| The Mountain Goats – Dilaudid Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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> The woman dresses as a whore, gets her "three score and ten" for a trick It's from the 90th Psalm: "The days of our years are three score years and ten." In this context, it means, "Even if we live out our full lives and don't die early, we're only going to be right here, right now, this once." The idea that a woman who dresses sexily is ipso facto a whore is, well, something it's *really hard* to imagine John Darnielle being okay with. |
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| Yo La Tengo – Pablo and Andrea Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Pablo and Andrea are the names of the children of the photographer Robert Frank, most famous for his seminal collection "The Americans" (and somewhat notorious for "Cocksucker Blues," the documentary he made about the Rolling Stones). In the early 1970s, Andrea Frank was killed in a plane crash in Guatemala; at about the same time, Pablo Frank was diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized; he died in 1994, the year before _Electr-O-Pura_ was released. I don't really have any idea how that relates the these lyrics, but that's who Pablo and Andrea were. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what it was like. Guarding my face. That was important. That was in 1972. I'm nearly 50, and I cry almost every time I hear this song. As Elvis Costello said, some things you never get used to. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Lion's Teeth Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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"Hot, red, and soaking wet" is the face of someone who's been crying. Wrestling a lion has been a metaphor for confronting something vastly more powerful than you since at least the book of Daniel. The details of this particular confrontation aren't all laid out here, but there's more than enough to get the sense of it: the fear, and the reality, of being overmatched, and the sense of terror and helplessness that comes when you realize you're not going to be able to hold on any longer, and the thing you've tried to conquer will smite you. At least, when I had this confrontation with my own father, that's pretty much how it played out. Most of what I get out of the songs on _The Sunset Tree_ is the shock of recognition. My girlfriend and I saw Darnielle give a talk the other night in San Francisco, and someone asked about his family's reaction to his autobiographical songs, and he said, "My mother said, 'Your stepfather did a lot of good things, too.'" We just laughed about this afterwards. My mom would totally say that about my dad, and I've actually *heard* her mom say almost exactly the same thing about her stepfather. Yeah, he did a lot of good things too. Keep believing that makes things okay, Mom. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Dance Music Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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I don't think "special secret sickness" is quite so dramatic as cancer or alcoholism or drugs. This song's about being seventeen and feeling like there's nowhere to turn to and you're doomed - sort of the flip side of the equally unrealistic I'm-gonna-get-outa-here-tomorrow optimism of "This Year". When you flee from everything else to the girl you've been seeing, only to find that sometimes she's unreachably sad, you discover something awful - that sometimes the person who seems like she's a door to another, better world, sometimes that door is closed and locked. Because you're seventeen, you don't have any real experience to gauge this with, and the only thing you can extrapolate it to is the end of the world. I think the genius of this song is that captures the sense of what it's like to start feeling adult emotions while you're still a kid. The song inhabits the kid's perspective, but the singer, who's an adult, knows that while the kid's looking at the right territory, he's drawing the boundaries all wrong. And because Darnielle is generous with the characters in his songs, even when the character is him, he honors this young man's emotional state by singing about it so frankly and directly. And I love the doubling of the voice on the line "I don't want to die alone." I think that's Darnielle acknowledging that, yeah, from the distant shore of adulthood, that seems like a pretty heady conclusion to draw from the fact that your girlfriend's unhappy. It's the closest he comes to winking at you. |
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