Punk’s Reviews > This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days > Status Update

I still haven't heard any of these early songs out in the wild (i.e. without looking for them), and I haven't heard Horseradish Road at all, but on the page it very much sounds like a Mountain Goats song.

"Financial ruin is an almost irresistible theme for me; as soon as I feel tempted to drain a character’s bank account, I do it, whether owing to bank error or poor money management skills on their part, it does me no force, I must have their money, the better to flush it down the toilet for them."

Guys, I just really enjoy John Darnielle's whole thing. On "Commandante": "There is a tradition, from the earliest folk musics, of songs in which the speaker boasts of his talents, or his successes, or his sexual prowess. There is a tradition in Mountain Goats songs of boasting about having, e.g., “a storage locker full of cow figurines.” This song is as firmly inside that tradition as you can get."

Darnielle on his initial resistance to including lyrics in his liner notes and a song that addressed both "you" and "You": "There is something hilarious—no, something fun to me—about working in a communicative medium while expressing, in that medium, a palpable ambivalence toward the whole project of communication."

NEW BRITAIN :
You’ve had it up to here with my west country talk.
You can hardly understand a word I say.
The shortest tree around here is a hundred feet tall.
It’s going to rain today.

Darnielle: I like this narrator who steps into the frame and immediately makes four declarations of which he seems absolutely convinced: supposition, accusation, declaration, prediction.

"We all have things we like best about ourselves. Sometimes these line up with the things others like best in us, and sometimes not. “Stories that take place against a backdrop of hazily defined political tension and that seem to be careening toward an unhappy resolution for all involved” is probably not high on anybody’s list of most desired qualities in a Mountain Goats song, but on my list it’s very high indeed."

"The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you, and that you’re standing in the doorway"—I read that line in "Going to Georgia" and felt like I was close to a Mountain Goats breakthrough, but–what it really is–as I discovered paging backwards through this book is that he just likes to have people standing in doorways or near them or by a window.

Now THIS has to go back to the library and I'm going to switch to the ebook that was magically available but still won't get me through to the end because you really can't read more than five or six pages of this at a time. My Currently Reading list is going to be a mess of half-read books for a while. (Jk, it already is.)

Darnielle on "Going to Wisconsin": It seems like a lot of nonsense, but I would defend it in court—"the boat wasn't real, and this is how I feel. / You don't know where you're going until you arrive" is practically a precis for my method for the next, what, thirty years? Some of these early songs get me into a dreamy state where I imagine nothing, nothing of my work surviving, except this.

On "New Star Song": "This, again, is the working ethos of the early lyrics. Set a scene and put some ghosts in it, then get excited about the ghosts."