js_thrill | This Year 365 songs: January 2nd (Reply)

Today's song is "Running Away With What Freud Said" another track I had not previously heard. It is the first song off of the Mountain Goats' first cassette (confusingly titled "Taboo VI: The Homecoming"). As you can hear, it has that extreme lo-fi sound:

Watch on YouTube

Here is a live version with slightly different lyrics, but which is a bit easier to hear:

Watch on YouTube

It's a short song, with compact lyrics. I like it better than Alphabetizing, because it has more specificity, but the live version is considerably more listenable for me than the boombox quality youtube audio of the cassette tape version (I have my limits for the lo-fi era).

The annotations talk about it being written originally as poetry during the time when Darnielle was working as a nurse at a psychiatric hospital and being tested regularly for drug use by court order. The title and refrain (such as it is) came from a psychiatrist's call in show where the psychiatrist advised someone not to go running away with what Freud said. Most interesting to me from the annotations is Darnielle's final comment:

I wrote this song as a poem, adhering to some principles then very important to me—compress everything as tightly as possible; if there must be images let them speak for themselves; show don't tell, sure but suggest more than you show—and then I set it to simple music using that guitar, probably with the TV still on, which was very much part of the process most of the time in those early days. (365 songs, p. 6)

This passage reminded me of something I think about a lot, which is two versions of the same poem, written by William Carlos Williams. I first encountered them through a post about the power of compressing one's writing as tightly as possible, and it has stuck with me quite a bit). I recommend that whole post, but I will just juxtapose the two versions of William Carlos William's "The Locust Tree In Flower" here:

The Locust Tree In Flower (1933)

Among
the leaves
bright

green
of wrist-thick
tree

and old
stiff broken
branch

ferncool
swaying
loosely strung —

come May
again
white blossom

clusters
hide
to spill

their sweets
almost
unnoticed

down
and quickly
fall

The Locust Tree In Flower (1935)

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

Those familiar with the Mountain Goats will realize that this extreme compression does not always reign over his lyric writing; in fact, he is somewhat famous for often taking an entire paragraph of text and creatively packing it into a single measure of the music; but it is interesting to see the "keep everything concise" phase early on; honing that skill is really good for knowing when to deploy it, and when to unleash the verbosity.