| The Mountain Goats – 1 John 4:16 Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I think the most obvious reference is a Christian being fed to the lions ("the beast") because of his faith. "The holding tank I built for myself" is the cell he's being held in, having "built" it to the extent that he's chosen his situation by choosing to believe. Like a lot of Mountain Goats songs, parts of the lyrics allow other interpretations that sometimes illuminate and sometimes deconstruct part of the literal reading. I think you can see that most clearly if you focus on the metaphor of the clouds and the rain. Most literally, rain will probably afford the narrator at least a temporary reprieve -- the spectacle he's about to be the victim of won't continue if it's raining. So, he remains faithful/hopeful that God will intervene on his behalf, even as "the guards lead [him] outside". The rain, as an awesome phenomenon of nature, is an appropriate metaphor for God's grace and power, and it symbolises the narrator's relationship with God and the development of his faith: "The endless string [I hear string; not spring] of summer storms that led me today"; "To an afternoon I spent with you when it rained all day". The image of gathering clouds used in the third line of the second verse is one that would usually convey foreboding, but Darnielle clarifies this, saying that the nasty weather is merely a demonstration of God's power and of the narrator's relationship with God, and is in fact the source of his (perceived) salvation. I don't know whether or not this is intentional, but I've always been struck by the romance of the imagery in "The endless string of summer storms ... began one afternoon with you, long ago and far away" and "To an afternoon I spent with you, when it rained all day". It sounds like he's talking about a girl, as a few commenters have mentioned, and that was my first thought before I really listened to the song attentively. Throughout this album, Darnielle seems to compare and contrast the relationships between his narrators and other people, and their relationships with God. I think that's another example of this: he's drawing a parallel between faith in the people we love and faith in God and the sense of security that those relationships bring us. (These sorts of comparisons between faith/holiness and romantic love/sexuality always remind me of a description I read of Hallelujah as a "carnal hymn", which I think is appropriate here as well.) It's easy to tie all this into the bible verse, which reads: "And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. / God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him." The narrator clearly knows and relies on God's love -- even to save his life -- and the the allusions to romantic love tie in with the second half of the quotation. Like so many MGs' songs, its greatest strength is that it manages to conjure a particular, acute feeling through vague imagery and the connotations of words, despite being lyrically pretty straightforward. The advantage of that vague imagery is that the message remains so universal -- we know that the narrator's faith or love (of God or something else) is helping him to withstand adversity through simple belief. But we can't say much more than that for sure, and so its application remains catholic (with a small C -- I couldn't resist). |
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| The Mountain Goats – No Children Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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I think it's impossible to be confused about the meaning of this song if you understand its context within Tallahassee. There's no happiness here. There's resentment, bitterness, malice, dependence and maybe even a shadow of what was once love - but not a shred of happiness. He's not being sarcastic - their marriage is a self-destructive tornado of a relationship. And it's a hell they're too vengeful to leave. Furthermore, I think a lot of people are hearing 'funny' in this song, when they should be hearing 'absurd'. Because, at their core, these relationships don't make a lot of rational sense - but, absurdly, they exist. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Pale Green Things Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| As everyone's said, it's 'paddock'. But it's also 'cracking asphalt underfoot', not 'on your foot'. Also, as most readers are probably unaware, 'Racing Form' isn't some form you fill out for a horse race. The Daily Racing Form is a publication about horse racing. | |
| The Mountain Goats – Southwood Plantation Road Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| The Louisiana graveyard line is a brilliant, brilliant metaphor, and is much better evidence of a stridently creative mind than, for instance, 'our love is like the border between Greece and Albania', clever as the latter line is. | |
| The Mountain Goats – The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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Two things about this song interest me: first, I think the 'plan to get even' line is pretty ominous. Precisely how Jeff and Cyrus 'get even', or plan to, is never mentioned in the song. But I think it's at least interesting that you're talking about two people in a death metal band developing a plan to get even with a school, or its students/faculty, circa 2002. I'm certainly not saying that the school shooting reference was Darnielle's intention, but it intrigues. Second, I, like many others, am struck by the 'hail Satan' lines. It's as if Darnielle, after deploring the establishment for belittling Jeff and Cyrus's dream, decides to put his money where his mouth is. And at the same time, he challenges us to do the same: we're perfectly happy to accept his 'don't punish people for dreaming, whatever their dreams' shtick, but we still instinctively do a knee-jerk 'Oh, Christ, stupid faux-devil-worshiping rebellious teenagers' thing when we hear the line delivered - and we assume Darnielle must be employing some kind of ironic distance and we laugh. He's not: to the extent that the 'hail Satan' line is emblematic of Jeff and Cyrus's dream, Darnielle is perfectly serious. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Source Decay Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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The line about the Austin post office box isn't about the narrator's earlier travels with his former companion. It's about his weekly trips to Austin to check for the postcards she sends there - to the post office box they once shared when they lived in the city together - the last address she has for him. Clearly, the couple lived together in Austin. Although the song doesn't say so explicitly, one gets the feeling that the person sending the postcards split up with the narrator and left him in Bangkok. There's a powerful image of him standing on a railroad platform, watching her train leave, as she continues her travels without him - perhaps in some effort at escapism. She continues to send him postcards as she travels - and, sifting through the postcards - a list, essentially, of the destinations she's passed him up for - he wracks his brain looking for a rationale: a reason for her to have left; a motive. He despairs at never finding one. The song never actually says that the narrator and the postcard-sender were in a romantic relationship. But I think we're justified in inferring that they were: he feels his heart break, his bitter smile at having been deserted, his promise always to be honest (to 'tell her what he knows') - and the fact that her absence so obsesses him that he describes himself as a 'hostage', and wishes he could escape by driving on a never-ending freeway. (I think the only line that suggests they were anything but romantic - 'from my old best friend' - merely alludes to the relationship's familiar closeness.) There's also evidence that the sense of malice, or at least careless teasing, that he detects in her correspondence (though it's more of a respondence, to steal a line from Lionel Shriver) is well-placed: in the intervening decades, she's never communicated in a method that would allow him to reply. One imagines that she mails him either to delude herself into thinking she hasn't deserted him, or because she thinks that his hearing from her might comfort him - either way, she can't quite bear to hear back from him. And surely she must know that the postcards - in which she invites him to reminisce (she asks what he remembers) - are, indeed, torturous. Whatever her motive, I'm always transported back to the image of him on the railroad platform, watching her receed toward the sea. I wonder if he has an inkling that she'll haunt him forever. I wonder if he already knows that he'll let her. |
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