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Here it is, fall, blown in to mess the map I just now drew. The streets got wet and the light’s gone grey, the shade that softens faces but sharpens lines: branch, curb, inter-sect, intro-spect? Let’s start over. The autumn fills me with myself but loses me in the woods; now that late light comes early, I know how to look, but not where. Coat & boot & this new knit hat, they’re bolder at the borders than just this summer’s skin - they keep me in, and push you out, and thank God. Let real cold shoulders renew these sleepy survival instincts.
And so, all hands tucked elsewhere, my winter guide’s again just headphones; mandolins that crescendo and conjure haybeds in snow drifts, voices that burn wet cedar like a signal, in the dark:
I am alone, out here. But I can warm myself.
Those first stretches of morning after a long night, you know them – it’s quiet outside, the kind of peaceful that soothes and then turns sad. What I’d give on these days of mine to amble like Kris Kristofferson or Johnny Cash, nursing tobacco stains and a wounded outlaw soul. Me, I wear the boots but skip the beer for lack of mettle.
This strained and breaking cover by Phosphorescent seems a salve to us less-than-rebel souls, for our lonely Sunday side-walks in skinny-leg pants.
A clock-measured 2:00AM won't appear longer than neighboring hours; but in practice, it's the one with power to grow, to stretch and loop, ignited by small bad thoughts. It's waker's choice - need to mow the lawn, leave her, tell them all the truth? Sift it through. Gather up records & vices for the dark duration, but be careful when pleading for passage; heed instead this Zopilote Machine warning: there are worse things to lose than sleep.
Because when the fucking sun comes up, yeah, morning sounds alot like "Alpha Incipiens." This is John Darnielle's Southern California, but it's yours, too, when you've felt how the daylight you sought turns a sudden broomstick to your windpipe. The first Mountain Goats LP tells only of daytime's beating and bleaching, pounding it out in strident strums. Christ, the things that make hearts bleat for shade. Now 14 years old, Zopilote Machine suggests it was the songwriter's gift from the get-go to tell the tiny torturing truths of waking life. No more of this coffee house crap about night-blossoming pain, Darnielle can't give day that kind of break, and why should he? What's day ever really done for you?
On this early album, the sun and its high-noon companions (say the Zopilote itself, a desert vulture) blasts into all of the cracks that the Mountain Goats will later probe with defter fingers. The furnace of "Orange Ball of Love" and "Orange Ball of Hate" melts and halts and shines down on the powerlessness of youth, the ticking clock ugliness of intimacy, and the shuddering loss of both. It's all here, but the knowing's just the half; Darnielle's whole, forgiving truth, is that the humans in this muck aren't the pieces, they're the paste. The LP and those to follow show us the authentic specifics of this sun-lit world, and we're the best of it - showing up to these dawns, fighting towards twilight, and carrying one another home.
Comments
"the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you"
:-)
Every night I yearn for night to never end. I know this cannot be, but I believe in my ability to carry the night forward if only within myself. This never works, however. But I soon pledge myself to the task again.
Comments
I am such a sucker for those tortured sounding voices...this is amazing!!!!
thanks for this also, have been missing your posts.
this is a great version. ohhh, i miss catching the smell of someone's frying chicken( this could be one of the strangest, great lines of all time)