When it was announced that John Darnielle's novel Wolf in White Van was a finalist for the National Book Award, the news was oddly reassuring to some of us. Maybe we weren't just being childish for attributing legitimate literary merit to a guy who recorded his songs at home on a boombox. Maybe we hadn't been too easily won over by that yearning voice that cracked in just the right spots. And maybe, just maybe, we were on to something when—a few drinks into the evening—we played these songs to our friends and declared that this guy, (yes, the guy who just belted out "Hail Satan!"), is one of our greatest living storytellers.
For several albums now, The Mountain Goats have been a full band. A lot of times when a performer makes this transition from solo-acoustic, I find myself missing the early stuff, but here I think it's an instance where a fuller sound genuinely works. That said... when they come to ship me off to a desert island where I'm doomed to play only a handful of records for the rest of my days, The Mountain Goats album I'll reach for is All Hail West Texas.
The cover art makes it clear what this album is about. It includes the following sentence in a modest gray font:
fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.
Among these fourteen songs are what I believe to be the greatest love song ever written (“Riches and Wonders”) and then the greatest we are not in love anymore song ever written (“Fault Lines”). Both wreck me. And then there are the cryptic ones: What on earth is the backstory on “Source Decay”? Who is this damaged man in West Texas, gathering his mail at the Post Office and straining to recall, in flickering glimpses, a railroad platform in Bangkok in 1983? Students in writing workshops sometimes nod to an untold backstory, and it’s often apparent if they've thought the untold stuff through or they're simply trying to gain some power from the unsaid. Maybe I’m too easily won over here, but for me the light brushstrokes on "Source Decay" have me believing in the entire picture.
Of the two, the tone in "Jenny" is a bit more hopeful, though what I see in both is the promise of escape from our lives as they currently are. Moreover, these are not songs about finding salvation within. They are about getting some wheels and getting the fuck out.
. . . p.s. Why call it "Jenny"? My best guess is it's a nod to "Pirate Jenny" from Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera. "Pirate Jenny" is sung by a woman scrubbing floors in a seedy hotel, quietly imagining her emancipation and revenge by way of a black freighter of pirates who will lay waste to the hotel and spare only her. The song concludes:
And the ship
The Black Freighter
Disappears out to sea
And
On
It
Is
Me
For several albums now, The Mountain Goats have been a full band. A lot of times when a performer makes this transition from solo-acoustic, I find myself missing the early stuff, but here I think it's an instance where a fuller sound genuinely works. That said... when they come to ship me off to a desert island where I'm doomed to play only a handful of records for the rest of my days, The Mountain Goats album I'll reach for is All Hail West Texas.
The cover art makes it clear what this album is about. It includes the following sentence in a modest gray font:
fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.
Among these fourteen songs are what I believe to be the greatest love song ever written (“Riches and Wonders”) and then the greatest we are not in love anymore song ever written (“Fault Lines”). Both wreck me. And then there are the cryptic ones: What on earth is the backstory on “Source Decay”? Who is this damaged man in West Texas, gathering his mail at the Post Office and straining to recall, in flickering glimpses, a railroad platform in Bangkok in 1983? Students in writing workshops sometimes nod to an untold backstory, and it’s often apparent if they've thought the untold stuff through or they're simply trying to gain some power from the unsaid. Maybe I’m too easily won over here, but for me the light brushstrokes on "Source Decay" have me believing in the entire picture.
Having gushed to the point of embarrassment here, I now need
to hurry up and say: But of course this
isn’t the first home-recorded album that feels very much like a short story
collection!
I’m sure there are other precedents, but for me the obvious comparison is Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. This is the album you start talking about in those baffling encounters when people make the same mistake Reagan made: thinking that Springsteen was that patriotic guy from the 80s. Nebraska is an album of stories, one of which was inspired by a film (Badlands) another of which inspired a film (The Indian Runner). “My Father’s House” could be the coda to a Cormac McCarthy novel. In large part these are stories of the downtrodden, though, as the final song proclaims, "at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe."
For our purposes here, these entire albums could be put side by side, but today I'm going to go with Springsteen's "Used Cars" and The Mountain Goats' "Jenny."
I’m sure there are other precedents, but for me the obvious comparison is Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. This is the album you start talking about in those baffling encounters when people make the same mistake Reagan made: thinking that Springsteen was that patriotic guy from the 80s. Nebraska is an album of stories, one of which was inspired by a film (Badlands) another of which inspired a film (The Indian Runner). “My Father’s House” could be the coda to a Cormac McCarthy novel. In large part these are stories of the downtrodden, though, as the final song proclaims, "at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe."
For our purposes here, these entire albums could be put side by side, but today I'm going to go with Springsteen's "Used Cars" and The Mountain Goats' "Jenny."
. . . p.s. Why call it "Jenny"? My best guess is it's a nod to "Pirate Jenny" from Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera. "Pirate Jenny" is sung by a woman scrubbing floors in a seedy hotel, quietly imagining her emancipation and revenge by way of a black freighter of pirates who will lay waste to the hotel and spare only her. The song concludes:
And the ship
The Black Freighter
Disappears out to sea
And
On
It
Is
Me
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