Lewis Powell

 Yesterday's song was Hatha Hill and today's is Noche Del Guajolote



The first of these is a quieter, more meditative track, while the latter has a bit more zest to it.  They're both fine tracks! The annotations for Hatha Hill are intentionally cryptic, while those for Noche Del Guajolote actually share some details about the genesis of the song.  I think I prefer Noche Del Guajolote, but both songs are pretty solid.

"Song for John Davis" is the song for today:


This song feels like we are getting into a more familiar Mountain Goats sound than a lot of the previous ones have sounded.  I've enjoyed getting to hear the range of songs that we've had so far, even the songs that didn't really do it for me, but it is nice to have the familiar, comfortable sound that I am used to.

 Got behind by a day again. Yesterday's song was Whole Wide World 


Whole Wide World is the more appealing of the two songs to me, but they are both slower more pensive pieces.  Darnielle notes that Wrong! was released on a "weird" 6 song cassette originally, and that he likes weird releases, but only if they are organically weird.  This attitude towards weirdness reminded me of Susan Sontag's "Notes On Camp"; particularly this line:

It's one part of that piece that has stuck with me for a long time, because it concisely captures why certain works are more appealing to me even though they are worse works; the attitude of the author towards the work is important.  Authenticity is important.

The title of the first song reminds me of a better known song with the same name, which shares no other features with Darnielle's song.  I do like the Wreckless Eric track, though, even as the name collision is mostly a distraction from reflecting on Mountain Goats music.

 

There is a fragment of another song at the beginning here, which is present on all the youtube uploads I could find, but which is not present if you go listen to the start of the song at the iTunes store. I don't have the album Sweden, so I can't check to see what's up with that, but I assume it is a weird artifact on all the youtube videos I can find.  Weirdly, the book says the song title is Sept 19 Triple X Love! Love! but all other sources I can find list it as Sept 20.  You may recall there was an earlier song that Darnielle had indicated was mistitled on the official release, but he didn't say anything about a similar issue in these annotations. I did more investigation of what was going on here than was strictly necessary, and yet I have no answers. If I were in an epistolary novel built around journal entries reflecting on this book, these sorts of discrepancies would be a good hook for "something is afoot, and the author of the journal entries gets pulled into the mystery while noticing them".

 Yesterday's song was "The Recognition Scene" and today's is "Third Snow Song"



The first song is titled after the scene in a tragedy where the protagonist sees that they are stuck in a tragedy.  The tone of the song certainly works with that reference. The second song is about Darnielle experiencing actual* cold weather as someone who had grown up chiefly in warmer, sunnier parts of California.

Both songs are nice, but I don't have much to say about either.

*Those of us familiar with winter in places other than Portland, Oregon, may question whether this really constituted "actual cold weather"

 Today we are listening to Pure Heat


Today is another day where I don't have much to say. The annotations are about Darnielle's progress with vocal melodies.

I have been thinking about how to handle travel for this project, and I think for times when I travel, I will probably mostly do a batch post on my return from travel.  Better than trying to bring the large hardcover with me everywhere, or stressing about posting these when I am elsewhere.

 We start the month of February with Alpha Gelida


This is another song in the alpha couple series, though as Darnielle indicates in the annotations, that wouldn't be clear without the title.

I don't have a lot to say about this track or the annotation, so this is a short post Sunday.

 Today we have an Orange Ball of Peace


My comments yesterday turned out to be on the nose for today's song/annotations, as well.  Darnielle says:


This isn't quite an answer to my comments from yesterday, about the truths in the narrative that even Darnielle doesn't know, but it sure seems to be getting at that same point about his writing.

Today’s song is early spring

Today is a “fine song, not many thoughts” day, and I am behind at typing this up. The annotations mostly talk about the repetitive structure of the lyrics, which works well here, and which makes it an effective instance of Mountain Goat minimalism.

 Today we have Song for Tura Satana



Darnielle loves a) elliptical* storytelling, in which you cannot recover the entirety of the narrative from what is in the lyrics, and b) the demise of relationships. I suspect that this is, like, at least 30-40% of his songwriting corpus.  Add in "longing for a place you haven't been" and "fascination with specifics of ancient history", and you are well on your way to the overwhelming majority of his interests.

This is a pretty good track, I think. The annotations are about how he read the story in a magazine, and became fascinated with it, and then wanted to make sure it was preserved for his memory. Somewhat ironically, he notes that he then misremembered a fairly central component of the story (whether Satana was shot or did the shooting) for decades, so, you know, so much for preserving the memory.  Part of the cost of telling stories in a fragmented manner, I guess, but also, no narrator of actual history is ever 100% reliable, really.  This is a pretty substantive divergence, but if you look at the Genius.com annotations for his Song for Cleomenes, you'll see that Darnielle frequently doesn't let truth get in the way of a good song, even in smaller ways (so much for Keats, I guess). 

*I am fairly embarrassed to say that I am pretty sure the word I was searching for, in vain, two weeks ago, was "elliptical".