What does loneliness sound like? How do you sing it? How do you sing for it? After all, the loneliest people in the whole wide world - as John Darnielle sings on the 2012 Mountain Goats track ‘Harlem Roulette’ - are the ones you’re never going to see again.
From context, it seems likely that Darnielle means the dead. The song explores the last night of the young singer Frankie Lymon, who found fame as a teenager and took a fatal heroin overdose at the age of 25 in 1968 - just after a New York studio session which was meant to restart his recording career. One of the songs from that night - ‘Seabreeze,’ the one Darnielle mentions - you can actually hear on YouTube, though not on Spotify. Links like this are unnervingly ephemeral - not hosted by any official source, they could easily disappear at any moment, which only adds to the sense that this is a fragile, ephemeral artefact, drifting away on its own sad tide. There’s a lot of great Mountain Goats songs - songs which have struck people to the core of their being and helped them find the strength to carry on - which only exist on links like this.
Ostensibly, ‘Seabreeze’ is about ‘a little town / Where the stars shine bright,’ ‘where a man can find peace and get all he needs.’ It doesn’t sound like that to me. Lymon’s clear, yet wistful vocal has the quality of a siren song, beckoning you along its deceptive doo-wop current towards a place you couldn’t leave if you wanted to. As is often the case with music surrounded by a penumbra of tragedy - I’m thinking here about Nick Drake’s Pink Moon - it’s easy to foreground those emotional qualities after the fact, now the song is charged with what we know about its circumstances.
But Darnielle’s invocation of Frankie Lymon - only three songs after the first time the album tells you to ‘Just stay alive’ - is about more than just that New York studio, and what happened after. It’s also about where this music, and the story attached to it, takes him in his own brain. That intersection isn’t made explicit until the bridge, midway through the song, but the connection between Lymon and one solitary listener forty years later is clearly at the heart of it all: ‘And four hours north of Portland, a radio flips on / And some no-one from the future remembers that you’re gone.’
A lot of what makes the Mountain Goats special - or at least, what makes me want to talk about them endlessly - is packed into this short song. That question of memory is a big part of it. What does it mean to remember, and so however briefly, to preserve, an artist who might otherwise be forgotten, through the tentative ‘little mark’ they made? And what about the fugitive fragments of our own lives - where do they go?
If not to raise that question, why would ‘some no-one from the future’ - a self-deprecating avatar of Darnielle himself - be mentioning Portland here, when it’s already four hours behind him in the rear-view mirror? Long time listeners to the band would already be aware of the city’s significance to the singer’s art: the nine months Darnielle spent there in 1985-6, in his own words, ‘chasing death,’ and the mingled grief and elation of surviving addiction while losing many of the friends who sustained him through it.
Long time listeners to this podcast have heard me talk about that period a fair bit already, though I managed to find out a little more when I travelled to Portland last summer to research this project, where I spent most of the month listening to the Mountain Goats’ 2006 album Get Lonely while trying to write my next episode. As it turned out - obviously - there was far too much there to fit into just one instalment, which accounts in part for the long hiatus I’ve taken. I’ll be talking more about my trip - and specifically about the City Nightclub - in my 2008 instalment on ‘Heretic Pride,’ in two episodes’ time. For today, it’s enough to say that - despite the life-saving experiences of community Darnielle associates with the City - Portland must have been a pretty lonely time.
Something in the experience of hearing Frankie Lymon on the radio, as ‘Harlem Roulette’ presents it, put Darnielle in mind of the ‘sad, young, frightened men’ to whom hands reach out from the lonely shadows, and to the time when he himself was one of them. In 2006, I was one of them too, and the new Mountain Goats record - the first to be released since I’d come across the band - was there for me, inviting me to get lonely right along with them.
Taken together as a unit, the band name and title promise an experience of committed absorption in one particular emotional state: the Mountain Goats get lonely. The formula echoes Elvis Costello and the Attractions Get Happy!! Franklin Bruno, a collaborator since Darnielle’s college days, who plays on Get Lonely and had recently written a 33 ⅓ guide to a different Costello album, would have recognised the nod. But Get Lonely feels far less arch and knowing than its forebear; there’s also an irony in more recent Mountain Goats imperatives to ‘Get famous’ or to ‘Wage wars, get rich’ and indeed ‘die handsome’ which is wholly missing here.
The sincerity of the album’s engagement with its title state is never in doubt. The liner notes to the album's Japanese release feature an interview with Darnielle conducted by Akao Mika, which has been translated and shared online by Andrew Fazzari. For Akao, this was a document clear enough to serve as a primer: ‘a textbook’ on ‘keeping company with loneliness.’
A textbook is a use-object: rarely a pacey read, but a publication designed to help you make sense of something complicated. And I’m drawn to that phrase, ‘keeping company.’ Speaking to Tom Lynch for Chicago outlet New City, Darnielle describes the internal states the record inhabits as ‘kind of where I lived after making’ The Sunset Tree, ‘spending a year playing and living with those songs,’ but also talking at shows to fans with whose experiences the album had resonated.
The Sunset Tree’s energy had been predominantly fast and rousing, and the Mountain Goats could have doubled down on these appealing qualities. But on a podcast with Steven Hyden, Darnielle expressed his admiration for Bruce Springsteen’s choice to follow up the thunderous drive of Born in the USA, not by ‘cash[ing] in’ on its stadium-ready template, but by keeping ‘digging.’ When an earlier Springsteen had evoked ‘Roy Orbison singing for the lonely,’ it was in the context of a romantic longing which ‘Thunder Road’ implies will be consummated before too long. But by this point, Bruce was interested in capturing something ‘a little weirder and more intimate,’ and harder to dispel: the ‘lost, spectral, ghostly sound’ which characterised Tunnel of Love. Darnielle liked this album enough that he and Franklin, as the Extra Glenns, even covered ‘Brilliant Disguise’ in a 1995 live show.
Now, similarly, Darnielle was starting to imagine a musical space which was ‘dark, but also soft,’ more suited to exploring interiority than the kinds of ‘physical action’ which had driven its predecessor: ‘a sort of dark cave we might all flee to in the wake of’ the turbulence brought into view on his breakout record.’ The place to which Get Lonely took its listeners was not unfamiliar in Darnielle's discography, but many of his songs which fulfil the need to ‘be connected to the crying part of yourself’ had tended to leaven this with humour. Get Lonely, uniquely, ‘kind of doesn’t have an exit,’ as its author told Vulture in an interview last year - which means you have to be along for the ride.
One indication of where he was going came in a 2005 Portland show, when Darnielle played ‘Dinu Lipatti’s Bones.’ One of the quieter moments on The Sunset Tree, the song makes powerful use of a slow tempo and high, fragile vocals to convey a stunned and gasping response to a threatening world, from which the speaker turns away towards the all-consuming ‘dark dreams’ he shares with another person who is ‘staring at the void and seldom blinking.’ Not all of the audience seemed to be responding respectfully to this material, but a lot more like it was coming down the line on the album the Mountain Goats had just tracked. Perhaps mindful of this, the singer implored the people talking: ‘You all paid to get in and I didn’t, [but] do fermez la bouche ... talking during the quiet ones, it’s crass, it’s rude.’ As if to drive the point home, the recording of the elegiac ‘Shadow Song’ towards the end of the set sounds like it’s performed almost entirely off-mic.
An interest in the kinds of ‘subtler moods’ which warrant this approach may not have been ‘the most crowd-friendly’ next step, Darnielle admitted to Tom Lynch, but he couldn’t avoid taking it: ‘that’s where my head is these days.’ On the back of the forceful, uptempo success of The Sunset Tree, Get Lonely would extend a hand, in particular, to those listeners who know better than to talk during the quiet ones. It’s a gambit of the kind Darnielle would lay out more explicitly in the closing track of Dark in Here, which he presented as a close cousin of the 2006 album: ‘there - there I’ll be. And who, who's coming with me?’
What’s it like there, in the dark cave? Well, cold, for one thing. I wrote a bit last year about Get Lonely’s kinship with Darnielle’s ‘snow songs,’ evoking the particular mood of the desperate winter he spent in Portland. Though the album ends with a narrator walking into the brackish water of a ‘humid marsh’ - Darnielle evokes the wetland habitat of Corolla, its pelicans and pricking reeds, with his trademark painterly precision - its primary settings are autumnal and wintery. This is a world of ‘slippery ice on the bridges,’ ‘pine trees frozen in the silvery moonlight,’ ‘wet leaves floating in gutters full of rain.’ The narrator of the title track even tells us explicitly that he’s buttoning up his coat.
‘Get Lonely,’ the song, is so chilling partly because of its narrator’s certainty, in the future tense, that the eponymous feeling is coming. Whatever else happens, ‘I will get lonely, and gasp for air’: an experience so miserable that it physically chokes me will be an inevitable part of my day. And that certainty is all the more striking because it’s counterpointed by such purposelessness, both in the music - those little guitar figures that build to nowhere; Erik Friedlander’s alternating, ostinato cello phrases which seem never to settle in one place or another - and in the rest of the lyric.
Our narrator rises up early and dresses nice only to go downtown, stand around, lose himself briefly in anonymous crowds, and head home again. In a 2015 show for which there’s no online audio, Chicago music blogger witchsong paraphrases how Darnielle introduced the song: the shadows the speaker stands in are the shadows of Chicago’s downtown, where John lived for a few months after leaving California in 1995, and ‘finding yourself in the darkness underneath them sometimes takes away that last little degree of light that apparently was keeping you together.’
Get Lonely is populated by people who live in that darkness: people who behave like ghosts, going about their lives ‘with no particular reason,’ and occasionally by real ghosts, too. The chords on ‘Maybe Sprout Wings’ are played unusually slowly and sparsely for a Mountain Goats song, occasionally punctuated by a spidery little riff in D-minor. In the lyric, Darnielle takes us methodically through the process of waking from and trying to move beyond an awful dream, from the bedroom to the shower to the chilly living room, and wishing that you could just fly away from it all: ‘Squint my eyes and hope real hard / Maybe sprout wings.’ What happened in the dream itself isn’t clear, but what’s left are the losses it reminded him of: ‘ghosts and clouds and nameless things’ that hover and then gradually vanish, ‘like figures in the distance,’ without their essence ever being grasped or clarified.
Whatever he sees, though, it puts him in mind of ‘old friends - the ones who’ve gone missing,’ and when it comes to this moment in live performances, occasionally Darnielle will improvise - as if summoning up their memories - a few names familiar to those who know his work well. These include Rozz Williams, the subject of ‘Shadow Song,’ and the friends from Portland he honours in ‘We Shall All Be Healed’ and the liner notes both of the same-named album and Goths, ‘forever perfect in the strobe’s embrace.’
(Live at the Gothic Theater in Englewood, Colorado on 2017-09-16 - taped by LMGB Tapes.)
Charged with the emotional weight of these invocations, the song played live takes on a force that seems to approach possession, that seems to make its desperately unrealistic escape fantasy feel like it could be plausible, like maybe those wings could really burst out of the singer’s skin if he just strummed the next chord hard enough. It’s a physical manifestation, perhaps, of a quandary the album returns to over and over again: the ghosts of our pasts can’t stay with us, but they won’t fully leave either. Their familiar nocturnal ‘company’ continues into the song which follows, ‘Moon Over Goldsboro’: the album’s longest cut, and its A-side closer. Something similar seems to be occupying the narrator’s mind even in ‘Clean Slate,’ a single released in July this year: ‘And then just when you think you’ve learned how to forget / You learn it’s just the ones who haven't risen to the surface yet.’
Get Lonely as a whole is concerned with the persistence of this kind of haunted loneliness - the inability to shake off grief, depression, dread, or do anything other than keep on going, into the next song and the next, under the weight of something that threatens to crush you every day and night. And its distinctive sonic palette gives further weight to these sombre tones. Percussion, where it appears on the album, often takes on a distant, skittering quality, while, unlike on the band’s three most recent records, Darnielle’s vocals are never harmonised. Their falsetto melodies often climb so high in the singer’s register that they leave behind the notes he can project with force, such that the songs seem eventually to be dissolving into pure breath, like the steam on the mirror on ‘Maybe Sprout Wings’ - wisps of song that, to quote their author’s description of the similarly-shaded ‘Duane Allman Slept Here,’ ‘barely even exist.’
There’s a kinship here, perhaps, with what folklorist John Cohen, referring to the Kentucky singer and banjo player Roscoe Holcomb, termed the ‘high lonesome sound’ - ‘modern, but also ancient’ - of Appalachian traditional music. Amanda Petrusich, in the New Yorker, described her experience of hearing Holcomb this way: ‘when Holcomb starts to sing in his loud, stick-straight, foghorn voice, my whole body shifts into a hyper-aware, overperceptive state’ - a state also called forth by Skip James’s ‘lurching, alien falsetto’.
Kara Kundert, for the trad publication No Depression, observes that ‘more than just sounding high,’ the often-cited ‘edge’ of bluegrass derives from ‘the actual physical strain’ required ‘to reach the notes’: not ‘beautiful or effortless,’ but drawing its authenticity from ‘the fact that it actually sounds a little bit painful.’ Authenticity is a complex word here - it always is. The singer and minister Buell Kazee actually undertook formal training to more widely share traditional music, only to be told by a label in 1927 that he had to sing his songs ‘using his high, tight “mountain voice”’ and unlearn the techniques he’d worked so hard to acquire.
As Darnielle told the Japanese journalist Akao, the stories on Get Lonely ‘are imaginary, but they're born out of real things in me.’ Perhaps in part because of his early and deep interest in the blues, the internal landscapes his voice summons up certainly seem persuasively lonesome, not least when Friedlander’s doomy cello lines billow and roil across them like clouds of dread in the sky. During ‘Maybe Sprout Wings,’ the strings have a restrained quality, gesturing at but never taking flight. But by the end of ‘Goldsboro’ something seems to be released, and they bloom darkly like ink in water, like the flowers growing in hidden places which are the subject of the following song. Reading symbols in traffic is a recurring motif across the album, and a line about this which Darnielle cut from an earlier draft of the song’s second verse - when it was named after the Canadian wrestler Abdullah the Butcher - seems apposite too: ‘beacons from the far side of the veil.’
Solitude, as described by Henry David Thoreau, is a deliberate, chosen, ‘companionable’ state: a kind of ‘serenity’ which allows us to experience a ‘strange liberty in Nature.’ Darnielle himself, in 2009’s ‘Satori in Denver,’ quoted an Evangelical hymn to portray it as a ‘friend of the friendless.’ What the characters in these songs are feeling is not solitude. Until the listener encounters the almost-peaceful resignation of the figure who seems to embrace his death by drowning in the closing track, over muted chords and a few sparse notes from Peter Hughes on the vibraphone, serenity is also in short supply. Nonetheless, by dwelling in these distressing states, the album has in turn shown itself a friend to many who find themselves receptive to those distant beacons.
When I was 16, I didn’t think of myself as lonely. I had friends, after all. Some of them my Mum didn’t like very much, because they were potheads who talked me into spending a night sleeping in a tower in the woods. Though for what it’s worth, I think those guys have all turned out just fine. But I was also getting to know another group through my streamed GCSE classes, many of whom were already planning to train as doctors.
This was the mid-2000s, the late days of the early, lawless internet, and the doctors were no more immune than the rest of us to the pull of its shocks. You wouldn’t have to step away from your desktop for long in an IT lesson to come back to a spinning dick on the screen, or an Urban Dictionary entry for a sexual practice you’d never heard of and would rather believe wasn’t real. Home, you may recall, was a village with transport links so poor that - as TV reviewer Stuart Heritage wrote of the rural sitcom This Country - even ‘the threadbare thrills of The Inbetweeners would have seemed impossibly luxurious,’ or at least out of reach without a parent willing to pick me up drunk from a schoolfriend’s house at 11.30.
So I spent a lot of time online there, too. I even made friends on the computer, like a guy from Uppingham called Miles - if you’re reading, hi Miles - who I’d been put in touch with by someone from youth drama, who was into things no one at my school knew about: the Mountain Goats, for one. I’d talk to him for hours on MSN Messenger about music and books and TV shows; we’d send each other ropey song demos and ask each other for help interpreting texts from people we fancied. Once I went into London on my own for the first time to see a girl named Vivian from MySpace who was also a fan of The Libertines, and was warned quite seriously to look out for unhinged strangers who might try to push me from the edge of train platforms. I think at one point she asked me to write some English coursework for her, and I think I actually accepted, and I hope wherever she is, she’s doing well.
But being sixteen is lonelier than most of us - especially teenage boys - are able to articulate at the time. This was a world of churning hormones and confusing signals which our new, totally unsupervised, access to internet platforms which encouraged us to make our feelings public could only amplify. The wider digital world I’d started dipping my toes into contained its own grim ecosystem of ladder theory and friendzones, snarky libertarian columnists and Newgrounds shooter games . I didn’t post anything especially awful, and I didn’t get redpilled, but it’s easy now to see how an awkward kid who hadn’t yet learnt to parse the differences between friendship and romantic attention could have ended up that way.
So I don’t know about you, but for me my sixteen-year-old self feels like a knot I’m only just now beginning to untie. And - cards on the table - I’ll forever be glad that the person I was then fell down the rabbit hole of the Mountain Goats, rather than becoming absorbed by all manner of other things that might have made me even worse. And this is probably where that obsession really kicked into gear: when I bought the new record from my new favourite band, at Pendulum Records, on the Stamford High Street, on the day of its release, and realised that it sounded a little different from the last one.
I understood what was going on with ‘Half Dead’ and ‘Woke Up New,’ of course - or at least I thought I did. I’d never actually been in a romantic relationship that would equip me to truly understand the weight of one’s collapse, but the idea was familiar enough as the place sad songs came from. But if I was aware, at sixteen, of ‘that feeling of solitude that some people, myself included, feel even when they’re in company, even with loved ones,’ which pervaded so much of the rest of the album, I certainly wasn’t going to admit it - to myself or anyone else. I didn’t think I’d ever experienced the ‘lasting sort of ache’ that might make you want to climb over a four-foot fence to lie down in the weeds in an empty lot facing a petrol station, as the narrator does in ‘Moon Over Goldsboro’ in a bid ‘to sever the tether’ of all human and perhaps all earthly bonds - the kind Darnielle told the Chicago Tribune ‘you either learn to live with or you go insane.’
Which was strange, because right before the record came out, in the summer of 2006 - in good time for a two-week course in Greenwich, London with the National Youth Theatre - my brain had got hold of an obsessive thought which had never really previously occurred to me. I told you last time that at this point, theatre was all I really wanted to do with my life: the NYT was actually more or less where my theatrical career peaked, though I hear one of my coursemates, Taron Egerton, has gone on to do quite well. It was an eventful fortnight in general: a girl kissed me (somewhat pityingly, as I recall), and a guy hit on me in a bar near The Cutty Sark which I was too young to be in, over a strawberry cider. But as I stretched for my warm-ups on the slip-resistant sprung floors of the Trinity LABAN Centre, improvised opening imaginary doors and watched my diction during choral speaking, all the while, like a drone underneath it, was an idea I’d just grasped: the certainty, finality, and inevitability of death.
If I think about the course today, these morbid feelings aren’t the main thing I usually remember, but for much of that summer they were part of the air I breathed. You could probably call it a depressive episode, and I wonder now if the atmosphere in my house had a bit to do with it. My Dad had recently been laid off from his warehouse job of twenty years and I’d seen at first hand his own solitary hours at the computer, when I left for school and when I came home, scouring the job sites for an employer who might want to hire a 54-year-old man with two O-levels. It was miserable, definitely, but I don’t want to give myself credit here for being more perceptive than I actually was.
I’m not entirely sure what shook my mood in the end - maybe I listened to the distinctly death-realist live-only track colloquially referred to as ‘Nikki Oh Nikki’ - but it might have been another new opportunity. That autumn, in my grandma’s kitchen, I got a call from a man called Andrew who worked for the Poetry Society in London, telling me I was one of fifteen winners of a youth poetry prize I’d entered online because it had no submission fee. (You can still find the poem - it’s not very good.) There was a ceremony in London, at Shakespeare’s Globe, and a residential course in Shropshire taught by the judges in February of the following year.
In the photo I sent in for the black-and-white booklet they gave out at the ceremony - the first image I chose specifically to represent me as a writer - I’m wearing the pinstriped blue jacket I bought from a Camden market vintage stall during the NYT course. I say that because I also wore it when a local newspaper came to my house, and took a picture of me sitting at my computer and turning slightly towards the camera with an alarmed look in my eyes, like I’ve just been surprised in the middle of a pressing task. It made me look like an ice cream man, and I must have thought it was the coolest thing I owned.
The bio I supplied with the photo, and the quotes I gave to the Stamford Mercury, don’t paint the most flattering picture either. ‘Some of my poems are [autobiographical], but this one is not,’ I’m described as ‘insist[ing]’ in response to the ‘salacious imagery’ of what the paper jovially terms the ‘lengthy work’ the judges had selected. ‘My own [experiences] are not that interesting,’ I tell the reporter, and so ‘I’m forced to create some which are.’ I also mention a couple of literary influences which are certainly a fair account of where my head was at: Shakespeare, George Orwell, Pete Doherty. I hope, I say, that this will be ‘the first of many great opportunities in the world of creative writing.’ I even admit to ‘dabbling’ in music journalism.
And yet, when it came to Get Lonely itself, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t write down any of my immediate thoughts. ‘People keep saying that the new album is a breakup album,’ the very much still-married John Darnielle told the audience at a 2006 Brooklyn show: ‘I don’t really know where they got that idea.’ I don’t know either, but I’d gotten it too, and I still remember feeling churlishly annoyed when Darnielle - a real person, who I didn’t know! - sensitively explained the situation 'Wild Sage' was actually about: not a romantic breakup, but somebody ‘more breaking up with … the basic units of what constitutes him as a person.’ Part of me, I think, just couldn't quite process the idea that what the singer, in a 2019 Portland performance, called his ‘confessional turn’ over the previous two albums wasn’t necessarily a permanent reorientation.
Instead, those steps into disclosure were something more like a productive muddying of the waters. Because from now on, the biographical context We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree had introduced would become part of the paradigm through which any new Mountain Goats song would be heard, bringing with it a whole new set of questions: is this song about the same person as that other one? Should this lyric be taken as a character’s stand-alone utterance, or placed in dialogue with everything else I now know about the person who wrote it? Who were those old friends who’d gone missing, anyway, and how much of this work is ultimately shaped by and around their absence?
These are interesting questions to think about on your own, but it was much more rewarding to find a bunch of other nerds who wanted to talk about them too. And those early experiences of the online community centred on the Mountain Goats’ music are what I’m going to be focusing on in the next episode, in two weeks’ time. I don’t think I deserved to get lonely at the age of sixteen - or at least I’d like to extend that past self a little more compassion - but when you’re just starting to work out who you are, sometimes the thing you need most in the world is to meet someone else who’s a bit more like you. If you’re especially lucky, you might even get to ‘revel through the fog like a pair of open graves,’ as Darnielle put it in ‘Rain in Soho’ - but in a pinch, it’s enough to find a stranger who has equally strong feelings about a scratchy bootleg from 1999.
Or maybe they’ve come across a new song, the one that’s just been shared online, which for that week is going to mean everything to you, and precisely nothing to anyone you’ve ever met in real life. It’s called ‘From TG & Y.’ Have you heard it? If not, you really should. Come back when you have. I think we’ll have a lot to talk about.
This week, Richard is getting into the local DIY scene. Check out the Young Property Developers! Look out for the next episode in four weeks’ time.
2006: 'Maybe Sprout Wings'