The Mountain Goats

I was a piano player my whole life, but I just picked up guitar just from being in music for so long.

Yeah, so in 2015, I joined a Mountain Goats ensemble there at the Old Town School.

I was in that for a few sessions, and then I transitioned to a Wilco ensemble.

I played acoustic guitar in the Mountain Goats and then played bass in the Wilco ensemble.

And then I went on to do a Beatles ensemble that I played bass in.

And then through that, with the same instructor, I started doing just a... general, it's called Guitar Forever.

Since the song was playing, I kept the end credits rolling, which I don't often do, while I clicked around some other websites, and I happened to click back just at the moment that the name Robert Thompson rolled across the screen as a member of the movie's production crew.

Just a couple weeks ago, one of our alchemical actors, Neil, a member of our ensemble who you've heard on this show, mentioned that he was a fan of the Mountain Goats, but wasn't listening much anymore because their music is too sad.

Savannah asked if their music was really sad, and I happened to think of one of a couple Mountain Goats songs that is in my thousand-plus liked song list on Spotify.

I couldn't remember the name of the song, but I said they've got a whole song about corpses.

The next day, one of maybe three songs that played on my way to work was the Mountain Goat's Cadaver Sniffing Dog.

Right.

And then there's this song by the Mountain Goats called Picture of My Dress.

It's a song, I think it's about someone who maybe got divorced and is doing a tour with their wedding dress.

It's not explicit.

Right now, I brought a couple with me to New York when I moved.

I have a Mountain Goats tour poster.

All right.

From 2015, from the Beat the Champ tour.

Every time.

Yeah.

I feel like Mountain Goats, you can sit.

Mountain Goats, you

The suggestion that the city that he may have invented or may have witnessed thanks to his inherited illness is somehow an entity in itself, and I got the sense that the family is living on top of this hinted-at structure just below the surface of everything, and yet, despite the allusions to Lovecraft and the uncaring nature of horror, I was still wholly invested in the characters.

OK, I'm going to move on to the second book, which is Universal Harvester by John Daniel of the indie folk band The Mountain Goats.

I heard this on audiobook, narrated by Daniel himself, and it's a multi-part story that jumps between point of view characters and times.

More than once I've seen this book described as folk horror, only for reviewers to say that it's been completely misshelved and it's not horror at all.

Now the second element which is related is about religious cults and indoctrination and people suddenly leaving their families and disappearing off the face of the earth.

Of course this brings us back to the It's really nicely written, I thought, and I liked it enough to probably look for John Darnell's other book called Wolf in a White Van.

Also, John Darnell has since 2017 co-hosted a podcast called I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, which is produced under the Night Vale Presents banner.

So there's a lot to enjoy about both books in their portrayal of pre-millennium life in a rural or suburban area and the opportunities for strangeness and horror.

Like Colin Malloy from The Decembrists wrote a novel about the replacements, Let It Be.

And John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats wrote a novel about...

Black Sabbaths.

Is it volume four? Anyhow, a Black Sabbath album.