The acoustic guitar stumbles a little on the way to the song’s three-note riff: A (open), B (hammer on), D (open). Back when Darnielle still played the song in shows, the fans would freak out as soon as they heard that riff; it’s extremely basic, but there’s something about it, maybe the slightly behind-the-beat weight of the notes, that’s like a fingerprint. The chords, downstroked to the trademark tMG beat—DAH-duh-duh, DAH-duh-duh, DAH-d’—are extremely basic too: D, Asus4, G5 (twice). He started a little fast, so he uses the first two times through the chord cycle to slow the song down. Then he seems to just talk really fast, with a kind of wonder in his voice:
The most remarkable thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again
It’s the most extraordinary feeling in the world
It’s over in four bars and the next four bars are played in silence. The recording comes from a live radio show, and the guitar has a little more belly to it than usual. Then, in an abrasive near-shout,
I have two big hands and a heart pumping blood and a 1967 Colt .45 with a busted safety catch
—and there’s a big step outward to another kind of experience. Four more bars are played in silence and you can feel a pressure building. There’s a long Asus4 (The world SHIIIINES) and a triumphant-sounding D (as I CROSS the MACon), followed by a G5 (COUNTy LINE) that runs right back up to the D. “GOing to GEORgia,” he sings/shouts, and as his voice drops a couple of steps on the last syllable, the chords under him shift to an Asus4 and back to D.
The second verse uses the first verse as a template, opening with a spoken evocation of feeling and then opening further into a one-line sketch of a scene involving the gun:
The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you, and you’re standing in the doorway
And you smile as you ease the gun from my hand and I’m frozen with joy, right where I stand
“The world throws its light underneath your hair,” he sings, full-throttle. “Forty miles from Atlanta, this is nowhere/Going to Georgia—a—a.” But it doesn’t stop there; it’s like there’s too much energy in the song for that.
The world shiii—iines as I cross the Macon County line
Going to Georgia—a—a—a—a
The long vowels are starting to have melodies inside them and the amount of feeling in the stressed syllables—CROSS, MAC, COUNT, LINE, GO, GEOR—is both exhilarating and frightening. (“When people snap still photographs of me singing it, it looks like I’m trying to eat the microphone,” he said in 1997.) But the point of the song has always been to get to this point of total expenditure. The crazed intensity of the final chorus is, for that reason, more formally satisfying than any beginning-middle-end story could have been.
Darnielle wrote “Going to Georgia” in December 1993, back when “Georgia was a distant continent, shrouded in mystery, and I never figured I’d ever see it.” The inspiration for the song was “that little riff from the A to the D string”:
I was playing that and sort of basking in how much I liked the way it sounded, and I ad-libbed the opening lines, and that suggested a little story, so I filled in the details. There was no real-life situation inspiring the story, it is just a story. I think the emotional hook comes from me being pretty well “inside” the story by the time I get to the end.
It appeared on Zopilote Machine in July 1994 and quickly became the closest thing to a hit that the Mountain Goats had ever had. Less than two years later, though, Darnielle was already getting tired of it. “If I didn’t like it so well, I’d wish I’d never written it,” he said at a concert in London in March 1996, “because I’ve played it fifty times in the last year.” And by 2005, he was starting to refuse to play it. “I am sick to death of ‘Going to Georgia,’ because I’ve been playing it for thirteen years now,” he told an audience in June 2005, just before giving them “This Year” instead. At first, the “feeling of being in motion again” had seemed to be there for him every time he played and sang the opening lines, propelling him toward the unknown worlds at the far end of the song (“I have to be creating unknown worlds somehow to be really happy,” he said in 2010). But when you’ve played a song as many times as Darnielle has played “Going to Georgia,” it can get harder to find your way back into the song’s essential vector. The feeling of being in motion and in relation to unknown things can go away.
And when that happens, when the words just lie flat on the page or come out of you in an estranged way, you can start to see and hear things that you hadn’t seen and heard before. “I had a good time playing it for many years, and then I made the mistake of listening to it,” Darnielle told a crowd in Brooklyn in October 2012. “As it turns out, if you subject it to a close feminist reading, it’s misogynist garbage, so that’s the end of that song.” A few months later, the writer Rachel Fershleiser tweeted, “Just spoke to a bunch of fellow fans/feminists and we’re not sure why Going to Georgia is misogynistic. Insights, please?” In response, Darnielle tweeted, “smitten narrator [presumably male, tho never specified] expresses angst thru spectre of gun violence. . . . I was careful almost always back then to not gender my narrators. So it could be anybody. But the more obvious reading gives me the creeps now.” “As the frequent object of sad men’s save-me fantasies, I read it as a story that feels true, not as an act you’re endorsing,” Fershleiser tweeted. “Yeah, no, I get that,” Darnielle tweeted back. “I mean, I could give it a more charitable reading, it’s fluid. But after singing it a bunch of times, I thought one day, you know what, that’s enough of dudes like this in songs.” Dudes who call in “those grand old men of getting what you want, idiosyncrasy and visible anguish,” and underscore their manipulative self-presentation with a gun.
What to do? Should everyone swear off “Going to Georgia” forever? I don’t think so. I get why Darnielle doesn’t want to play it anymore; I wouldn’t want to go into the character, as opposed to the feeling, in show after show after show. But listen to the performance of the song at Bimbo’s 365 in San Francisco on February 29, 2008, right after Wurster joined the band.
Listen to the cover version that Laura Jane Grace recorded in July 2017 too. Both Darnielle and Grace find their way into the feeling that drives the song, and both of them lose themselves in it. (“100 percent caffeine free is 100 percent what this song is not all about,” Darnielle said before playing “Going to Georgia” at a 2011 show.) Neither of them becomes, in the process, the character; neither of them seems very interested in the character at all, except as a means of access to that surging, rising feeling. “The world shines,” each of them sings, emphatically, over that tension-and-release Asus4, holding the open IIII a long time. The character is doing an absolutely terrible thing. But Darnielle and Grace are not. The shining world is so much bigger than the character who glimpses it, so much bigger than anyone who glimpses it, no matter how good or how bad they might be.
My take on it has always been with a weirdly light at the end of the tunnel scenario. The narrator has gone through hell and back and is at the end of his rope, not even the gun worked for them so they went to the one person that always was there is still there and they finally just let it all out and this person still holds them...Also the best live performance of this song was at that charity show where he played it for $60(not for charity, for him) and interjects on why he hates the song between every line.