The best songs by the band The Mountain Goats to listen to while panting on your display easel Pt. 1

Published May 27, 2010

The prolific songwriter John Darnielle has been writing songs almost non-stop since the early 90s. He has amassed a very large collection of over a 1,000 songs on numerous releases. His early work was marked by his use of an old tape cassette recorder in lieu of an actual recording studio. Mostly backed solely by his acoustic guitar and nasal voice, Darnielle wrote numerous songs about fictional characters, Roman emperors, water, Sweden, Aphrodite, and very often, food. It wasn’t until he entered a proper studio and signed to reputable record label 4AD that he began to write about himself. On 2004’s “We Shall All Be Healed” he vaguely detailed his teenage years in California and Washington where he hung out with meth users and dealers and nearly lost his life. On 2005’s “The Sunset Tree” he wrote a song cycle loosely based upon his childhood and abusive stepfather, it met with rave reviews and is considered one of his best works. With so much material it is hard to name just a few songs, so here is a list of the best John Darnielle songs as The Mountain Goats to listen to while painting on your display easel.

“Are you Cleaning Off the Stone?”

This song from one of John’s early cassettes shows the narrator speaking to someone who has come to visit them, softly having a one-sided conversation with them with simple remarks like “they tell me your hair’s gotten much, much longer / I bet it looks nice.” It is only until that final chorus of “Are you cleaning off the stone / that’s a sweet thing to do” does one realize that the narrator is dead and the person he is speaking to is a past lover who is visiting him at the cemetery.

“Grendel’s Mother”

Highlighting a scene from “Beowulf,” Darnielle details the moment with Grendel’s mother, attacks a group of soldiers in revenge for the death of her daughter. The song is from the perspective of Grendel’s mother as she approaches the great hall, ending with the brutal and emotional line, repeated: “I will carry you home in my teeth.”

Alan McGee is a freelance writer from MN.

The best songs by the band The Mountain Goats to listen to while panting on your display easel Pt. 1

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