctuary fell to the soldiers. . . . He reached Italy and was not heard from again” (65-66).
“Last Gasp at Calama”: “Theodosius totally abolished all freedom to practice pagan cults with the notorious law of November 6, 392. . . . [But] freedom of conscience was not definitely suppressed; it would not be until 529 under Justinian. . . . In 408, at Calama (today Guelma in Algeria), pagan dancers attracted a crowd, Christians were roughed up, and church buildings were set on fire” (71, 74).
“The Wooded Hills along the Black Sea”: “During the first part of the fifth century (between 400 and 446), Hypatius and his monks descended on the rural sanctuaries of Bithynia to cut down the sacred trees. . . . It is not surprising that paganism persisted so close to the capital. . . The wooded hills along the Black Sea are very hard to penetrate, even today, and that is the region where Hypatius vented his missionary zeal. . . . But how could he hope to cut down all the sacred trees in the Bithynian forests (called today the Sea of Trees)? This mad woodcutter’s enterprise could not possibly succeed, and the tree cult has survived to this day, in that province as in others” (80, 81).
“January 31, 438”: “The death sentence [for practicing paganism] would be restored three times during the years that followed: in 435; on January 31, 438, during a time of famine ‘caused by the cults of demons’; and on November 4, 451” (92).
“Hopeful Assassins of Zeno”: “Severianus remained important enough to become implicated in a plot against Zeno with one of Aspar’s surviving sons. . . . [I]n 477 one of Zeno’s slaves tried to assassinate him” (96, 98).
“Their Gods Do Not Have Surgeons”: “[Then came] the devastation of the last sanctuary of Isis in Menouthis. . . . [T]he abode of the pagan statues was completely razed down to its foundations, as was usual for the lairs of ‘false gods,’ and a vast rampage was unleashed. . . . They broke the legs and arms of the idols, shouting, ‘their gods do not have surgeons!’” (109).
“Exegetic Chains”: “Procopoius was a cleric, versed in theology, who knew Plato well and argued with Proclus. He was the inventor of ‘exegetic chains,’ a method of commenting upon sacred authors that consisted of compiling earlier commentaries, listed under the name of their author, with the compiler proving his cleverness merely by a judicious choice of texts” (115).
Before playing “Beautiful Gas Mask” in April 2011, Darnielle evoked for his audience a time and place in which “the fingers of dawn will greet you in the arms of your beloved. And the two of you will look toward the wealthy morning sky and know that in its gorgeous portents lie the certainty of death every single morning. The fact that you both know this is why you like each other so much.”