Last December, I went to see the Mountain Goats live in concert.
This had been on my bucket list ever since mid-2020, when I’d happened across a recording of a live performance of the band’s breakout hit, “No Children.” It was the height of the pandemic, and watching that crowded ballroom fervidly sing along to a ballad of marital dysfunction made me realize that I needed more live music in my life. When we get through this, I vowed, I am going to more concerts.
I spent the pandemic solidifying the Mountain Goats, the Decemberists, and the Crane Wives as the new foundations of my music taste (spurred, no doubt, by YouTube and Spotify quietly sorting me into their “white queer indie folk rock” algorithm). I’ve since seen the Crane Wives in concert this past summer, and if I ever catch the Decemberists live, then I’ll have completed the set. The Mountain Goats were the first of the “big three,” and I was excited to get the ball rolling.
Early on, I became aware of two college-age people standing behind me: a short dude and a tall, curly-haired person of indeterminate gender presentation who was eager to share their thoughts after every song. They had correctly identified Darnielle’s habit of singing two verses and then doing an instrumental reprise for almost every song (once you notice it, you can’t stop hearing it in his extensive discography), and were very proud to call it out where they saw it. The dude with them only mumbled the occasional “I guess, yeah” in response.
The thing is, they weren’t wrong. The Mountain Goats have a fervent cult following, but also plenty of haters, and not without reason. John Darnielle’s got a whiny, nasal voice that often strays out of his comfortable range and various idiosyncrasies as a songwriter, including a habit of… creative… choices when it comes to rhyme and meter. If you can’t stand the sound of him, I can’t blame you. But I can blame you for yapping about it during the show!
After two or three songs of this, I realized that everyone around us was also hearing this, but weren’t willing to speak up. (Mountain Goats fans are, as a general rule, very socially awkward.) So I took it on myself to talk, remembering the time my mother had saved the Great American Eclipse of 2017 for our whole viewing area by approaching a truck driver and telling him to turn off his loudly trundling engine. As I turned around, I saw the short dude’s smile light up with self-evident glee.
I would love to read your criticisms on your blog, after the show, but not dictated into my ear.
They shut up for the rest of the show.
Everyone who hears this story always responds with something like: “Jesus Christ, Annabelle, you are so mean. That was brutal.” But I was being honest. I would like to read that person’s first-time review of the Mountain Goats! They have their own unique perspective, and could call my attention to things that I hadn’t noticed about the music. I just wanted to be able to do that on my own time, not concurrent with the concert — which was very fun after that point, and ended with the traditional singalong encore of “No Children.”
That’s sort of the idea behind this blog — or newsletter, or publication, or whatever you want to call it. It’s a place for me to share my observations about art, music, and fiction, and how they make me look at the world and myself in new ways. Just like that curly-haired blabbermouth, if I notice something, I want to share that and work through it to see what we can learn.
Just maybe not during the show.
“Jenny from Thebes,” the 2023 album that the Mountain Goats were promoting at the concert I attended. I bought a T-shirt with the album art on it, but forgot it at the venue. Alas alack.