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This Year

Articles and publications tagged This Year across the Atmosphere.

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MiscellanyOct 21, 2026

October 21 - Song for Ted Sallis

So, we've had songs for dead blues singers, songs for wrestlers, songs for gods, songs for Ozzy Osborne, and now we have songs for comic book characters. I always had an attachment to Man-Thing, partly based on the sadly persistent status of him as a joke or a perceived inferior copy of Swamp Thing. He wasn't, by the way. A baffling act of parallel evolution meant that as Stan Lee and Roy Thomas were creating him for the May 1971 edition of Savage Tales, Len Wein was creating Swamp Thing for the...

MiscellanyOct 20, 2026

October 20 - Almost Every Door

The previous EP was called Marsh Witch Visions, but this one feels the most magical. This is a soft, creepy, unsettling spell of a piece, sitting in a gentle but threatening spot that feels loaded with power. The lyrics are strongly about feeling trapped, about methods of escape, some of them self destructive, and there's a dangerous calm at their core. This is not a way out. The thing you are trying won't be that easy. And you can sit in that lack of security, or keep going into danger.

MiscellanyOct 19, 2026

October 19 - The Video with Lita Ford

There is no video of The Video With Lita Ford. So instead here's a video with both of them. It's sadly only when you hear Ozzy sing with somewhere else that you have to contend with the fact that his voice... wasn't that good. It was memorable, and he was the only person who should sing his songs, but when he's in a sing with someone who actually can sing (and Lita Ford has a really pleasant alto) it becomes clear that as a vocalist Ozzy was bringing something other than vocals. However, the som...

MiscellanyOct 19, 2026

October 18 - No More Tears

The Ozzy retrospective continues and we're looking at the memories of an old rock star, trying to remember how things were back when things were crazy. It has to be remembered that being tired and past it is honestly the best a rock star can hope for. If you become an old fart who used to be a legend, then you've got pretty much as close to the top as you can get. Even Ozzy, who did about as much as someone could do and then lived until his mid seventies, was as much a joke as a legend by the an...

MiscellanyOct 18, 2026

October 17 - Mid Morning Florida

So this is online as Going Back To California, but I do think Mid Morning Florida is a better name. This is a sad song that is willing to be sad, and it's about one of the most horrifying moments in rock history. Randy Rhoads, the 25 year old genius guitarist in Ozzy Osborne's band was travelling with the rest of the band when their bus stopped for repairs by an airstrip. The driver of the bus, who was also a pilot, borrowed one of the small planes at the airstrip, reportedly without permission,...

MiscellanyOct 18, 2026

October 16th - Passaic 1975

As a song, this is a beautifully sad tale of the damage of the road. It's part of the ongoing Ozzy project, but much like Song for Black Sabbath's Second North American Tour it isn't actually on the Marsh Witch Visions EP. Lyrically and overall as a piece it does the frequent Mountain Goats trick of sounding delightful and a little dreamy and then having lyrics that track someone's descent. There's a section in this qhere the narrative character is given a present by the tech crew: a teleprompte...

MiscellanyOct 17, 2026

October 14 - Song For Black Sabbath's Second North American Tour

These are late because ironically I was up in Manchester to see Mountain Goats. More about that when we get there. This is a small live guitar-only song, which is suitable for a meditation on fame. Small and simple and true to its subject. Ozzy Osbourne was a very unlikely person to become famous. He was apparently a wreck as a young person, a product of trauma and abuse who left school at 15 and worked in a slaughterhouse until the band took off. I always feel like people are just waiting for f...

MiscellanyOct 13, 2026

October 13 - Shirtless in Hamburg

Continuing with the Ozzy songs, this one is about the grim business of trying to make it, having to be a version of yourself and smile through pain, pretending to have a better time. Which is something we're all doing right now, I think.

MiscellanyOct 12, 2026

October 12 - Marsh Witch Vision

OK, so the font for Marsh Witch Visions fucks severely, let's start there. This song feels like a collection of the things that someone is doing while waiting to be alive. Starting with the small and mundane and then growing something. We're back to very traditional early Mountain Goats, both in terms of this being a guy with a guitar and a simple rhythm and in terms of this being a collection of songs around a particular life. In this case, that of Ozzy Osbourne. OK, weird connections time. I'v...

MiscellanyOct 10, 2026

October 10th - Clemency for the Wizard King

fuckin' wizards again This song is a delight. A chorus number, both in performance and in action depicted, it's got the wonderful tension of the title and seeming action (the acolytes of the Wizard King come to beg for his release) and the actual acknowledged action (a large group of assassins come to free their master). Both work, and indeed both work together. Mountain Goats songs are sometimes at their best when their sound triggers elaborate colourful visuals, as they do in this case. I cann...

MiscellanyOct 9, 2026

October 9th - Possum By Night

I miss possums. And by extension miss a number of things about the edges of urban life shading into rural life in North Carolina. At some point I'm going to have to think long and hard about what my 8 years living in the United States actually meant overall. It began as young and in love and will be wherever she is and slowly became an abstract love for the place along with the love for her. And one of the thing I loved about it was the weirdnesses of wildlife and nature that you don't get in En...

MiscellanyOct 8, 2026

October 8th - Younger

By some distance one of the funkier songs of this era, feeling like a precursor to the songs we'd get in Bleed Out. Especially Guys on Every Corner. This song has hustle, an adventuring song, but one where the adventure involves danger and cover and one that's been going on for a while. The it never hurts to... motif is a great way of putting you in the mind of the veteran hero or spy or survivor. The songs of age aren't necessarily better than the songs of youth, but they have a quality in comm...

MiscellanyOct 7, 2026

October 7th - Doc Gooden

Old soldiers are one of the most fun literary tropes. Someone who was promising, and then good, and then great, and is now... this. Someone who has the skills but might now lack the finer points of the conditioning. Someone with all the dirty tricks but not the elasticity to pull all of them off. It's easy to think of old age (or even not old age but the passing of youth) as a lament. You are not what you were. But the thing is, that's the only option. Anything else is not being anything. We ido...

MiscellanyOct 6, 2026

October 6 - Waylon Jennings Live!

I don't know, man. This is a lovely little song, and Waylon Jennings always felt like one of those people who was a benefit to the world in his existence. Despite living in the South I've never been a real country guy, but the more of it sounds like Waylon and Willie and Johnny the more I like it. Music with the varnish left off. But I'm not sure I connect to this song. I don't want to give it a yeah, it's fine or talk about something else, and I'm fairly sure the fault is with me on this one, n...

MiscellanyOct 5, 2026

October 5th - In League With Dragons

So this is the mundanity of heroic fantasy album, so if course we get a Boris Vallejo name check in this story about marking time until the world gets to feel real again. This feels like a sibling song to Up The Wolves, where time has taken the fury of needing revenge and replaced it with the cold certainty of faith. This too shall pass. In fire and blood and a settling of accounts. It's my brother's birthday today. He's 52, and four years older than me, and when you're socialised male and have ...

MiscellanyOct 4, 2026

October 4 - An Antidote For Strychnine

I mean, all of this is fiction. Even songs about real life are fictional in order to fit with the format of being a song. But this especially. It's a small odd fantasy pulp gem, someone in trouble who is trying all their usual sleuthing tricks to get out of it, and just not able to surmount the impossible, so trying new and odder things. The re are bits at the start of this song that read just as easily as desperate attempted chemistry (which you can't get a Nobel prize for) or attempted magic (...

MiscellanyOct 3, 2026

October 3 - Done Bleeding

I'm Leaving You is one of the five themes that Elvis Costello said the writers of popular music have available to them, and while the majority of Mountain Goats songs fit into his fifth category (I Believe In Something), this is very much an I'm leaving you song, if you can be defined as a place. This is a song about watch ending. You had a duty, it wasn't necessarily a great one, but it was yours, and then there comes the day where it isn't any more, and that might be a good thing or a bad thin...

MiscellanyOct 1, 2026

October 1 - Going Invisible 2

Everything in this song, from orchestration to lyrics, feels like a start. Where music and lyrics differ is in the nature of the beginning. The echoing choral nature of the music creates an impression of dawn, of a spiritual beginning, like a warrior in the highlands finishing his prayers before stepping out to see how he can defend his town from the bastard English. It's simple and it's holy. But the lyrics are a very different start indeed. They speak of darkness rather than light, not in a mo...

MiscellanySep 30, 2026

September 30 - Hand Of Death

As calypsos about dark magic go, this is certainly one of the better ones. Another Mountain Goats rarity, and one that shows both its past and its future. Bleak lyrics with a cheerful beat is basically the Mountain Goats stock in trade and this is a lovely example, but it feels like it throws forward to other versions of the same. What is here a warrior preparing for a macabre battle is, by the point of Training Montage, a badass hero doing the same. Both songs are even about The Temple. I think...

MiscellanySep 29, 2026

September 29 - Wizard Level

The only recording of this song is done as a live fundraiser for abortion funds. There's something mildly depressing about it as it was made 8 years ago back when abortion was still a protected right. The song is a small delight of acapella folk magic, trying to capture the magic in the world through its own rituals. And speaking of small delights, this sing by Clover Paradise is a miniature instrumental wonder from a filipino band I hadn't ever heard of before.

MiscellanySep 27, 2026

September 25 - Shelved

There's a curious thing in some forms of storytelling where the apex is the end. Where you struggle to make it, and then the act of making it is the end. This is a song about a goth band who know that signing to a major label is when what they're doing is going to stop working. It makes me think of a story I wrote about 15 years ago called Say Not A Prayer For Me about someone who was - in person - the most beautiful person anyone present had ever seen. They could make people fall in love with t...

MiscellanySep 26, 2026

September 24 - Paid In Cocaine

It took a while for me to get this song. It got in its own way a little, and it wasn't until I was reading the lyrics in the book that this ballad to the people who were adjacent to fame really clicked. Oh, I thought. This song is about me. The band I was in ultimately were unlikely to make it. We were good enough to get a foot in the door, though, and in the right place and the right time to make it far enough to at least fail on a good stage. Clint Boon from the Inspiral Carpets came to watch ...

MiscellanySep 26, 2026

September 23 - Rage of Travers

This is a song about the passing of musical legacies, of the hot current thing becoming a thing of the past. And interestingly this is a concept that I think is slowly fading away. Whatever else one might say about the way music works or doesn't work in the modern era, something that has happened is that music has greater latency. There are bad reasons for this (nostalgia and recycling and a lack of risktaking) but it means that if you were in a successful act in 1998 you can probably tour today...

MiscellanySep 25, 2026

September 21 - Wear Black

I'll confess that the orchestration of this isn't quite for me. it's too chaotic and robs itself of the clarity that I love from Mountain Goats songs. However, the theme is spot on. This to me is about identity and identification. The not quite correct thing that people say about the tendency of subcultures to adopt uniform Looks is that they do so in part so that the members of the group can identify each other. This is almost the case but misses the mark. What's far more true is that the unifo...