john darnielle

A Week With The Mountain Goats' "Get Lonely": Day 3

28 August 2006
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
Be ready and willing to suspend any gleeful thoughts that you may having circulating through your person when you get into the creamy middle of “Get Lonely.” Now’s not the time for a hot fudge sundae or a fondness for anything, this is when we put on our serious faces, ones just right for the funeral parlor or the emergency room. Though nothing on the album is quite so grave, the asking price for even the faintest bit of optimism must have been more than head Goat John Darnielle was willing to shell out. But then again, it’s particularly moving when someone’s all in. It’s particularly warming when the agrieved are buried by it, when there’s no slushing or slurring of signals. Is it or is it not phenomenally arch when we can be taken for a trip right into the blackest rain clouds, with a visibility that wouldn’t allow you to see your hand were you to hold it out in front of your face, an inch from your eyes. We don’t need the variance. We don’t need the curtsy of providing us with some sunshinier moments to go with our depression. We don’t need that kind of factitious, glamourized soft landing. “Moon Over Goldsboro” is a grand example of the general mood of the album, a pessimistic tone overshadows every aspect and it begins with a solemn line about it being football season again (sounds like a bad thing in Darnielle’s opinion) and the city he’s returned to being dead and his heart being barren. This city of Goldsboro seems full of dirtied memories that may have been better left forgotten. He sings, “And as I was crossing our doorstep/I hesitated just a moment there/Remember the day we moved into our small/Til the vision got too vivid to bear.” Later, he even turns on himself (though there’s a feeling that the contemption was there all along), “And a guy with any kind of courage/Would stop to think the matter through/Maybe hold you still and raise the question instead of blinding holding onto you/But we crank up the heat and you giggle and moan/Spend all night in the company of ghosts/Always wake up alone.” You can’t help wanting to just go drink this one off with him.

The Mountain Goats

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