1994: 'Grendel's Mother'

On the longest night of the year, I’m standing in a car park on the north bank of the River Tyne, messing around with the settings on a Magenta Bat4 bat detector. A product designed to convert bats’ ‘inaudible ultra-sonic sounds to frequencies in the range of human hearing,’ the device bridges a gap between our experience of the world and what researchers have recently begun to characterise as the ‘more-than-human.’

Technology like this microphone, unusually sensitive to higher pitches, can put us in dialogue with everything out there which isn’t us, to which we are nonetheless intimately related. It connects us to a range of entities which late capitalist society has a vested interest in refusing to acknowledge as legitimately sharing our space: the pipistrelles whose voices we were hoping to capture; the insects they consume by the thousands; the dense vegetation that provides them with food and shelter, and the linear structures, like treelines, which they need to follow to keep their bearings in England’s heavily-deforested landscape. But it also allows us to hear something which wasn’t meant for us: to eavesdrop on voices far beyond the hearing limits of our natural bodies. The aim of such explorations, designed by a company which organises a number of local wildlife walking tours, is obviously to help the bats. I don’t mean to be precious when I state the simple fact that no one asked them if they minded us listening in.

At the time, in the car park, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was tuned in to something else – the low rustle of static coming from the detector, tuned between 40 and 50kHz to pick up the frequencies produced by common pipistrelles. It was still too bright, and too exposed, for any to be in our immediate vicinity: what I was hearing was the background noise as we tested how the dial worked, guiding its plastic disc up and down through the numbers like a person looking for ‘the hard-to-find stations on the AM band.’ But for some reason (and here I’ll admit I was a little drunk), the static on my device was playing ‘longer and louder’ than anyone else’s in the group, to the point where my wife had to gently remind me what the volume knob was for. The sound was a familiar paradox, a kind of comforting warm snow.¹ I think by this point, if you’re reading this newsletter, you already know what it sounded like.

The ground-breaking CW series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explored – in West Covina, no less – the much-desired daydream of going through life with a movie character’s personal soundtrack. Protagonist Rebecca Bunch, played by lead writer Rachel Bloom, eventually characterises the show’s witty and profound songs as an outward means of processing her internal responses: ‘when I stare off into space, I’m imagining myself in a musical number.’ I’m not implying here that I go through life imagining I’m a character in a Mountain Goats song – I don’t think my nervous system could take it – but in its (mindless, inhuman) closeness to ‘the ripple of the Panasonic hum,’ the bat detector briefly made me feel as if I was somewhere I recognised.

That sound lives in my head because the Mountain Goats do, and have for the past fifteen years: I’ve carried around their words and melodies as what the literary critic Kenneth Burke called ‘equipment for living.’ Burke viewed poetry as ‘a ritualistic way of arming us to confront perplexities and risks’; poet Michael Robbins, in an essay and later book picking up this theme, expands it to pop music, finding in both ‘a way of fortifying the self through the acceptance of perpetual unrest.’

The consolations of art are ambiguous – they might not help us meaningfully change anything, except, in the most optimistic view, ourselves – but Robbins sets them against a list of apparent material certainties that don’t always fix all the problems either: ‘vaccines, Google, drone strikes, showrooms filled with fabulous prizes.’ (Ah, but look at them!) It seems plausible enough that Robbins has paid his own visits to the realm of the imagination which here I’ll tentatively call ‘Goatland,’ on the model of Greeneland – a term applied to the spiritual backstreets and borderlands of Graham Greene’s novels, with which a map of John Darnielle’s world might share some distinctive landscape features. I mention this because I’m coming to understand that, among other things, for me the Mountain Goats – as much as any artist with an extensive yet unified body of work – are a place to spend time.

It isn’t always a comfortable one: songs like ‘Alpha Incipiens’ use the word ‘love’ to describe a relationship where even ‘the cool breeze that blows is somebody’s fault,’ and they rattle and shake with such a fathomless intensity that you’d be forgiven for hearing its opposite. An early zine interview with Corey Brown gives some indication of Darnielle’s own take on the world he was creating during his first decade of recording: a body of work which had its roots in ‘poems about people who wanted desperately to love one another but didn’t know how,’ and made ‘real connections … especially with people who had in some way been touched by divorce.’ He acknowledges a certain cruelty in putting his characters through this, a process which makes him feel ‘like a monster for being either unable or unwilling to let them have what they wanted’ – but deems this sadism a species of ‘what all artists do.’  These songs were often conveyed by ‘crazed first-person narrators who talk about how new it looks to see what the sky is like outside or something’ – a ‘wacko hermit’ image which Darnielle admits he ‘carefully tried to cultivate’ despite being a ‘fairly sociable person.’

The standard bitter love songs I’m describing here, and in the previous newsletter, sometimes feel like they sit in the space described by Peter Coviello in his music memoir, Long Players: ways of channelling the ‘volatile quality’ of young male anger, which ‘boys and men like me’ observe in themselves ‘with grave wariness, as if it were the seed from which something altogether malignant might be grown.’ Music that is ‘loud, frantic, and concussive, filled with a thrashing propulsiveness,’ can serve such listeners as ‘a place where you might have your furies, and have them as something other than poisonous: as elation, perhaps, or as transport, or as scene-making joy.’

That doesn’t mean its excesses, or their author, are beyond critique. Around 1998, Darnielle received a letter from a feminist correspondent in Missouri which addressed these recordings’ heavy reliance on, as the singer summarises it, the perspective of a ‘tortured emo dude who blames all of his problems on the absence of a woman who could fix his life by coming and just sort of standing there in the radiant sheen of his self-effulgent narcissistic light.’ An awareness of the damage done by this kind of ‘wretched behaviour’ in his own family history is one likely reason for wanting to explore it in the first place, but Darnielle nonetheless started to confront the dangers inherent in romanticising it through his narrators: ‘forever grateful’ for the writer’s call-out, he described it as ‘a signal … to stop writing songs like this.’

The song like this with the greatest reach, written on Christmas morning in 1993, would probably be ‘Going to Georgia.’ In a 1996 London live set – which I think was the band’s first UK performance – John prefaces the stand-out track from Zopilote Machine with a cheerful ‘I mean every word of it!’ By 2012, his relation to the material is rather different:

I honestly don’t want to play Going to Georgia ever again. I really confronted my old catalog because I began getting more and more engaged with my feminism, and I think Going to Georgia is a bullshit song … It seems daring and edgy to a 26-year-old dude to have a guy who goes down with a gun for unknown purposes to see somebody he claims to love, but to my present self, that guy is a fucking asshole. I don’t like to celebrate things like that.

The original recording drives towards an ‘exhilarating,’ cathartic release which a 2016 solo performance – where John takes the request in exchange for $60 in weed money – seeks to frustrate at every turn.² Darnielle calls the song ‘misogynistic garbage,’ breaking off after the first line to call the literal sophomore who wrote it in 1993 ‘good at being pathetic.’ He interrupts himself again at the peak of the melody – ‘and you smile as you ease the gun from my hand’ – to emphasise that he hates the character singing, jovially suggesting that he should be in jail: ‘Actually, your feelings are not that fucking important.’

It’s hard to tell how much of this is visually directed towards the fan in the room who requested it, but to me the performance reads as a vicious self-parody: the playing unusually sloppy for this stage in Darnielle’s career, the vocal delivery knowingly howling and harsh. The message seems to be: ‘Are you sure this is what you really want from me?’

This moment illustrates something of the awkwardness of growth, both as an artist and as a person. Though they might exist within the audible spectrum, releases like Chile de Arbol and Yam, The King of Crops were expected to be heard by few people and closely scrutinised by fewer – ‘Going to Georgia’ itself was ‘almost totally improvised,’ not even fully written when it was first recorded. On re-releasing these songs for a later audience who sought out his early outputs as artefacts to mine for meaning, Darnielle’s liner notes wrestle with the fact that they were largely committed to tape by a prolific college student who wasn’t giving much thought to how they would be judged by his ‘feminist activist older self’ - or to how many people might eventually be listening in.³

Appearing in 1994, Zopilote Machine sits somewhere between these cottage industry releases and the more outward-facing work produced in what Kyle Barbour has termed the Goats’ ‘early studio era.’ Sequenced by Bob Durkee and containing five recordings cribbed from radio sessions, I confess I’m not certain what defines this as the band’s ‘debut studio album,’ but perhaps a line in the sand has to be drawn somewhere. Here, Darnielle’s signature Latin epigraphs are accompanied by English text from Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah as a ‘sort of peace offering,’ and there are further gestures of welcome. One song in particular, ‘Grendel’s Mother,’ seems to point the way forward from a sound defined by what Jonathan Dollimore has called ‘the aesthetics of energy’ (with reference to Yeats, an early Darnielle influence), to one more deeply invested in an ethics of care.⁴

There’s rage here, too, of course: the title character is grieving the death of her son at the hands of the hero, Beowulf, who tore his arm from his shoulder in a Danish mead-hall. But her inexorable progress in hunting down the perpetrators is stately, measured, drawing on deep reserves – in the depths of its occupant’s grief, ‘the cave-mouth shines / By pure force of will.’ Vengeance will always find its target, the singer suggests, in a global perspective – ‘You can run, and run some more / From here all the way to Singapore’ – and so it can take its time. We seem to follow Grendel’s mother, pace by pace, as she ‘beat[s] down the new path to the castle … naked and alone’ – an image of striking vulnerability – towards the men who killed her child, who know what they’ve done and are still drinking red wine, chewing meat off the bone, continuing to enjoy their comforts while her son smoulders to ashes on a funeral bier.

If, as listeners familiar with the poem, we know that on the other side of this quest for retribution only death awaits, for all its narrator’s plangent certainty, that might further allow us to empathise with the monster. In recent years Toni Morrison has offered a nuanced perspective on Grendel and his kin. The former is perceived by the Danes as ‘the ultimate monster: mindless without intelligible speech,’ whose ‘mere presence in the world was an affront to it’; his mother meanwhile, in a common misogynistic framework, is framed as ‘more repulsive, more “responsible” for evil’ than her son, despite having a more obvious ‘motive for murder,’ and if she has a name, ‘it is as unspeakable as she is unspeaking.’ But in the absence of communication, of even the slightest attempt to see stories like these from the perspective of the other creatures we share our world with, violence can only breed violence ‘until the blood of Grendel’s mother annihilates her own weapon and the victor’s as well,’ as ‘the sword of vengeance collapses in exhaustion or shame.’⁵

Darnielle’s song takes place before this final conflagration, in the middle of the cycle, the eye of the storm. Despite where it’s heading, in narrative terms, its overriding affect is one of simplicity and tenderness. I was listening to the whole album in preparation for this episode while trying to bulk-buy cat food in a Morrison’s supermarket – not a practice I recommend – and amid all the stuttering strumming and gnashing of teeth, this song, where Darnielle sings in a lower, gentler register than usual, was the only point where I felt genuinely calm and settled. That’s no mean feat when the singer is threatening to eat you alive, and suggests an engagement with monstrosity very different than ‘having your furies.’ Before the final line resolves – ‘in my teeth’ – we hear two rounds of the phrase ‘I will carry you home,’ and it doesn’t sound like violence – I had to double-check that she was speaking to the warriors rather than to her child’s broken body. Slowly but inevitably, it seems to say, some more-than-human force – call it fate, call it plain mortality - will gather all of us in, will bring us in its own mouth back to the cave-mouth. What happens after that belongs to the fire and water.

Around this time, there were big changes on the horizon, both in John Darnielle’s life and in my own. I started primary school, young for my year, and I feel for the uniformed child in this picture, frowning like a politician and suddenly dressed like a tiny businessman. I remember a horseshoe of orange carpet we would sit in for story time, which looked like one of the 1970s ’conversation pits’ which were recently doing the rounds on Twitter; I don’t remember pissing in a communal sandpit, biting a learning support assistant, or my parents being taken aside to be told that their child was advanced for his age and might be acting out due to understimulation, though I’ve since been reminded of all of these events by people whose view of me was clearly shaped by them in lasting ways.

And in California, John sent a grateful email to a fellow user of a local online music forum who had been kind about the first few Mountain Goats releases which were evidently splitting opinion. By the following year, he and Lalitree were talking regularly on the phone, and he was trying to broach the subject of romance – a subject that would lead, over the coming years, to a crop of love songs that were far from standard and considerably less defined by bitterness. As he tells the story, a shared sense of musical recognition was the key piece of the puzzle.

I really liked her. I was trying to figure out a way of saying so without sounding lecherous; what I wound up saying was: “You know, you...” and then just letting that vowel fade. “Hey,” she said, “that sounded like a Souled American song.” “What did you say?” I said.

We are still married.

1. Here it might be worth quoting John on his own batch of ‘Snow Songs’, which he calls ‘a generic term with a very specific purpose. I use it when I've written a song whose mood reminds me, either lyrically or musically, of the winter I spent in Portland, Oregon, a season during which I almost died at least twice."

2. I’m aware of only one performance since then, in Oslo, Norway, but I couldn’t speak to exchange rates in the local market.

3. If you enjoy this kind of self-recrimination, you’ll be delighted to hear my future episode about the highly flawed work I was writing as a second-year undergraduate in 2009. Without a platform anywhere near the scale of John’s, I find myself asking similar questions whenever anything from the time is mentioned. What do you do with souvenirs of something you partly wish hadn’t been put in the world, with the fact that other people remember things about you which you’d prefer to forget yourself?

4. Jonathan Dollimore, Sex, Literature and Censorship. Wiley, 2001.

5. Toni Morrison, Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations. Random House, 2019.

This week, Richard is getting into Dark in Here, obviously.