#3 - How Long Til the Snake Devours Its Tail?
The Mountain Goats' Songs for Pierre Chuvin (#1 - Present)
(This is the first of a three part series on what I think were a few of the most important records of last year, under the theme Past, Present and Future. This one is Present. If you like it, why not subscribe and see how this all shakes out?)
The Mountain Goats released Songs For Pierre Chuvin on April 10 of last year. The world had been in lockdown for perhaps a month. Tour cancelled and needing to pay the small collection of professionals that depend on the band for their livelihood, John Darnielle produced a ten track tape in quickfire order. These songs are hard, sharp diamonds, most two or three minutes long and recorded straight to an ailing Panasonic boombox, the first record of this type since 2002’s All Hail West Texas. A band that had been growing more musically complex for three decades was sent back in time. The pandemic reassembled our lives, took some of our privileges, and made redundant some of our learning. Gates clatter shut, boundaries appear where there were none. Darnielle found something to say about the unfolding crisis in the stories of the book he was reading, French historian Pierre Chuvin’s 1990 A Chronicle of the Last Pagans.
There was something providential about the release. A few videos went up of songs in progress, but the whole process took only weeks. Darnielle worked with an inspired fury that you would imagine comes less frequently after you turn 40 and stop doing uppers. The Mountain Goats’ music has always been religious, in an old testament sort of way. Over thirty years the small benign cult of TMG followers has gradually expanded, and fans tend to become superfans. You start off listening to This Year and before you know it you’re embroiled in intricate arguments over the sacred texts, the meaning of the obscure codices.
(From Series “Reusable Photos From a City Under Lockdown” April 2020, Jack Sheehan)
Comes a time, comes a plague, comes a divine bolt of inspiration. The suddenness of its appearance, the unfiltered sediment of the medium coming through your headphones, it all make it feel as if Darnielle was just passing on a message from somewhere else. There seems no other time that something like this could have appeared that wouldn't feel artificial, arbitrary. Darnielle has spent three decades getting better at his instruments, adding more band members, becoming more collaborator than auteur. His fascination with the complexities of music and love of constant learning has made the work ever more polished and intricate. John Wurster, Peter Hughes and Matt Douglas are talented artists in their own right, and latter day Mountain Goats has tended to foreground their work. From one man hammering an acoustic guitar and redlining his primitive recording device to a whole album without guitars, a mock-opera about Goths called, as you’d imagine, Goths.
Since the first time he stepped into a recording studio there have been fans who would really love him to step out, thank you very much. Not me, I came to the music far, far too late to be a purist. I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to Hot Garden Stomp all the way through, but I don’t want to live in a world where Pale Green Things doesn’t exist. You can’t go home again, you can’t pretend to be an angry young man who will not wait to learn his instruments before getting out the things in his heart and his head. And there are few things worse to listen to the results of an unsuccessful attempt. Bruce Springsteen, going through the fallow early 90s, no longer a desperate vagabond and denied even the subject matter of a failing romance, sang It’s a sad funny ending when you find yourself pretending/A rich man in a poor man’s shirt. The same year he wrote a song about having too many channels on your TV.
The Panasonic RX FT-500 has a mythic place in Mountain Goats lore, the rolling hum as much an instrument on tapes up until All Hail West Texas as anything else was. It stopped working in the early 2000s, but Darnielle discovered you could get it to play nice if you stood it on its end. You can always repurpose an old idol if you play around with it a little. All your fine fine columns/Poking up through the pond scum/We will have uses for these things/When we come. The subject of these new songs is ostensibly the last days of the pagans of Europe. It’s the fifth century AD, the old religion is dying, a new one advances across the land like a cloud of locusts, casting aside what it can’t devour and repurpose. John Darnielle is a good Christian man, but his sympathies lie with the pagans. If not quite ripped from the headlines, the album feels like the product of cabin fever dreams, a restless night after endless days of consuming too much rolling news and too many stories of heresies and heretics and high priests reaching the end of the line.
Darnielle seems to be reckoning with living in a time of defeat. The two great liberatory electoral projects of the English-speaking world in the last five years have both been put to the sword. A defeat means a reckoning within any movement. Some fraying will happen, a splintering perhaps, as people lose faith, disagree about the path forward, even repudiate their beliefs. To plan for your future is to believe that you have one. A plan for a shared future is an acknowledgement of shared purpose and shared solidarity. This loss came at the worst time imaginable: in the face of a disease that makes in person mourning near-impossible and even discussion restricted to the savage and alienating rhythms of the online world.
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Songs for Pierre Chuvin is full of hard, bitter solace. Rough blankets to keep the warmth in for a long winter. The bracing drink is laced with a dash of nostalgia to make it go down easier, to banish the despair. Just enough sentiment, just enough indulgence. The echoes of the old stuff, the first few bars of each song that make us feel, just for a second, that the glory days are still here. There are treasures to be found for the die-hard, innumerable treasures. A sequel to a beloved rarity, the fourteenth song on an album released in 1994. Dozens of intertextual references to his own songs, Bon Iver songs, Pavement songs, whatever songs might be rolling back and forth across your addled brain as you try to make it from morning to night and morning again.
It’s as if he went back in time and gave the wisdom of age to a furious young man. But this is Darnielle after decades of experience. Every song hits, every line kills. It’s hard to imagine a passage like this without the layered irony of a musician who found Jesus, and wrote a whole album with bible references as song titles:
Notch some wins, take some losses
Be nice to the guys who wear necklaces with crosses
They will stab you in the back
You gotta turn the other cheek
You gotta learn to love Jesus
So to speak
The tape taken together is a love letter to things that seem defeated, sympathy for the soon to be extinct. One summer/Then all of this is gone/One more summer/Then no more swan. but more than that. It is a plea to keep faith, to hold on to those around you and the ideals you were once so sure of that are taking a beating in this storm. Protect yourself/Vouch for every member of the team/This is just a momentary ripple in the stream. In our defeat we are denied even the comfort of others, of a raised drink in a crowded pub and a hoarse rendition of an old song. Alone, the doubts creep in. Everybody knows these days can’t last. Everybody knows there’s nothing left in the tank. But it seems like it’s been Late Capitalism for a very long time now. How long ‘til the snake devours its tail?/Longer than we think.
No easy outs, no simple answers, no taking away the pain. But a few songs to stiffen the spine. A broadcast from the mountains to let you know that help will come eventually.
Political music, at its best, is less didactic than harmonizing. It does not ask you to dissolve your doubts or to show no fear, only that you still both for a few minutes. It subsumes the rancour and disagreement into a familiar song, full of short affirmations of faith. We shall overcome some day. As he died to make men holy let us live to make men free. It reminds the listener, better yet, the chorus, that we are here for a reason. That it is not about the atomised individual, but the whole world.
The ending is an old mantra, an affirmation of the Mountain Goats line that belongs to tens of thousands of sick and struggling people. Go to the YouTube video for 2004’s This Year and read the comments. It is thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people’s “song”. I got a diagnosis last month. I’m gonna be listening to this next year. People with cancer, with depression, with heartbreak and pain. Anyone else listening to this on New Years Eve? We made it. Latter day Mountain Goats songs resolve often into a simple list of affirmations, or perhaps instructions. Lie in wait/By the gleaming city gate/Try not to lose sight of the mission. Take note of what will be gone in the blink of an eye. Say your prayers to whomever you call out to in the night. And that line that has stuck for fifteen years now comes back to play us out.
Make it through this year
If it kills us outright
Extras/Would Recommend
Reading: “The Lottery and Other Stories” - Shirley Jackson - 1949
Listening: “For Those I Love” - For Those I Love - 2020/2021
Watching: “Secret Honour” - Dir. Robert Altman - 1984
How would you relate the Mountain Goats to Secret Honor? I love both so much and love when others feel the same (obviously you could say they are both about an almost manic older man yelling into a tape about the days when he was younger but I dont particularly feel like you gave that recommendation to relate John Darnielle to Nixon (I might be more compelled to say that Secret Honor and Pierre Chuvin are Philip Baker Hall's and John Darnielle's best performances)).