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June 6 - Magpie

The most consciously folksy song on a not-very-folksy album, and one of the only ones to fit the Mountain Goats trope of list of things you must do which is one of my favourite tropes. Remember what we had here when there was something left to save is the kind of line that I'm always going to regret not being good enough to write myself. This is a song about reckoning, and scavenging, and paying prices that might well be too bad. There's no reasoning with the magpie, he will take what he takes a...

June 4 - Dance Music

This gorgeous song is two vignettes of two different types of trauma. Both told in the same stream of consciousness moment-of life style, as if jumping straight into a memory already in progress. The first and simplest is about the fear of physical harm: harm to the self, harm to a loved one, from the moster living in the house. Here the dance music coming from the record player is escape and guilt and shelter all at once. The second is more complex, although it's built on the trauma of the firs...

June 3 - Abandoning My Father Talking Blues

This is, as John says, when it starts, a sad one. It's about people who have no choice and the choices that get made for them. It's about things that are presented as opportunities and are actually just mitigations. It's about sandboxes in parking lots and the ever present silent threat of things being worse. I've been through many things in my life. Everyone has, that's why they call it a life. But I'm quietly glad that I've never felt unsafe in the place where I've lived. I've felt depressed a...

May 30 - Cotton

Is whimsical catharsis a thing? This song is light and beautiful and soft, a gentle account of the things we hang onto, the memories that pain us, the scabs we pick at, the guilt we tend and maintain, and an easy instruction to do the hardest thing possible. Leave it behind. It's not forgiveness per se, it's not even forgetting. It's just... not hanging onto things.

May 29 - Rose Quarter Drifting / We Shall All Be Healed

This is a fragment, an unreleased song that only exists in versions from radio stations and live shows. And as such it's easy to see the ideas that started here and came out later. The line stared down demons, came back breathing felt like a preview of You Were Cool or Spent Gladiator 1. And those are two of my absolute favourites. This is a song about being a ghost, about visiting ghosts. About going back to old places, which is not something you can ever actually do. There's a town I can never...

May 28 - Against Pollution

I don't know if there's such a thing as a stadium anthem of eschatological nihilism, but if there is, that's this song. A huge and momentous sound to this song, coupled with lyrics that start with a narrow focus of the mundane and horrifying, but can't help but look up to see vast and impossible futures. This is a song of redemption. Of viewing ourselves and our actions in their total form, from a perspective we can't imagine. Once you're through the nihilism it's a song of trust and hope. We wi...

May 26 - Home Again Garden Grove

A rolling boil of paranoia, this is a song about scoring. The mania and the on-edge nature of looking desperately for something, caught in the rabid simplicity of needing your fix and nothing else. Everything about the song here, from the lyrics to the instrumentation to the mix, is a set of spiky lines where nothing comfortable can happen. One of the reasons I started doing this blog, started following John Darnielle's music from its earliest forms through whatever came after, is how utterly un...

Sometimes the simplicity and audacity of a song just wash over you. Mole is a simple, tiny melody, a story of an addict going to visit another addict in a hospital bed that had been gained via misadventure. Small and sad and kept afloat by a false hope of better times. And then the tidal wave of the middle movement hits you, and all the chaos that is being carefully kept out rushes through the song uncontrollably and everything is enormous piano and uncontrolled noise. And then it's quiet and sm...

May 22 - Hommel West

May 21 - Butter Teeth

Still in the We Shall All Be Healed headspace, this is a b-side from a Mountain Goats single and also a quiet and assured banger. The rhyme scheme and melody are the sketch of an idea that will one day become Lovecraft In Brooklyn (more on that later), and the song itself is a slow almost leisurely exploration of the mania of an amphetamine high., This is the up, the point where everything is forward, you have been launched into gear by a substance hitting your brain and while it's there you are...