2009: ‘Psalms 40:2’
Sin as hard as you can.
Part of me worries that if I start talking about Shane MacGowan I might never stop, although since his death in early December the main phrase that’s been occupying my mind is about silence. Novelist Joseph O’Connor, eulogising the Pogues singer for the BBC, comments that ‘his art was fuelled by a reality about the strange country that was Ireland, a so-called republic that could not feed or employ great multitudes of its own citizens, who had fled to the land of the ancient oppressor for work.’ These multitudes were people like my father’s parents, who sailed from Dublin to London in the 1940s, and who I never really got to know before they died. They sent money home, but they were ‘rarely written about in novels or short stories, rarely spoken of in Irish political speeches. They were inconvenient, a bit embarrassing. There was silence around them.’
I shared this quote with my Dad in my kitchen while my parents were visiting for an early Christmas. He didn’t agree with the totality of O’Connor’s representation of Ireland, but he shared MacGowan’s early experiences to an extent I’d never realised before the obituaries started rolling out. Both were born to Irish parents in South-East England; both returned to Ireland for the first few years of their childhoods and, when their families settled into life in the UK, continued to romanticise Ireland as their spiritual home. Their lives had taken very different courses since, but something in O’Connor’s description matched something in my experience of my taciturn, sometimes solitary, father: ‘When Shane sang, that silence, the awful wordlessness was defeated … You were part of the generations who'd been asked to disappear, but you were far from alone in your loneliness.’
Visiting Dublin for a Pulp gig this summer, I stayed in Dun Laoghaire, and learnt from a historical plaque, for the first time, the phrase ‘the Forgotten Irish’: a term applied to ‘that generation of post World War II emigrants who left their homes, counties and country from the Carlisle Pier, never to return.’ I texted Dad: his parents had left from the same pier. This wasn’t my experience, but it constituted an essential part of who I was, and it was something I hadn’t even known there was a name for. Or at least, not one more indicative than ‘half-Irish’: the description of my identity I’d trot out when it came up as a kid, and which, given the back-and-forth described above, always felt like something of a half-lie.
I don’t want to overstate my connection to any kind of immigrant experience: my Dad and his parents were part of the ‘thousands … sailing … to break the chains of poverty’ who MacGowan had described, but growing up all that felt very far away. People had long stopped using the kind of slurs he’d heard at school; after a series of displacements - a children’s convalescent home in Hampshire with steel beds, and then the army - he’d lost his accent, and eventually sort of faded into Englishness. Now he had a stable job as a warehouse logistics manager in a small town in the East Midlands - but behind all that was this. ‘Your grandfather rode the boat over from Ireland,’ I first heard John Darnielle sing some sixteen years ago, and a few years after that realised: ‘Oh - mine too.’
I learnt earlier this year, from a letter to an inquisitive fan in the 90s, kindly shared on a Mountain Goats Facebook group, that he also held MacGowan’s songwriting in the highest regard. A poem by Cian Ferriter, shared by the Irish Literary Times in response to the latter’s death, beautifully describes his ability, in his writing, to ‘weigh in love the loser’s lot / to bend in to the man without a voice / and whisper you are held, held and understood.’ This is the kind of intimacy which animates the weary, yet somehow triumphant, chorus of ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’:
Take my hand and dry your tears, babe
Take my hand, forget your fears, babe
There's no pain, there's no more sorrow
They're all gone, gone in the years, babe
It’s also, of course, the sort of thing people are referring to when they talk about the importance of empathy in the Mountain Goats’ music. In my 2005 essay, I quoted Darnielle’s comment on how music ‘held my hand when I was walking down dark alleys and couldn’t see my way out,’ and his increasing ambition for his own work to do the same thing. Though he’d be the first to acknowledge that the same ethical attitude can be arrived at by other means, in a podcast interview with Craig Finn he recognised that this kind of empathy for him personally was inseparably a Christian impulse. Raised, like MacGowan (and Finn), as a cradle Catholic, his work has consistently spoken in terms informed by that religious upbringing of what it might mean, in MacGowan’s terms, to ‘fall from grace with God’ - and in turn, to be lifted by what he himself, in the resonant closing number of the first Mountain Goats album conceived of primarily as a sustained engagement with Christian themes, called ‘the permanent efficacy of grace.’
The Life of the World to Come, in 2009, billed its contents as ‘twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of.’ I’d forgotten that touch of reticence tacked on at the end - the slight taking back of what’s just been affirmed. There’s too much complexity here, in any case, to speak of this unilaterally as a ‘Christian album,’ but that ‘kind of’ might be taken as something of an olive branch to a fanbase used to hearing Darnielle hail Satan - some of whom started sending the singer ‘hate mail about the album as soon as the song titles were announced’ - and so perhaps to some extent primed to reject what a Christian Mountain Goats album might entail.
The alternative, of course, is that Darnielle really means it. Here are two quotes about ‘Romans 10:9’, and the apparently definitive statement of faith in its chorus - ‘If you will believe in your heart / And confess with your lips / Surely you will be saved one day’ - which appear consecutively on the Mountain Goats fandom wiki page for the song:
‘It's been really, really amusing to see, you know, you can tell how hard somebody listens to a song depending on how they feel about this one … Some people think that it's a devout expression of faith in the benevolent God. Um, I'm taking it those people just heard the chorus and skipped the part about the guy whose mind is… contracting on himself and who is grasping in the darkness for some small sign of hope and pretending to himself in the chorus that he's been able to find it instead of just ambling through...’ - 2009-11-28 - Theater of Living Arts - Philadelphia, PA
‘This is one of those cheery sort of, you know, winery dinner kind of songs about chronic pain and illness and coping with the idea that the thing that has changed in your life is not going to return to the state of stasis that you had previously known, but that you have to accommodate, right, a new reality of constant pain and discomfort … I wrote this in a hotel room and I meant it at the time and I mean it now.’ - 2016-04-11 - City Winery - Chicago, IL
I’m not in the business of poking holes when I say that ‘the guy [is] pretending to himself in the chorus’ and ‘I meant it at the time and I mean it now’ are mutually contradictory readings of what’s happening here. I’m more interested in the way the distance between those statements gives these songs their unique charge, hovering as they do on what Browning called the ‘dangerous edge’ between faith and doubt. A brief glance through Darnielle’s comments about Catholicism on his Twitter feed will indicate both that he takes the subject extremely seriously, and that establishing a full, coherent picture of his theology and the personal beliefs underpinning it would be a fairly absorbing task.1 ‘I do worship Jesus but I pray like a protestant mostly now,’ one post reads: ‘Will still break out the rosary whenever I feel like it and probably genuflect a dozen times a day all the same.’
Elsewhere, Darnielle has described the affective ways in which religion speaks to him. Interviewed by The Guardian, he summarised his wife’s response to ‘a CS Lewis-inspired disquisition on faith and emotion’: ‘you just like it because it makes you cry.’ A conversation with PopMatters during the Life of the World to Come release cycle goes deeper on what inspired Darnielle’s engagement with his source. The songwriter describes his personal circumstances leading up the composition: a couple of years of ‘pretty punishing physical and emotional health,’ including a diagnosis of tinnitus which engendered ‘the worst depression I have suffered in my adult life,’ a state Darnielle termed ‘crying while awake,’ struggles with sleep deprivation, and a sense of personal crisis so intense that he called ‘my former junkie friend—who is now an addictions counselor—to ask him whether, maybe, if I needed to go back on the program.’
These factors, he notes, will naturally ‘get a person thinking about his spirit just as a refuge from his body’ - ‘I am not this body which imprisons me,’ as ‘Isaiah 45:23’ puts it - which in turn encouraged him to bring to the surface ideas which had long been submerged in his writing: ‘so much of what affects me emotionally is bound up in ideas of God and mercy and forgiveness and wrath and the sort of peace that we mean when we say “peace be with you” in the mass.’ What’s written in the scriptures - as another significant influence on Darnielle’s early writing, Leonard Cohen, attested on his final album - is ‘not some idle claim,’ and the long pedigree of these stories seemed to grant them an additional power: ‘the life of the spirit’ is bigger than some ‘little songs,’ ‘so maybe it can knock a few teacups off the shelves, right?’
The interview’s conclusion suggested that in a sense Darnielle was merely making use of the Bible: ‘Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.’ But whether that was in fact the case, or whether he was actively endorsing its contents, seems far less important a distinction to me now than it did when I was 19 - perhaps because, in the intervening years, the faith I was brought up in has become something I feel far less antagonistic about, or perhaps because my pre-order of the new album, when it arrived in the post, came with a poster which I pinned to the corkboard of my second-year college accommodation. What could be less cool to advertise, in such circumstances, than a Christian rock act?
At the time, however, perhaps I needed to believe in some distance between the singer and what was, for me, familiar subject matter, in order to enjoy his treatment of it: a kind of plausible deniability. Growing up Catholic in England didn’t dominate my life outside of school and Sundays in any disciplinarian way, but it had always been a fact of difference without real consequence, a duality which reared its head whenever I enjoyed the cheerful anarchy of Guy Fawkes’ Night and felt intermittently conflicted about what, exactly, we were celebrating. I can’t speak to how it would have felt in Southern California, but John Darnielle’s break with Catholicism, as he tells it, came as a sudden interruption, one of many forms of stability to crumble in the wake of his parents’ divorce. After a ‘rampaging atheist’ phase in high school and the extremities of his year in Portland, he found himself back in Claremont, ‘looking for Jesus,’ attending regular mass and listening ‘to gospel radio all night long’ on his ‘graveyard shift’ at Metropolitan State Hospital. My separation from the faith was less dramatic: I took communion but was never confirmed, and once church attendance was no longer an educational requirement, it simply stopped being an active part of my life.
I have no memory of a definitive moment when I knew I no longer believed in God, but rather a gradual sense of something sliding away. I don’t recall my beliefs being actively swayed by Philip Pullman’s depiction of the Creator, in His Dark Materials, as a senile ‘decrepit angel, locked in a crystal prison,’ or by the 1999 South Park episode when God appears to the town’s residents as a sort of hairy, deformed blue hippo - but I still remember how disturbing I found both of these moments, two decades later, and I think they reflect the tenor of the time. Both, in different ways, mocked the idea of the deity’s corporeal form, showing him as in some sense diminished or ridiculous, not congruent with the world in a meaningful way. In the absence of faith, I didn’t fill the void it left in my life with anything in particular - other than, I suppose you could say, an increasing devotion to my own niche interests.
But by sixteen, I was reading a lot of Graham Greene: a convert whose frequent references to Catholic imagery and doctrine indicate, if nothing else, a desire to demonstrate that he’d taken his instruction seriously. And when I got to the Mountain Goats, I already knew that they were interested in the same things, on a linguistic and thematic level. A demo of ‘Sign of the Crow 2’ was uploaded to the forums with an injunction not to share it more widely which aimed primarily ‘to make dudes who're already gonna do this feel a little guilty about it, because that is how us Catholics roll.’ The song referenced a picture of the Virgin Mary with a pierced heart, a visual trope similar to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. An example of this iconography hung halfway up the staircase of the house I grew up in. My Dad had inherited it from his grandmother in Dublin. In a BBC documentary about Shane MacGowan you can find on YouTube, his family home in Tipperary hosts an almost identical image. So the fact that Darnielle’s songs invoked phrases like ‘the pleasures of the flesh’ and ‘the pleasures of the spirit’ was part of what made me feel so connected to this music in the first place.
What’s harder to determine from here is whether I’d grown up actually hearing words like these from the mouths of Father Malachi - who visited our primary school for the occasional sermon, and slowed down his speech in order to circumvent a stutter - and Father Pat, the priest at St Guthlac’s. I wonder now if I had, in fact, gone seeking out this kind of language, to affirm for myself one of the few things I could point to in a stable way as part of my ‘identity,’ long after I’d moved on to a secular secondary school and church had become something we did only at Christmas and, for a while, Easter. In my first year at Brasenose, I showed a Christian friend a poem which contained a passing reference to ‘monks at vespers,’ and she wondered, reasonably enough, what my intention was in bringing them into the picture. I’d never prayed vespers; I knew nothing about the lives of monks. But in some way, I suppose, I was staking a claim to these references - asserting that they were, as Wallace Stevens wrote about the blackbird, in a poem I first studied that year, ‘Involved/In what I know.’
Because, inevitably, what I knew was changing. For one thing, I had a lot of new people to hang out with, and to try to convert to the gospel of the Mountain Goats. I was no longer living in the middle of nowhere - an active social life was at my fingertips, and I’d rarely turn down the invitation to go out for a drink. Which was fine, for the most part: I wasn’t, like Graham Greene during his student days, drunk almost every hour of every day, though I blacked out a few times and once spent an agonising morning on a library visit holding back the strong urge to vomit in a room full of priceless medieval manuscripts.
But a phrase from one of my first-year tutors has always stuck with me - delivered, I think, at a Fresher’s Week induction session which I shambled into, late and bleary, the worse for wear after some foam party or other the preceding evening: ‘Sometimes I think they’re actually trying to kill you with Fun.’ Here’s a picture that should give some flavour of this frenetic first year. Shiny theatrical coat, red lipstick, gliterring eyeshadow: Solomon in all his glory not arrayed like these.
‘One way you can get really close to God,’ Darnielle told Pitchfork in 2009, ‘is to sin as hard as you can.’ Clearly there are harder ways to sin than whatever I was doing - which might explain why such antics didn’t bring me any closer to Godliness - but as I wrote of Get Lonely, certain experiences are more readily recognisable by the young than others. Darnielle himself commented that ‘When I was young, I only wanted music that was very convulsive and violent.’ In ‘Psalms 40:2’ - the song the Pitchfork quote was addressing - Darnielle’s characters are seeking out ‘the depths of … degradation’ and, in the process, confronting the prospect of God’s mercy, by acting in ways his previous work might well have led you to expect. ‘This is a story about the transcendental romantic joy of desecrating a church with the one you love,’ he told an audience at Lollapalooza in 2011, and its particulars are familiar from the likes of ‘The Recognition Scene,’ which itself described ‘a point in time when everything sacred goes profane.’
We meet two evidently damaged people driving down a long American highway, committing petty crimes and occasionally contemplating something greater than both of them: ‘something written in tall clear letters,’ the Lord’s ‘sign in the sky.’ Placing ‘Psalms’ in the longer tradition of his love songs, John - as his interpretive comments often do - offered an external perspective on the wisdom of the characters’ choices:
The future will be brighter if you stop breaking stuff, no matter how exhilarated it makes you feel in the short term. What is the use, though, in trying to convince our lovers that the road to ecstasy doesn't pass through the valley of total damage? It's not that they want to 'learn the hard way.' It's that they don't want to learn.
You could, I think, apply part of this to the listener’s experience too: the exhilaration, the damage, the destruction, when you’re immersed in them for the space of the song, shine far more brightly than the prospect of the future or any lessons learned. It’s sacrilegiously energising to imagine somebody at once ‘drunk on the spirit’ and ‘high on fumes’ vandalising the schmaltzy Precious Moments Chapel: the thrilling, vicarious danger of a figure running away from a ‘place in ruin[s],’ describing their whole life as a ‘burning fuselage,’ speaks to what Baudelaire, in a phrase Darnielle approvingly quoted, called ‘the shimmer of evil.’ ‘There is a charge to the environment in which violence takes place,’ Darnielle told podcaster John Moe, which can be felt vicariously when any art approaches the excitement and energy of ‘somebody putting a first through a window.’
Music can be - as it was for one of his favourite metal musicians, Erik Rutan - a ‘safe environment’ in which to surface and explore ‘the vast terrain of … anger.’ The characters in ‘Psalms’ are not necessarily violent, angry, or even evil, inasmuch as such terms might be applied to similarly driven or pursued narrators in Darnielle’s earlier work (‘Going to Georgia,’ ‘Baboon’), but their days are still ‘shot through’ with ‘sharp, small shards of shrapnel,’ and the strange sort of shuddering gurgle the singer uses to deliver that last word is an eloquent expression of how it might feel to carry such corrosive energy inside you, constantly on the verge of ‘burst[ing] out.’
This song, then, was a natural entry point to the album for a listener used to looking to the Mountain Goats for a feeling I rarely accessed otherwise: it vibrated with the kind of caustic, tremulous energy which could transport me, if only for a moment, outside and beyond myself. ‘I’ve got to turn it up at least once for people who can't stand it unless it's turned up,’ Darnielle admitted to Pitchfork, and - although newly-electrified and propelled by an increasingly prominent drum part as the singer works his febrile way up to whatever the hell is happening in Kansas - ‘Psalms 40:2’ still represented the version of the Mountain Goats that most of us were mostly used to. It’s interesting in this respect that the band chose this number - in some ways, a supercharged summary of where they were coming from - for their first televised appearance in a 2009 taping of The Colbert Report, rather than one of the quieter new songs which might instead point the way to where they were going.
Early indications of this change in direction could be heard on the self-released Satanic Messiah EP which appeared in 2008. In a recent video, Darnielle presents these recordings as the point when ‘the music begins to become as important as or more important than the lyrics’ in the Mountain Goats’ sound. At home and unable to tour with health problems he feared were self-inflicted, as he told Tone Glow - ‘I thought I fucked up my ear. I wrecked it, it was my instrument. I needed that!’ - the singer tried to break out of ‘feeling sorry for’ himself by ‘randomly’ playing a C major 7 at the piano. Due to ‘the tiny missing notch’ in John’s ‘right ear … reconfiguring the way’ he ‘processed sound,’ these kinds of chords seemed to have a new ‘depth,’ and ‘began to do something inside my skull that they hadn’t done before.’ Along with other jazz-inspired chord extensions featuring 9th and 13th notes (also in evidence on the collaborative Black Pear Tree EP with Kaki King), this sound and texture appealed to him in a ‘synaesthetic’ manner, ‘like a wall of water going up in front of me,’ which opened up a new ‘way to connect with music’ when he needed it most. ‘When you learn to accept something being mellow,’ he observed elsewhere, ‘it’s a great moment in your music-listening life.’
On The Life of the World to Come, Darnielle and his collaborators could now explore this mellower, evolving sound in full band arrangements for the first time, with additional string parts under the direction of Owen Pallett. Some tracks, like ‘Deuteronomy 2:10’ and ‘1 John 4:16’ are still played mostly solo, as achingly sparse and hushed as anything on Get Lonely, though with a warmer and more inviting delivery. ‘Romans 10:9’ and ‘Isaiah 45:23’ feel reasonably foursquare - the latter coming closer than anything on the album to contemporary worship music - while opener ‘1 Samuel 15:23,’ ‘Hebrews 11:40’ and ‘Philippians 3:20-21’ all extend the previous album’s experiments with textural percussion and more varied strumming patterns. ‘Matthew 25:21,’ meanwhile, was Darnielle’s most overtly autobiographical composition since The Sunset Tree.2 Its raw grief and metaphorical flourishes (‘I am an airplane tumbling wing over wing’) are tempered with the writer’s typical eye for grounding details: addresses on envelopes, red tropicana lillies lining the approach to the cancer ward in which his beloved mother-in-law, Nancy Chavanothai - to whom his second novel, Universal Harvester, is dedicated - was ‘dying too young.’
While aspects of the sound were new, the thematic inspiration was not, as Darnielle was keen to remind his listeners. Biblical ideas were ‘a huge part’ of who he was, and is, and he thought they’d been ‘darting around like a fish in [his] songs since at least The Coroner’s Gambit.’ A comment in the same interview dates this engagement back even further: when John references ‘an early song where a guy actually physically yells at the Bible’ he’s talking about ‘The Doll Song,’ an unreleased number which circulates in a 1992 radio session recording. The narrator carries ‘seven little dolls/In a bag,’ fetish objects which seem to cause him more trouble than they’re worth; nonetheless, he’d rather talk to them than the song’s ‘you,’ and this frustrated attitude, in the second verse, transfers to a more familiar subject:
I was reading the Bible
I Corinthians 13
Where Paul talks all about love
But I don't know what he means
Because he says that love is kind
That has not been my experience
So I set the Bible on the kitchen table
And yelled at the Bible until I was no longer able, baby
I'm talking to inanimate objects over you
According to the Annotated Mountain Goats, this is one of six songs to reference that specific chapter of Corinthians: three of them dating from the band’s first decade. In a 2013 forum post, responding to a question about some of his earliest recordings with Franklin Bruno which were, by miraculous accident, appended to a few copies of the Transmissions to Horace cassette, John identifies a lyric in ‘Greasepaint Friday’ - ‘the peace that makes the names get blurred’ - as ‘a Philippians 4:7 reference, pace anybody who thought The Life of the World to Come came out of left field.’ There are allusions to the Psalms in ‘Alpha Gelida,’ to the Nativity in ‘Night of the Mules,’ and a whole ‘Song for Cleomenes’-esque talking blues number from 1992 about the theologian Polycarp of Smyrna’s debate with the Gnostic movement. These are not, I would contend, the sorts of things you are drawn to do if you perceive the Bible as an ‘inanimate object,’ no matter how angry at it you might sometimes be.
For as long as John Darnielle has been writing Mountain Goats songs, the citation of scriptural and liturgical phrases has always been - as it was for Greene - one of the most effective tools in his arsenal for raising the stakes on his characters. But it’s perhaps ‘Stable Boy Song’ - smuggled out in 2002 on a Christmas compilation for a Dutch public radio station, available for download on Jon Nall’s fansite, and never yet played live - which gives the first indication of Darnielle’s spiritually-inclined writing taking on the gentle tenderness he’d go on to display on the likes of ‘Genesis 30:3.’ (Whatever else you might call them, you’d be hard-pressed to characterise most early Mountain Goats narrators as stable boys.)
Observing the lead-up to the Incarnation as experienced by one of the lowliest characters likely to come into contact with the infant Jesus, it expresses simple ideas over simple chords with a ringing sincerity: ‘When you come the world will seem shiny and new … My mom told me that someday someone like you would come to set things right.’ Our narrator engages in tasks of practical service: scrubbing and sweeping the stable in Bethlehem, doing his ‘best to make things nice’ in preparation for the child’s arrival, which will bring with it much greater change - ‘days of light and grace,’ ‘hours of wordless wondrousness.’ At least for the space of the song, it feels like Darnielle really means it. This is a giddy anticipation of salvation, a direct and hopeful dispatch from ‘the times of changing tide,’ after which nothing will ever be the same again.
If these interests - along with their flipside, Darnielle’s no less meaningful attachment to pagans, heretic, and the imagery of the occult - have been present in some form or another since the band’s inception, that’s not surprising given their author’s comments on music itself. ‘God is present in all music, in my opinion,’ he commented to Vulture, noting that ‘you can’t hear’ a gospel choir ‘and not feel some connection to something greater than yourself.’ As such, religion is ‘the bloodline of music,’ from the first notation which aimed to preserve monastic chants: to Darnielle, ‘whatever we want to call divine and music’ are ‘permanently and inextricably bound.’
This has also been his experience of playing with his own band, as he told Spencer Kornhaber during the ‘momentary ripple in the stream’ in which the COVID pandemic prevented them touring: ‘When people gather in space, I think it’s congregational, it’s liturgical, and it’s personal … Even though I’m kind of a hermit, that’s where I get the charge from: the presence of physical bodies in the room, and mine being one of them.’ The congregational dynamics of the Mountain Goats audience, have, of course, been expounded at length by curious journalists over the years, but perhaps at their simplest, they come down to this: a sense of shared participation in a communal enterprise which, to the singer on stage, stretches all the way back to the origins of music. Within that collective body, the extent to which any given fan might share Darnielle’s religious outlook will naturally differ. Certainly, some might share ‘Psalms 40:2’s conviction that ‘he has raised me from the pit’; for others, the pit is just the best place to stand to hear the good rocking tunes. What brings them together, as much as anything, is the fact that for the person at the microphone, the differences between those positions are far less important than their similarities.
NOTE: I wrote this newsletter at home in North Shields, but have ended up editing and uploading it in Antibes, in the South of France, where Graham Greene lived from 1966 until nearly the end of his life. I’m visiting the town for another writing project, and I haven’t had as much time as usual to sort out things like the accompanying playlist, the show notes, and proper academic references for every source I mention, so although the focus of the post is Catholicism, I may have to ask you to ignore the absence of the usual good works and trust that the quotes I’m using all came from somewhere reliable on the basis of sola fide - faith alone. I’ll get the documentation squared off as soon as I can, but for now I just want to get the thing out on time.
*
This week, Richard is getting into some pretty good patisseries, if I’m lucky.
On the theology of the songs themselves, of course, A. K. M. Adam has already done an impressive job.
He hadn’t yet begun discussing the personal references in ‘Wizard Buys A Hat.’
2009: 'Psalms 40:2'