| The Mountain Goats – Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Never mind my previous comment because this is all that needs to be said: "This song is about the inevitable Ron Paul/John Darnielle presidency." -- 2008-03-20 - First Unitarian Church - Philadelphia, PA (comments by JD quoted at http://themountaingoats.wikia.com/wiki/Marduk_T-Shirt_Men's_Room_Incident ) |
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| The Mountain Goats – Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| What's the girl doing in a men's room? Well, think about that. | |
| The Mountain Goats – No Children Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Someone else *must* have noticed this, but I didn't until I was reading about the song "Genesis 30:3" from _The Life of the World to Come_ 'When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister. She said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I shall die!”' (Genesis 30:1, KJV) |
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| The Mountain Goats – This Year Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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I was thinking about the "stuck in second gear" line -- because I wasn't sure why the song was that specific, I mean, there are other ways of saying he crashed the car into the house -- and then it hit me that it could be a reference to the 5 stages of grief (specifically, anger is the second stage). I don't know, but there's always something new to discover in even the biggest and shoutiest of all tMG's songs. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Pink and Blue Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| It's a song about being reborn, about learning to take care of yourself. The "bananas" line makes more sense that way -- the narrator doesn't know how to take care of himself any more than he would know how to take care of a 9-day-old baby, and is having to learn from scratch. | |
| The Mountain Goats – Estate Sale Sign Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I don't doubt OneTimeForAll's story, but JD is really great at telling more than one story at the same time. To me, the chorus ("eagle spots the fish") strongly suggests an unequal, probably exploitive relationship. So I think this song is about what happens when your abuser dies and you have to sort through the memories to figure out if there are any that are worth keeping (echoing the end of The Sunset Tree). | |
| The Mountain Goats – High Hawk Season Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Or possibly the reference is to the movie of "The Warriors" -- in a performance of "Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece" (an outtake from All Eternals Deck), JD says: "As with most songs that come from movies that you wouldn’t otherwise have spent a lot of extra time with, I sort of found something to cry about in it.” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USpiOMFe3co ) |
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| The Mountain Goats – High Hawk Season Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I haven't read the book that DPOakley mentioned ("The Warriors"), but it makes sense based on the description -- the process of making peace with the violent parts of yourself (maybe even: making peace between your true self and the part of yourself that wants to destroy that other part). | |
| The Mountain Goats – High Hawk Season Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I think the chorus refers to "waking up" from a state of mind where the only feeling you can experience is rage ("heat") about the things that have happened to you. The process of allowing yourself to feel everything about those memories, not just anger, can feel like exploding. Hence "supernovas". | |
| The Mountain Goats – Beautiful Gas Mask Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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"Never sleep, remember to breathe deep" is the key, I think: "Once addicts have that first revelatory glimpse of their true self hiding beneath all of the layers of drama and trauma, it's as if they are coming out of a sleepwalking trance. Consequently, they should keep repeating this mantra: 'Don't go back to sleep! Never go back to sleep!' Without vigilance it's easy to slip back into an unconscious state." -- Christopher Lawford, _What Addicts Know_ (the next song on the album, "High Hawk Season", echoes that: "Rise if you're sleeping, stay awake.") |
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| The Mountain Goats – This Year Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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I just had a thought about the Jerusalem line -- I've listened to this song hundreds of times and always thought that line was this incredible ray of hope in a description of an awful situation. But... if you've heard interviews with JD, you know that the year he lived in Portland that's described in the songs on _We Shall All Be Healed_ was the year he was 18. So for him, writing this song after the fact, "Jerusalem" is a sketchy motel in Portland and "feasting and dancing" refers to almost dying of a drug overdose. The song gives you all this hope but if you know the backstory, you know it's actually grabbing that hope away from you. Heart-crushing brilliance. For more evidence for this, see the unreleased song "You're in Maya", which is about 100 times more heartbreaking than "This Year" while telling a very similar story. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Jaipur Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| Compare and contrast this song with the later "All Up the Seething Coast" from _We Shall All Be Healed_. I don't think the sugared pastries are sugared pastries. | |
| The Mountain Goats – Up the Wolves Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Things that might be obvious to everyone else, but weren't to me at first: I think the "you" in the song is JD's past self and the "I" is his current self. He's telling himself that someday, he'll feel better, and not only that, he will write about what happened and it will be heard ("commandeer the local airwaves"). Maybe "And they will shake their heads / And wag their bony fingers / In all the wrong directions" means he doesn't really think, as he's writing this song, that anybody else is going to understand it -- but on some level it doesn't matter to him whether they do ("By daybreak we'll be gone"). And then the line "who can say, who can say"... probably, he's not actually feeling better quite yet. |
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| The Mountain Goats – The Young Thousands Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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I can't edit comments? Okay, sorry, here's the really correct link: www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_366_-_john_darnielle |
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| The Mountain Goats – The Young Thousands Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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IMO, "closet full of almost-pristine videotape / documenting sordid little scenes in living color" refers to memories that you don't want to confront, so you push them in the back of your mind (the closet) and don't think about them. I think that "ghosts that haunt your building" also refers to memories that haunt you but that you're not quite consciously aware of. The use of the second person in this song is great because it underscores how universal the tendency is, in people who've survived trauma, to reach for anything (often, drugs) that distracts from these memories. I think that's one of the things this whole album is about. Background: the wtfpod link that some other people gave, but here's an actually correct link: http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_366_-_john_darnielle |
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| The Mountain Goats – Slow West Vultures Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Just a guess, but I think "sanding numbers off the monojects" refers to re-using needles so many times that the ink marking the quantity of liquid in the syringe gets rubbed off. Also, I'm guessing "slight returns" refers to tolerance and not a diminishing supply. (I used to give liquid medication to my rabbit and I would wash and re-use the same (oral) syringe. The numbers rubbed off pretty quickly.) |
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