2006: 'Maybe Sprout Wings' cover art

2006: 'Maybe Sprout Wings'

2006: 'Maybe Sprout Wings'

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 What does loneliness sound like? How do you sing it? How do you sing for it? After all, the loneliest people in the whole wide world - as John Darnielle sings on the 2012 Mountain Goats track ‘Harlem Roulette’ - are the ones you’re never going to see again. From context, it seems likely that Darnielle means the dead. The song explores the last night of the young singer Frankie Lymon, who found fame as a teenager and took a fatal heroin overdose at the age of 25 in 1968 - just after a New York studio session which was meant to restart his recording career. One of the songs from that night - ‘Seabreeze,’ the one Darnielle mentions - you can actually hear on YouTube, though not on Spotify. Links like this are unnervingly ephemeral - not hosted by any official source, they could easily disappear at any moment, which only adds to the sense that this is a fragile, ephemeral artefact, drifting away on its own sad tide. There’s a lot of great Mountain Goats songs - songs which have struck people to the core of their being and helped them find the strength to carry on - which only exist on links like this. Ostensibly, ‘Seabreeze’ is about ‘a little town / Where the stars shine bright,’ ‘where a man can find peace and get all he needs.’ It doesn’t sound like that to me. Lymon’s clear, yet wistful vocal has the quality of a siren song, beckoning you along its deceptive doo-wop current towards a place you couldn’t leave if you wanted to. As is often the case with music surrounded by a penumbra of tragedy - I’m thinking here about Nick Drake’s Pink Moon - it’s easy to foreground those emotional qualities after the fact, now the song is charged with what we know about its circumstances. But Darnielle’s invocation of Frankie Lymon - only three songs after the first time the album tells you to ‘Just stay alive’ - is about more than just that New York studio, and what happened after. It’s also about where this music, and the story attached to it, takes him in his own brain. That intersection isn’t made explicit until the bridge, midway through the song, but the connection between Lymon and one solitary listener forty years later is clearly at the heart of it all: ‘And four hours north of Portland, a radio flips on / And some no-one from the future remembers that you’re gone.’ A lot of what makes the Mountain Goats special - or at least, what makes me want to talk about them endlessly - is packed into this short song. That question of memory is a big part of it. What does it mean to remember, and so however briefly, to preserve, an artist who might otherwise be forgotten, through the tentative ‘little mark’ they made? And what about the fugitive fragments of our own lives - where do they go? If not to raise that question, why would ‘some no-one from the future’ - a self-deprecating avatar of Darnielle himself - be mentioning Portland here, when it’s already four hours behind him in the rear-view mirror? Long time listeners to the band would already be aware of the city’s significance to the singer’s art: the nine months Darnielle spent there in 1985-6, in his own words, ‘chasing death,’ and the mingled grief and elation of surviving addiction while losing many of the friends who sustained him through it. Long time listeners to this podcast have heard me talk about that period a fair bit already, though I managed to find out a little more when I travelled to Portland last summer to research this project, where I spent most of the month listening to the Mountain Goats’ 2006 album Get Lonely while trying to write my next episode. As it turned out - obviously - there was far too much there to fit into just one instalment, which accounts in part for the long hiatus I’ve taken. I’ll be talking more about my trip - and specifically about the City Nightclub - in my 2008 instalment on ‘Heretic Pride,’ in two episodes’ time. For today, it’s enough to say that - despite the life-saving experiences of community Darnielle associates with the City - Portland must have been a pretty lonely time. Something in the experience of hearing Frankie Lymon on the radio, as ‘Harlem Roulette’ presents it, put Darnielle in mind of the ‘sad, young, frightened men’ to whom hands reach out from the lonely shadows, and to the time when he himself was one of them. In 2006, I was one of them too, and the new Mountain Goats record - the first to be released since I’d come across the band - was there for me, inviting me to get lonely right along with them.Taken together as a unit, the band name and title promise an experience of committed absorption in one particular emotional state: the Mountain Goats get lonely. The formula echoes Elvis Costello and the Attractions Get Happy!! Franklin Bruno, a collaborator since Darnielle’s college days, who plays on Get Lonely and had recently written a 33 ⅓ guide to a different Costello album, would have ...
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