The Beginner's Guide to All Hail West Texas
Intro
I wrote this for a friend who was just getting started with The Mountain Goats. I think that The Mountain Goats are the best band on the planet, and this is my attempt to convince him that The Mountain Goats are a great band, and AHWT is a great album. If you’re familiar with The Mountain Goats and their work you’ll likely find most of this obvious and condescending, but that’s not my intention. If you’re unfamiliar with The Mountain Goats you might also find it obvious and condescending. In which case you have my apologies. I did try. As always, questions, comments, corrections can go to the address at the bottom of this page.
The Mountain Goats is primarily comprised of John Darnielle, hereafter referred to as “JD”. Although others have played on some of the albums, AHWT is an album in the classic Mountain Goats style, just JD and a guitar recorded on his creaky Panasonic boombox. The liner notes describe the boombox, but its real history can’t be appreciated without listening to the other albums. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to figure out what makes AHWT a great album. We start with
“The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton”
This song is a tough introduction to JD’s music. It’s not clear if it’s meant to be serious or funny. Actually it’s a little bit of both, which you’ll find is a recurring phenomenon with The Mountain Goats. Before you listen to this song, go off and read this. It’s from Last Plane to Jakarta, JD’s primary venue for writing about music. Note that JD’s writing about music also shares the blurred line between funny and serious that characterizes his songs. In order to appreciate The Mountain Goats, it’s important to embrace this dualism. Funny is orthogonal to serious. JD’s feelings about death metal are entirely earnest, as you can see if you continue to peruse the LPTJ archives.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, it’s a little easier to understand what this song is about. The song’s most didactic line gives the overall meaning: “When you punish a person for dreaming his dreams / don’t expect him to thank or forgive you”. This song is about more than rebellion and punishment, though. It’s about rising from the ashes. It’s about keeping the faith. It’s about raising your middle finger to authority and loudly proclaiming, “Hail satan!”. It’s about kids doing what kids want to do.
“Fall of the Star High School Running Back”
This song is a bit of an emotional letdown after the first one, but it’s a good example of a straight biography song. This song is also about kids and the choices they make, but unfortunately the protagonist makes a poor choice. The melody is, to my ear, catchier than the first song.
“Color In Your Cheeks”
Admittedly, this song doesn’t do a lot for me. It’s a very sweet song, though. JD likes places and singing about places and about people who come from places, and this song certainly fits in with those others. But it’s mediocre as far as The Mountain Goats goes.
“Jenny”
This, on the other hand, could be the greatest TMG song of all time.
This is one of the few TMG songs that’s about completely untainted love. The people in this song aren’t at their wits’ end, they’re not at each others throats, and their love isn’t going to die any time soon. JD rarely writes about people in this position, but this is one of his best. The imagery in this song, like many others on this album, deals with authority. Life is so fantastic because the protagonists are completely free. God isn’t looking, the police aren’t looking, and they can drive as fast as they want to. The motorcycle provides the same release as death metal does for Cyrus and Jeff. The people here are outlaws as well, but they managed to get away.
This is also a good place to point out that JD’s voice can convey a very wide range of emotion, but he usually does it subtly. For me, this heightens the experience of listening, but I can see how it might slip by. Listen to the amount of joy in “Hi diddle dee dee / God damn”. If this line completely elates you, you get the Mountain Goats.
Another point about this song for people more familiar with JD. I’ve seen him play this song live three times, and each time he’s changed the words in two places. The most relevant is that he switched from “We were the one thing in the galaxy” to “We were the two things in the galaxy”. I think this seriously weakens the song, and I didn’t realize how powerful the idea of two people and one motorcycle combining into one God-avoiding unity was until I heard it changed. I hope he changes it back.
“Faultlines”
One thing that is almost always ambiguous in JD’s albums is the continuity of narration between songs. (I say “almost” because Tallahassee is unambiguously about one couple.) Is this song about the same couple as “Jenny”? I hope not, but it’s certainly open to interpretation. This song is more typical of JD’s love songs in that it documents a point after “Jenny” when the relationship has begun to decline.
This song contains a lot of typical Mountain Goats traits. JD is obsessed with the metaphor of gardens and things that grow. Love and vegetables both grow into beautiful things. They also can get too ripe, and they both can rot. The first line mentions watermelon, a fruit that is bursting with sweet ripeness before it deteriorates. Ditto the strawberries further on in the song. In general, these people are living a life of excess to cover up their misery. JD also excels at thinking up new ways to insult people, and this song contains a few doozies. Let’s look at one of them: “I’ve got termites in the attic / so do you”. This is a great example of how JD links the disparate images within one song. Termites cause a beautiful and useful thing to rot from the inside. An attic infested with termites might, in some ways, resemble the rotting, overripe watermelon.
Okay. Maybe I’m stretching here. Another great thing about JD’s songs is that the narrators of these bitter love songs are never above blame. In fact, JD’s narrators usually accept their fair share of the blame. This doesn’t lessen the vitriol that you can hear when JD sings “both of us do” and “so do you”. The ability to convey such emotion in just one phrase is one of the greatest things about The Mountain Goats.
“Balance”
So this one starts out in a key that screams tension. The tone here is very similar to the tone in “Faultlines”. The last line is what kills me in this song: “We are far too slow to outrun it now / Not too far gone to care”. Ouch. It’s the worst feeling in the world to watch disaster approach but to be completely unable to stop it. Especially if the disaster is of your own making. And the disaster in JD’s songs is (almost) always of the narrator’s making. (A notable exception: ”‘Bluejays and Cardinals’”, which I find the saddest TMG song of all.) The disintegrating love/snow metaphor is great too. Even if you manage to catch all the snow that falls, it will melt on your tongue and leave you with nothing. Truly, there’s nothing to be done. See how apt the metaphor is? That’s what makes JD great! THEY‘RE ALL SO APT!
“Pink and Blue”
This song is a nice relief after the last two. I like to think that this song is about a single mother, but there’s no reason why it can’t be about a single father, or half of a fully functioning couple. Nevertheless, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
“Riches and Wonders”
This song is another troubled love song, but the situation is more nuanced than the situation in “Faultlines” or “Balance”. The first verse is a little confusing. There’s a lot of good stuff going on (love growing fat and friendly, the presence of a surplus of love), but there’s something wrong as well. Holding on to love is a great thing, but holding on until your knuckles are white? How hard do you have to hold on to love to keep it there? Why would you want to clutch to it if it makes your knuckles white?
The middle of the verse is where things start to become clear. “We feed fresh fruit to one another”. Uh oh. Again with the fresh fruit. The chorus, such as it is, reveals the problem lurking underneath the relationship. The narrator starts with “I want to go home” and immediately follows up with “but I am home”. The comforting, warm feeling you get when you’re home is what’s missing. They’re trying as hard as they can, but being together is not being home. JD’s best trait (which I haven’t really explored as much as I should) is his ability to reinforce musically what he’s saying in the lyrics. Here, the “but I am home” does not end on the tonic chord. We’re stuck, like the narrator, waiting for resolution. It comes in the song with the next chord change, but the narrator is silent. Will resolution ever come for him? He’s not home (because he wants to go home), but he is home (because he has nowhere else to go). He tries to convince himself that everything is hunky-dory in the second verse, but it ends the same way. No resolution.
“The Mess Inside”
Once again, is this narrator the same as the narrator in “Riches and Wonders”? It sounds like the same person who can finally admit that there are problems bigger than the relationship. The couple in this song is trying to hide their problems through exotic vacations. JD, however, likes to punish his characters for trying to avoid their problems. In the end, the problems must be dealt with.
I think this is another place where JD’s voice really shines. The bridge between the first two verses and the second two is a pretty vicious indictment. Listen to how he shouts “cannot run” and “cannot hide”. No matter how much you want to, there’s no escaping. Listen to how he almost whines the word “wanted” in each of the four verses. You can tell that the narrator wants it more than anything, but he knows that it ain’t gonna happen. This sort of longing/hopelessness combination is classic JD.
“Jeff Davis County Blues”
(Why aren’t the words to this song on themountaingoats.net?) In case you hadn’t picked up on it, people who run away and people who want to go home are all over this album. This song is also not my favorite, but it fits in well lyrically with the rest of the album. Someone is running away. What’s he running away from? JD never gives you all of the relevant information. why was he in jail? Was he looking back to check for cops? In the end it doesn’t matter; he can’t stay away from Texas or whoever “you” are. He’s dreaming about home, and I, for one, hope he makes it.
“Distant Stations”
Not a highlight of the album. There’re some good mixed feelings here. You’re waiting, but you expect the other person to just guess where you’re waiting. I’ve certainly been on both sides of that one. Even when JD doesn’t exactly hit, he doesn’t exactly miss either.
“Blues in Dallas”
Fake drums! Synths! Instrumentation other than guitar! It does occasionally happen. This song is kind of a cool way of expressing disdain for someone. The narrator wants to see them, but will feign indifference when he does. Why? Because he’s holding a grudge.
“Source Decay”
Okay, I hope you made it this far, because this could be the best song on the album. (Which, I realize, when taken with my comments about “Jenny” means that it could be the greatest TMG song of all time. I definitely think these two are in the upper echelon.)
All of the elements of a great TMG song are here. It has my favorite metaphor in all of JD’s songs: “I wish the west Texas highway / was a Mobius strip / I could ride it out forever / when I feel my heart break”. Not exactly a metaphor, I know. The highway isn’t actually a Mobius strip. But man, wouldn’t it be great if it were? How many times have you wished you could drive forever without getting too far away from home? A circle’s no good; you want to always feel like you’re going forward. It’s just perfect.
It’s got a mysterious past. What happened in Bangkok? Who was on that train? I don’t know, but I do know it was some bad shit.
It’s got a throwaway line that has a huge emotional impact. When the narrator “starts wishing it would rain”, it nearly makes me cry. He’s reached a point of such deep sadness that the sunshine doesn’t do him any good. He’s lying on the ground, unable to move, and all he wants is for it to rain. I could go on for pages about everything that that one simple line conveys. It’s lines like that that haunt my imagination on dark nights. It’s lines like that that make JD my hero.
Best of all, it’s got a part that can be kicked into high gear. If you think the last part of the song (from “come into the house” onward) is cool on the album, just wait until you see JD live. He goes up on “come into the house” instead of down like the rest of the verses. It’s songs like this that make the live experience worthwhile even for those who aren’t Mountain Goats fans. It’s unreal. I’ve talked enough about how emotional JD’s voice can be. Wait, just wait, until you see him in person. I’m going to shut up and listen to the song now.
“Absolute Lupthos Effect”
(More missing lyrics! I might have to transcribe them.) Another song where some bad shit has happened, but we don’t know what. JD likes the aftermath of bad shit. This song has another gardening metaphor, except this time it’s the narrator who is the plant. All he needs to heal is water, sunlight, and tender mercy. At this point, you can probably predict if JD will ever let him have the things he craves.