I have bad dreams about driving. I don’t know when they started, but let’s say the first one was some time before I was eligible for lessons, and the most recent, a while after I failed my fifth practical test in 2017 and let my theory result expire. In the dreams, I’m a passenger who has to become a driver, when external forces make it impossible for the person usually responsible to take the wheel. In some variants, that person is physically present: an older relative who needs to go to the hospital or some other place of urgent need, and I’m the only one on whom they can rely, even though I haven’t mastered any of the skills to do the job correctly or safely, and of course they know it. In others I’m alone, with the keys to a car I’m passively familiar with but have never had to start or steer, and the person who needs me is somewhere else, waiting for me to get in gear.
These unconscious narratives have always taken place on the roads of my childhood – the snaking B-roads and corridors of trees which shape the countryside connecting South Lincolnshire, Peterborough and Rutland. Perhaps I’m in a layby near Shacklewell Farm, where I once went for a Scout camp and got in trouble for trying to pay in the gift shop with greenish, oxidised coins my fellow campers and I had clearly fished up out of a wishing well. I’m around the corner from Tolethorpe Hall, where I used to perform in open-air Shakespeare productions as a teenager, wrestling with the handbrake, looking over my shoulder in panic as I pull shakily away from the kerb.
In 1999 I was trying to learn to ride a bike for the second time, for a Year 6 trip to a stayaway camp with a programme of activities in Crich, Derbyshire (one of which involved descending into a cave and the facilitator turning all the lights off; I can confirm that it was dark in there.) I practised on a private track which might have been a disused railway line, using a vehicle borrowed from my headteacher whose adult children didn’t need it anymore. It’s possible this had something to do with the dreams, but more likely that I feared what they represented even before this. We don’t need to run away with what Freud said to recognise that all of this is pretty clearly about independence, and the risk it carries of skidding inexorably out of control. But what frightens me about these experiences is one of the aspects of John Darnielle’s songwriting which most compels me: the man has made a career out of careering. And in the Mountain Goats’ extensive corpus of references to cars and driving, recently lovingly catalogued by the website Jalopnik, I couldn’t discuss this theme – so often interwoven with questions of self-definition – without mentioning ‘You’re in Maya.’
This 1999 North Carolina live set is the first recorded performance of the first of Darnielle’s songs which he identified (to an audience in Amsterdam) as ‘extensively autobiographical.’ There are caveats to make here: John has acknowledged the cloaked personal content of earlier compositions like ‘Full Flower’ and ‘Running Away With What Freud Said,’ and appears to have realized only in the course of a 2019 live rendition that the cruel central figure of ‘Pseudothyrum Song’ – also apparently written around 1999 – who is plaintively asked ‘Why do you try so hard to break my spirit?’ was an oblique representation of his violent stepfather.1 ‘You’re in Maya’ itself, meanwhile, may well have had prior outings that slipped past the watchful eyes of internet bootleggers – a performance filmed only three days later in Indiana describes it simply as a song that’s ‘seldom’ been played live. But let’s take the above statements at face value for a second, and assume that the audience at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, on the 27th of January, is witnessing something new and, in its own way, remarkable.
Earlier in the set, John has played a song he introduces as a live rarity. In ‘Letter From A Motel,’ one member of a fractious couple on the edge of divorce sends a photograph of their house, so ‘weakened’ and warped by heat that it is apparently ‘tilting on its axis,’ to their spouse. That person, who is the singer, is standing in a motel room, separated from his entire family but nonetheless confidently insisting – here, in a voice so ragged with phlegm that despite its great power it seems constantly, thrillingly, on the verge of collapse – that ‘stability is everything.’2 Warsan Shire writes that ‘no one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark’ – but where do you go if home is unstable? The new song Darnielle throws into the set three songs later, apparently casually – asking ‘Why don’t I just play this song called “You’re in Maya” instead [of launching into a ten-minute anecdote]?’ – offers one answer for which ‘The Recognition Scene,’ its predecessor in the set, prepares us: you hit the open road.
To later fans encountering it in the rear-view mirror, ‘You’re in Maya’ might seem like an early sketch of the material that would become ‘This Year .’ The narrator of each song inhabits a ‘broken house’ in the college town of Claremont but finds some measure of solace in their easy access to the broad highways of Southern California, where your own vehicle has the ‘crashing, kicking’ potential to propel you out of an ongoing nightmare and into freedom, or the nearest thing to it. Whatever’s waiting on down the track, it isn’t heaven. Instead, in both compositions, the singer is driving up a major transport artery (up Towne/north on Mills Avenue) towards the things of this world: Scotch and video games in ‘This Year,’ cheap whisky and pinball in the earlier lyric.
Here we’re a long way from ‘the affirmative optimism of Bruce Springsteen’ – a concept invoked so often in the LA Times rock review column that it induced a powerfully ‘reactionary’ response in the adolescent Darnielle. ‘It’s a town full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win’ exemplifies the ‘giant, going-for-it’ energy of Born to Run, a car-centric record in which every song ‘is very certain about how it means to be … and you know how you’re supposed to feel when you hear it,’ as John told Steven Hyden in a podcast interview. Rather than the ‘ambiguities’ of feeling to which Darnielle found himself more drawn on the follow-up album, Tunnel of Love, the classic, uptempo Springsteen sound foregrounds either ‘people who are triumphing in some way,’ or people who ‘even if they’re not going to triumph … are seizing the moment of their lives and wishing for more. If they’re not getting what they want out of life they’re imagining a better one for themselves.’
‘You’re in Maya’ hurtles past us at a jaunty clip, but its singer doesn’t seem able to imagine much of anything. Its ultimate destination is the oblivion of consciousness and purpose: ‘I drank ‘till I couldn’t see straight any more / And until there was nothing to drink to.’ In a sense quite different to one of the archetypal rock’n’roll songs of the American road, our narrator has ‘no particular place to go.’ Darnielle has acknowledged the influence, and the extent to which it ‘rewired’ his own brain: ‘I started thinking about Chuck Berry when I was sixteen one morning, and that was the end of that, in a lot of ways.’
What the teenager saw in Berry’s lines – and especially his ‘throwaway place-and-time-setters’ (Saturday morning, Mills Avenue) – was ‘a force as pure and direct as Shakespeare on a good day.’ Though these songs ‘almost never seem to take themselves very seriously,’ they arrive with ‘the shocking force of… a car skidding across a hundred feet of hot blacktop.’ Noting that ‘leaving one place and going somewhere else’ – a subject Berry explores at length – is ‘one of the all-time great themes,’ his disciple feels compelled to add that this is ‘not just because I’ve staked my entire musical career on examining it, either, you bunch of cynics.’
The extent of Darnielle’s commitment to narratives of flight and return shouldn’t, however, distract us from what makes this entry in the canon so distinctive. Firstly, like many of the ‘Going To…’ songs, but unlike ‘This Year,’ this is a solo voyage: in ‘You’re in Maya,’ no one shows up and hangs out. Many of Darnielle’s songs about people in cars making bad decisions bear up his comments that, when carrying your own damage, ‘the main thing that makes you feel better is the company of other people who are as damaged as you are,’ for which such people have a powerful ‘internal sensor.’ This intense connection can offer the promise of a kind of unity in chaos, becoming ‘twin high maintenance machines’3 – the kind which ‘Cry for Judas’ reminds us are prone to malfunction. Here, being a ‘broken machine’ is akin to being, or being in, a speeding car:
Speed up to the precipice
And then slam on the brakes
Some people crash two or three times
And then learn from their mistakes
A key song in Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne’s Gypsy indicates the hubris of so readily dismissing ‘Some People’: the kind who ‘can get a thrill / Knitting sweaters and sitting still,’ which is ‘okay for some people / Who don’t know they’re alive.’ Darnielle’s narrators at least sometimes recognise that a life of unstoppable escalation isn’t the only kind worth living, but apparently can’t do anything to stop – not least as someone in this situation can easily be aided and abetted by any other member of that thrilling club, the ‘ones who don’t slow down at all,’ who happens to be free to take a ride. ‘Take your foot off of the brake, / For Christ’s sake’: the wild closing scream of ‘Dilaudid’ frames the brief thrill of escape with a dynamic partner as a force strong enough to oppose the equally compelling pull towards death. As such, it’s deserving of equal reverence, even if the temporary connection it promises doesn’t offer any lasting support: ‘there’s nobody there to catch us when we fall.’
This is one of many reasons that a set of parody Goats lyrics shared on Twitter by Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, whose work I otherwise love, made me irrationally angry: no one sharing a car in a Mountain Goats song would treat sex with the glibness necessary to frame it as ‘getting handsy in the Hyundai.’ Nor is screaming into a pillow a common response to small romantic disappointments in Darnielle’s work: the pieces are the wrong way round. Instead, emotions of unbearable intensity function as a catalyst to throw the narrator out into the world and into the arms of whatever form of intimacy or contact might help diminish the ‘big ugly lump’ forming in his throat.
In the absence of any accomplice, ‘You’re in Maya’ is closer in spirit to the much later ‘Matthew 25:21,’ which also centres on an unaccompanied traveller going through an emotionally intense experience:
And I’m an eighteen-wheeler headed down the interstate
And my brakes are going to give and I won’t know until it’s too late
Tires screaming when I lose control
Try not to hurt too many people when I roll
But ‘Matthew’ – an elegy for Darnielle’s mother-in-law, with whom he had formed a strong familial bond – was released in 2009, by which point the Mountain Goats had been recording overtly autobiographical material for five years. ‘You’re in Maya,’ written ten years earlier, was a much larger leap into the unknown in terms of personal disclosure. Your own life can be tricky to approach head-on as an artist – you have to decide which details to foreground and which to cloak; you have to wonder if the people you’re writing about will see it, and how they might feel about you when they do. There are probably few more direct ways of beginning to write, for the first time, about experiencing violence at the hands of a caregiver than the opening line of ‘You’re In Maya’: ‘He hit me right in the face.’
The line immediately afterwards is framed, through a careful parallelism of syntax and meter, as an equal and opposite reaction to this violence: ‘I drove the Falcon up Towne.’ The narrator’s next response – hanging out in the library parking lot – seems to be a loss of clear direction, but the buoyant melody keeps pushing us forward, as if to say, whatever else happens, now that’s out of the way. Everything else in the song follows logically from the momentum of that initial escape. The narrator gets blasted at a college he doesn’t attend until the furious but futile desire for vengeance dissipates (‘‘Till I didn’t wanna kill anyone’). In the second verse, the ‘thirst’ once quenched by the Hiram Walker becomes a force powerful enough to displace him further, ‘up the coast’ towards ‘a small room that got even smaller / A block away from the Willamette’ – a scenario which bears a clear resemblance to Darnielle’s other accounts of a blackout and the haunting period of social isolation which followed it in his Portland apartment at 253 North Broadway. (The address is mentioned in the video below; the blackout is covered in the 1991 instalment.)
The telescoping of time here is a significant element of the writer’s craft: two events, which presumably happened at least a few months apart in biographical reality, become one single narrative, as if what a therapist once euphemistically referred to as the ‘very rich ’ experiences of Darnielle’s teens and early twenties could all be condensed into one representative movement from suffering within the family unit out into the destructive independence of self-medication. Wordsworth described poetry as the result of ‘powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity,’ and I’m forever boring my students about the difference between an emotional experience and the literary shaping that conveys that experience. The two verses of ‘You’re in Maya’ have the balance and concision of a well-crafted country song, and their witty compression bears comparison to the Merle Haggard number, ‘I Think I’ll Just Stay Here And Drink,’ with which the Cat’s Cradle set closes:
There was nowhere I needed to go
And nowhere I wanted to be
And my window looked out upon nothing
And nothing looked right back at meI had a couple of things on my mind
A couple of problems to think through
And I drank ‘til I couldn’t see straight anymore
Until there was nothing to drink to
Darnielle’s retelling of these personal trials stitches them together with something more communal, in the form of a singalong quotation from a Gaelic drinking song. Despite the specific circumstances in which the narrator incorporates the phrase, its implication seems to be that ‘the juice of the barley for me’ is a sentiment many through time have been able to readily relate to. ‘Bainne na mbó is na gamhna’ is perhaps a harder sell for those of us who don’t know the language, not least as John has admitted that his own pronunciation as Gaeilge is far from exact. ‘The milk of the cow is good for the calf,’ runs the English translation, with the heavy implication that none of us are calves here.
Reaching for a language you don’t personally speak is an unusual rhetorical move to make in your first attempt at publicly addressing, in your art, experiences of an intensely private character. Hearing a language which you ought to speak, which your family used to speak, but from which the effects of English colonialism and economic migration have fundamentally estranged you, in a song badged as the ‘first’ autobiographical composition by an artist important to you without a direct connection to that heritage, is unusual in a different way. For Darnielle, switching into Irish seems to be a way of leaving the personal behind, as his isolated narrator pulls back from the heightened intimacy of confession to invite the presence and support of a community of voices.
‘You’re in Maya,’ the singer comments in the Amsterdam introduction, is ‘what Hare Krishnas say to one another when they feel one of them is being too worldly’: the song’s title also finds Darnielle reaching for deeper connection in a language far removed from his own upbringing. This brings us to another ‘small room’ where horizons seemed to be expanding rather than narrowing down – the New York storefront temple at 26 Second Avenue occupied by Śrīla Prabhupāda, founder of the modern Krishna-consciousness movement, in which his early American followers ‘found themselves transported into another dimension’ (p.63). The International Society for Krishna Consciousness reached California in the year of Darnielle’s birth, 1967, and its San Francisco headquarters swiftly became known as a welcoming place for ‘troubled, searching, and sometimes desperate young people’ going through their own struggles with addiction and recovery (p.68).
In the words of an ISKCON chanting primer, ‘the materialistic mind … is full of unlimited ideas for sense gratification, and being perpetually restless, it constantly flickers from one sense object to another’ (p.108). Prabhupāda may not have spoken directly about the kind of thirst that carries a car up the coast, but Darnielle, a practising devotee in the late 1990s, would have understood well enough what he meant about the mind ‘always concocting objects of happiness … taking us anywhere and everywhere … as though we are riding on a chariot behind an unbridled horse’ (p.102). Māyā refers in part to the ‘illusion’ of control we seek over this chaos: ‘we are all trying to be lords of material nature, while actually we are under the grip of her stringent laws’ (p.14). The song’s narrator may have reached the plane of ‘mental speculation for the purpose of getting out of the material clutches,’ but Darnielle’s title is a wry acknowledgement that the particular acceleration he is pursuing will only bring him closer to destruction than to the ‘deliverance’ promised by the mahā-mantra.
‘You’re in Maya’ is not, of course, the first song by a Western musician to take an implicitly Krishna-conscious approach to the problems of ‘Living in the Material World.’ George Harrison’s 1973 song of that name centres a figure who ‘use[s his] body like a car / Taking me both near and far,’ and finds himself ‘frustrated,’ his ‘senses never gratified, / Only swelling like a tide.’ Here, however, the singer directly asserts his ‘hope to get out of this place / By the Lord Śrī Krishna’s grace’: a concept that doesn’t seem to have crossed the young Darnielle’s mind, at least as the song represents him. ‘You’re in Maya,’ like Darnielle’s Bible-inflected work, speaks of a less-than-certain faith: a self-described ‘devotional creeper,’ the singer at one time asserted that ‘I’ve had this lifelong thirst to believe, but I just don’t. I try; I go in as deep as I can.’ Nonetheless, there is a clear resonance between Harrison’s own description of his purpose in writing ‘Material World’ – to gloss a comment by Prabhupāda that ‘we’re not these physical bodies. We just happen to be in them’ (p.41) – and the Augustinian strain of Darnielle’s thought which I discussed in the previous newsletter.
By the end of my time at St Augustine’s Catholic school, I’d taken my first communion and given my first confession, but I couldn’t tell you whether or not I sincerely believed in anything. The main sins for which I remember seeking absolution were pretty small-scale: swearing and lying. I wasn’t exactly an eighteen-wheeler, but I had started acting out of control in my own way: I nearly got banned from the schoolbus for calling an unfriendly driver ‘Gormless’ on the journey back from a day trip to a Tudor manor; I started vandalising property, my own and others, with scissors, and then blaming other people for it. I think I mostly just wanted to see what would happen if I cut things (as it turns out, everybody was upset.)
I’m not sure if any particular disruption was underlying these behaviours, but I can’t imagine it helped being mentally split between year-groups, with all these placements represented in the school environment. I certainly didn’t, at the time, know anything much about the more significant fractures in my family history, most obviously that between England and Ireland. One of the first news stories I remember watching play out live on television was the 1998 car bombing in Omagh, but I suppose there wouldn’t have been a productive way to tell an eight-year-old that his father’s uncle had spent time in prison as an IRA courier, or that his father, who’d joined the British Army as a teenager, had himself been sent at the height of the Troubles to serve in Belfast.
None of these facts, and their implications, is visible in this picture of three white English children dressed near-identically in homemade helmets and white tunics bearing the cross of St. George – I’m not even sure which of the boys is me. The child in this photo, standing on the back of a carnival float covered in some sort of stone-effect cladding and decked out with poorly-painted heraldic shields, is one among many taking part in a performance of national, and local, belonging through the Georgian streets of Market Deeping – wrapped in the symbolism of history, literally draped in the flag. He’s a passenger, along for the ride. If you sang to him in the language of his ancestors, he wouldn’t understand a word of it.
This week, Richard is getting into ‘Running on Empty’ by Jackson Browne.
Another song from this period, ‘Cao Dai Blowout,’ turns on a forceful patriarch, ‘the ghost of your father,’ who ‘comes to town’ and immediately takes to ‘knocking over furniture.’ Clearly it would be reductive to approach too many Mountain Goats songs through this lens, but there must be at least a few others amenable to such a reading.
The song is elsewhere titled as part of the Alpha series.
A phrase which, were it not for the giddy way it’s sung, would seem a lot less exuberant than the earlier title it revisits, ‘Twin Human Highway Flares,’ which describes an older couple with slightly more apparent stability.
1999: 'You're in Maya'