Mountain Goats Set List From Music Hall of Williamsburg [03.20.08]

Posted at 12:30 PM, March 20, 2008

Because we were born on Sept 15, 1983, here's the set list from last night's Mountain Goats show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. . .

Solo/Acoustic:
Whole Wide World
Jeff Davis County Blues
Color in Your Cheeks
Against Agamemnon
Recognition Scene
I Ain't Livin' Long Like This (Rodney Crowell cover)
Going to Port Washington
One Fine Day (Carole King cover)

Full Band:
Dance Music
Michael Myers Resplendent
Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident
In the Craters of the Moon
Love Love Love
Sept 15, 1983
Lovecraft in Brooklyn

Encore:
No Children
Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton

Second Encore:
Houseguest (Nothing Painted Blue cover)

Live: The Mountain Goats at Webster Hall

Posted by Jesse Jarnow at 11:23 AM, March 19, 2008

The Mountain Goats perform at the Music Hall of Williamsburg tonight. It is sold out.

No drummers here! CREDIT

The Mountain Goats
Webster Hall
March 18th

"Judas!" somebody shouted, half-muffled, from the back of Webster Hall as chief Mountain Goat John Darnielle strutted joyously among smoke machine puffs and twirling lights, carrying a blonde Telecaster and leading a power trio. And if I was mishearing things, somebody definitely should have shouted it. Like Dylan, Darnielle has no reason to believe such an accusation, but that doesn't mean it's not true, either.

"We are a generation that has romanticized self-loathing in hopes that it will get us laid," Darnielle announced, introducing "Autoclave" during the first part of the performance, the Telecaster still waiting in the wings. "We should be ashamed at ourselves about this. This does not entirely invalidate the trope of self-loathing as possible fodder for songs." As on the recently released Heretic Pride, Darnielle was accompanied by longtime bassist Peter Hughes and new drummer Jon Wurster, formerly of Superchunk. Even more than the electric guitar, it is Wurster's presence that is lithely shocking.

Through its 17-year existence—a lifespan that's included numerous albums with drummers—Darnielle's peculiar energy always been the group's undisputed center of gravity. No matter what form the Mountain Goats took on tape, or in what fidelity, one could be reasonably sure that the songs would make ultimate sense rendered by Darnielle and Hughes alone, some unstated contrarian/purist mission about being able to rock harder without drums than with them. Certainly, their incessant touring and rabid live following is a testament to that—their packed appearance at Webster Hall being their biggest Manhattan appearance yet. It is not Wurster's fault that, positioned center stage—Darnielle and Hughes some 25 feet away from one another on either side—he makes the band seem like a parody of themselves, like Nirvana in Ed Sullivan drag a la "Lithium."

Playing naturally and finding an easy pocket in Darnielle's manic strums, Wurster dropped stadium-sized mallet thumps behind 2005's "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod" and an almost atmospheric backbeat to 2006's "New Monster Avenue." But even Wurster's grandest cymbal splashes were no match for those Darnielle has often seemed to imagine as he plays. In the presence of an actual drummer, Darnielle's guitar playing seemed somewhat diminished, as if it had surrendered part of its mission. Mid-set, Hughes and Wurster departed for four songs, but the energy level went unchanged, shifting easily from the typically strident attack of "Genesis 19:1-2" (from 2002's Devil in the Shortwave EP) to a meditative "Have To Explode" (from 2002's Tallahassee, though only recently played live).

All too soon, the rhythm section returned, making literal Darnielle's longtime reggae flirtations on a cover of the Wailers' "Babylon Burning" and his own recent "Sept 15 1983" (about the death of singer Prince Far I). Wurster's presence was nothing if not logical, but it's hard not to yearn for Darnielle and Hughes particular dynamics on numbers like "Love, Love, Love." For all his aesthetic negotiations, though, Darnielle still remained an engaging showman, introducing songs with his pocket fictions. "All you really need is a television and a pencil, with which to mark the days you've stayed in the house, on one or all of the walls," he announced before "In the Craters of the Moon." "This song was written with that pencil."

Even though Wurster's presence dominated uncomfortably, it was a Mountain Goats' show through and through: deep cuts (Sweden's "California Song," with Darnielle acting as guitarless frontman), clever covers (R. Kelly's "The Greatest," maybe not quite as lovely as Bonnie O(+>'s), and—finally—a Mountain Goats' song that genuinely needs drums to exist, 2002's "See America Right," which bottled up and exploded just exactly as it should. John Darnielle has made and broken plenty of rules over his career, dangerous games all, but adding a drummer has made his music as safe as it has ever been. It's a good thing he's still John Darnielle.

PREVIOUSLY
Mike Powell on Heretic Pride
Zach Baron on the Mountain Goats at NYU
Michael D. Ayers has seven questions for John Darnielle

Seven Questions For John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats

Posted by Michael D. Ayers at 11:30 AM, February 13, 2008

Mountain Goats, "Sax Rohmer #1" (MP3)

John Darnielle has been branching out lately. He's avoiding concept albums. He's wrangled producer / songwriter John Vanderslice to help him in the studio. And in one of the weirdest collabs of 2007, he lent his voice to Aesop Rock's None Shall Pass.

Over the last two decades, Darnielle’s band the Mountain Goats has not only garnered endless critical acclaim, but his rather confessional outpourings have inspired its own amount of fessing up, even in this very space. But now the always-literary, consistently prolific John Darnielle returns with his sixteenth release Heretic Pride on February 19th. Darnielle’s distinctly nasal voice is ever present as usual, but there’s almost an upbeat, optimistic feel this time around, even when he’s picking his guitar amidst a soft cello on “San Bernadino.” After exercising those personal demons during We Shall Be Healed, The Sunset Tree and Get Lonely, the obvious choice for subject matter this time around would most definitely be swamp creatures, Michael Myers, and religious oxymoronism.

Let's get down to business.

I noticed that parts of Heretic Pride were recorded in Fairbanks. How'd you end up there? I'm picturing some sort of log-cabin studio. What type of set up was it?

I only wrote some songs in Fairbanks ("In the Craters on the Moon" and "Autoclave"). The whole album was recorded at Prairie Sun in Cotati, California, where both Testament and Tom Waits have recorded. It would be awesome to record in Fairbanks in February though—you would get mighty focused!

I've always noticed and appreciated your frequent choice in rounding up Erik Friedlander to help your last few records. How did you first recognize his work, and develop a relationship with him? And in terms of his musical parts, how are they written? Are you writing them for him, or is it a collaborative effort?

I found out about Erik when Brassland released Maldoror, his improvisations based on Lautreamont. Brassland asked if he could open a show for us in Manhattan, and he did, and I was just blown away by how great he was, and also how cool he seemed in the dressing room—just enjoyed visiting with him. John Vanderslice was on that tour, too, and we knew we'd be making a record together, and I was all, "JV, we should get this guy on the next record, right?" and JV was like "Yes. Yes. Lock it down." And so we set it up.

I don't write parts for people—I think people do their best creative work when you give them all the freedom you can stand to give. So, I tell Erik "Here's the song," and sometimes he'll ask what I'm looking for and I'll say "something staccato and nervous" or "some counterpoint to the vocal melody," but that's as far as my input goes—I like to be surprised by what he comes up with. I'm not a micromanaging kind of collaborator, I'd rather play with people for the most part.

Another inquiry along those same lines: I really enjoyed St Vincent's / Annie Clark's Marry Me record last year; did you write parts with her specifically in mind?

No, we just brought her in because we liked the way she played guitar—again, it's like, "You're such an awesome musician, please put some of your juju powder on my record." I think it was my idea for her to play a descending scale on "Sax Rohmer #1" though, I'll take credit for that!

Your last effort, Get Lonely is a solemn record. But with Heretic Pride’s tendency to have more instrumentation on each song, it feels like a “bigger” album. Were you gunning for a "larger" sound this time around?

Get Lonely sort of willed itself into being—we knew when we went in that the songs were kind of quiet, but we didn't know just how far in that direction they wanted to head. But as the session went on everybody got this feeling that there was something distinct going on and we should just get out of the way and let the record go where it wanted to go. In a sense, Heretic Pride is the same way—I wrote the songs, and we practiced them some, and by the time we were done with the first day's tracking, it was clear that the record was leaning toward a sort of high-spirits-on-fire sort of thing. Once you catch that feeling, yeah, you think maybe some "bigger" arrangements are going to be best. But really a lot of the credit for the bigness is on Jon Wurster, whose drums are so great, and on Scott Solter, who really knows how to record a big drum sound.

One of the oddest songs on Heretic Pride (to me) is "Lovecraft in Brooklyn." [It's a rock song that seems straight-forward until the three-minute mark, wherein we find Darnielle's protagonist buying switchblades, and seemingly fired up about it.] Can you talk about that one a bit?

Yeah, weird evolution on that song. I got the idea for it on an airplane going to Stockholm. I was listening to Eddy Grant's Greatest Hits, and I got the idea to call a song "Eddy Grant T-shirt." That was all there was, the song title. I sort of had this image of somebody wearing an ancient faded T-shirt not for fashion reasons but just to have something to wear—maybe the guy wearing it doesn't even know who Eddy Grant is. So that was the whole idea until I was in my hotel room in Stockholm and couldn't sleep, so I got out my notebook and went to work on the song. Only "Eddy Grant" is hard to say at that tempo, so I changed the Eddy Grant T-shirt to a Marcus Allen jersey. I'm a Raiders fan and Raiders fans have this sort of outlaw image they like to cultivate so that changed the vibe a lot—now I'm thinking about outsiders, people who place themselves apart from others, loners. But not lonely people: just solitary people, maybe. So I thought about how when you've placed yourself outside of everything else, then everything else starts to look distorted or monstrous. And that's what the song's about: aggravated alienation and how it makes the world seem weird and threatening.

Your following is very dedicated, to say the least. My old roommate used to tell me how much she adored you, while simultaneously threatening me with torture/mental anguish if I too didn't become wise to your talents. Knowing such adoration, is there any added pressure when you sit down to write new records?

I wouldn't call it "pressure," no—if you take that angle you wind up writing the same records over and over. I feel, like, really stoked about the way people get super-into my songs; "honor" is kind of a flat word, it's more like: cool! Way, way cool! People are doing with my songs what I do with the songs of the artists I love: really getting inside their skins! So it's not pressure, really it's inspirational. It drives me to write songs people might want to wear on their bodies, if that makes sense.

You're rather prolific in terms of your output, but your work is also consistently substantial. Do you ever get writers block?

I go through times when I don't write much, but I think "writers block" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't believe in it. I think the times when you're "blocked" are transitional times when your inspiration is sort of trying to re-direct you toward the place where you'll eventually end up. Thinking of this state as a "block" is really counterproductive, pernicious even: you're not "blocked," you're on a detour, and maybe the sights aren't as pretty, but they're still really valuable. That's my take, anyway. I mean, if you couldn't actually move your hands to make the pen go across the page, that's a legitimate block. Otherwise, sit down and work!

The Mountain Goats bring their own juju powder to Webster Hall on March 18th and The Music Hall Of Williamsburg on March 19th.

No Context: Mountain Goats at NYU

Posted by Camille Dodero at 10:34 AM, December 3, 2007

No Context

by Zach Baron

The Mountain Goats
NYU Kimmel Center
November 29, 2007

Like so many of the homer fans John Darnielle now makes fun of from stages all across the United States, I’ll cop to an almost pathological aversion to anything made post-4AD, and to an equally Pavlovian fanboy response towards everything pre-. Darnielle knows this phenomenon, among other reasons because he’s as obsessive about records as the next guy chasing Taboo VI ‘cross eBay. Before one song last night, the 4:01-clocking “Tallahassee,” from Tallahassee, the record that marks the dividing line, he joked: “4:01! In the old days that was like 7 songs…”

Anyway this gets embarrassing, as far as public behavior goes. Me, mid-show, post-2002 composition: furious; disgustedly staring at the ground. Me, mid-show, pre-2002 composition: ecstatic; hopping. Generally I am the least stalker-like fan a band will ever obtain but there is the notable exception of the Mountain Goats, about which I develop theories.

One such theory, regarding audience affection, from an earlier draft of this very piece: “…Granted, this particular concert took place at NYU, but I’ve always fretted about the adoration Darnielle’s received in the 4AD era, which in regards to its character is less frantic and pushy and more messianic, which has always led me to worry about the effect being hailed as god might have on a man whose ideal rock show is the one put on by Heart on their Dreamboat Annie tour, etc etc…”

Look, who could argue that he doesn’t deserve it—even deserves the pair of girls who were right in front of me last night, wearing peasant blouses, flared jeans, and open mouths, who professed adoration for Peter Hughes—“I like this guy, whoever he is!” Characters who may well have been torn to pieces by a Mountain Goats crowd, circa ’97.

Again, call my knee-jerk what it is, which is involuntary. In the year that I discovered file-sharing and downloaded 40 different live Mountain Goats bootlegs, occupying my laptop’s tiny hard drive to the detriment of Word documents, pornography, other music, and emails more than three days old, the live-set refrain I inflicted on myself at the rough repeated frequency suggested by home hypnotism tapes was: “As you all know, I don’t write songs about myself.”

Famously this changed. Tallahassee, Darnielle’s trial run for 4AD, was a record about the Mountain Goats’ long-running, long-suffering Alpha couple, vodka-swilling and living near the Florida-Alabama border in decaying house with no children and no future; We Shall All Be Healed and Come, Come to the Sunset Tree and Get Lonely instead introduced a new character, one who’d never once graced any of the 500-odd songs the Mountain Goats had already written, whose name was John Darnielle.

Previously, avoiding the personal had always seemed a way of subtracting the confessional and bathetic stuff from the singer-songwriter paradigm. Writing about other people freed Darnielle up to act out, to identify, and for us to act out, and identify, and there you had it, the two-way street that gave birth to guys like myself who would later basically spit at the floor when Darnielle took a bigger piece of the action for himself.

‘Nuff said though; the new one, due next year, is called Heretic Pride, which is probably all the summary re: Darnielle’s POV necessary. The song “Heretic Pride,” which he previewed last night, is a banger – “old-school jams” is how he described the new record; fanboys take note – and hearing it was only one of many moments that exposed the whole split in the band’s catalogue for what it is—notional not actual.

Funny thing was, NYU was more Mountain Goats double-major fantasy-nerd than it was indie-citizen, slick-orchestrated Mountain Goats. Off tour, Darnielle and Hughes were in town for a one-shot, off-brand show: under-rehearsed, request-ready, off-the-cuff. Darnielle broke strings (“Old days, I used to break a string ever three songs”), did interpolations (from “Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton”: “…and the top three contenders, after weeks of debate, were Satan’s Fingers, and the HOLD STEADY, and the Hospital Bombers…”), and played ancient songs: “Love Cuts the Strings,” “Orange Ball of Hate, “Alpha Incipiens,” etc.

But it was “Dance Music,” from the ostensibly loathsome Sunset Tree, that got me worst, as the two coeds just in front of me began to first suggestively bang hips before in fact banging hips and then banging asses and then full-on grinding, I kid you not. They went to the floor. They came back up. Everyone shouted “I DON’T WANT TO DIE ALONE” and for a second we were all the same fan.