Taboo VI: The Homecoming ^{1 2}

"In 1992 my friend Dennis Callaci ran a label called Shrimper, and I had been starting to turn my poems into songs and I thought some of them were pretty good, so I put nine of them on a tape — eight or nine of them on a tape, and I gave it to Dennis, 'cause he had asked, 'Could I hear something?' And the next time I saw him, they had a cover that I had — I had drawn a little fake cover, you know, why wouldn't you do that, you can draw a little picture of a goat and like a brick wall behind him or something, you know and then write some fake liner notes on a typewriter, and give it to Dennis. And the next time I saw it, it was twenty copies of it that he had printed up, and he gave it back to me. And he had added a couple songs. I do not consider them part of the album. They were — it's very clear from the liner notes. That's how it came to pass that my first tape had bonus tracks." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014

"When I wrote and recorded Taboo VI, I had no idea that anyone outside of a few friends would ever hear it; neither did I hope that anyone outside of those friends would ever express any interest in it. A couple of the things on it (Going to Alaska, Eleven Bands, Solomon Revisited, the Hank Williams song) are things I'd stand by if pressed, though I wish I'd've known how to sing better back when they were recorded. While I completely understand the collector's urge, I would offer the following caveat to anyone trying to hunt down Taboo VI: it's not what you think it is. Its successor, the Hound Chronicles, represented an abrupt and total change in direction, and is the stylistic starting point for all that followed. While I can't and wouldn't disown Taboo VI, I'd like to offer this note of caution to those who like the later stuff and are trying to get their hands on my first efforts: you probably won't like it much, and if you pay an inflated price for it, you'll probably feel cheated. Having said that, if you still feel inclined to hunt it down, I do hope that you enjoy it on its own meager terms. It means well and didn't want to hurt anyone. Except for maybe that one guy. I hate that guy." Comment from John Darnielle on Taboo VI: The Homecoming, May 29, 1997

"Tantric lo-fi by a not-so-lapsed Catholic. A suburban Chris Knox. A bottled Barrell, a patchwork of songs lost and found." Catalog description on insert in the Back to the Egg, Asshole Shrimper compilation.

"If I ever reissue that thing, you'll know that I, like, need a new kidney or something." Zoop, Farm Sanctuary, New York, June 17, 2007

"If you never hear that tape, it'll be better for you." Brownie's, New York, April 12, 1998

"'Leave the dead to bury their dead,' as Christ put it -- the world is a better place without Taboo VI fouling its already-polluted air." Heavy Metal, Ephemera, and Popular Culture: A Chat With the Mountain Goats, Space City Rock, Spring 2001

"Good, good, good, good, good. No one should own that. It's not very good." KJHK interview, March 2, 1997. In this same interview, John claimed that he was working on a sequel to Taboo VI which would "answer any questions raised by the predecessor", which hasn't surfaced. ↩

I'm not sure what the origin of the title is — if you do, please email me. Taboo is a pornographic film series which runs from Taboo through Taboo 23 as of 2015, and Taboos 3 through 7 had titles which are very similar to the title of this album. Specifically:

• Taboo 3: The Final Chapter
• Taboo 4: The Younger Generation
• Taboo 5: The Secret
• Taboo 6: The Obsession
• Taboo 7: The Wild And The Innocent

These were released between 1984 and 1989, early enough that John could have based the album title off of them. Given the sexual theme of other aspects of the album, this seems reasonable to me. ↩

Although the Mountain Goats website lists the release as 1991, the insert lists the release as 1992. Further, Tim Adams from Ajax and Three Beads of Sweat (and who also put together the discography that formed the basis of what eventually was listed on the Mountain Goats website) confirms this release chronology:

I got a lot of my "release dates" from looking back at when I received stock at Ajax – not a perfect method, but close enough. Anyway, my comments:

So here's what we've got:
1992
-Taboo VI* – I first stocked this in May '92, but may have originally come out in '91. (I believe that May '92 was the first time I had dealt with Shrimper catalog)
-Hound Chronicles* – first stocked August '92
-Songs for Petronius* – first stocked January '93
1993
-Transmissions to Horace (?) [I'm leaning toward this one] – first stocked July '93
-Chile de Arbol* – I put this out, so I know the release date was 6/28/93
-Hot Garden Stomp* – first stocked October '93
-Philyra* (Cusp of 94?) – first stocked Feb. '94
1994
-Things Get Confusing
In some order:
-Beautiful Rat Sunset* (I suspect this is early b/c it was recorded Summer 93 but vinyl manufacturing takes a while) – first stocked Feb. '94 Why You All? (I have no idea) – first stocked July '94

(The asterisks just label releases which have Bright Mountain Choir listed as contributors.)

Tim Adams. I need research help. Mountain Goats forums, April 26, 2012. Retrieved September 15, 2015.

For more on discography history, see shlack's post as well. ↩

As John explains above, Dennis Callaci added the recordings of I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry and Eleven Bands to the eight songs that John had given to him and therefore never considered them to be part of the album. This was additionally emphasized when John played the whole tape live at the Bottom of the Hill as part of the Twin Inhuman Highway Fiends tour in 2014 with Peter Hughes, as he concluded the tape with Going to Alaska.

Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014. See also Zoop, Farm Sanctuary, New York, June 17, 2007. ↩ ↩² ↩³

Mahayana is a major school of Buddhist thought, with the majority of the world's Buddhists falling under its traditions as of 2015. Contrasted primarily with Theravada, the Mahayana (or "great vehicle") places as the purpose of Buddhist practice not just transcendence of samsara and attainment of Buddhahood, but becoming a bodhisattva, a Buddha who practices to help all sentient beings attain enlightenment. ↩

This question is most similar to the famous Zen koan, Joshu's dog, one of the koans in the 13th century Zen text The Gateless Gate, compiled by the Chinese master Wumen Huikai:

A monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?"
Zhaozhou replied, "Mu."

The koan includes the answer "mu", meaning "nothing" or "nonexistence". The purpose of the koan is to impress upon the student that Buddha-nature should be realized through practice rather than through memorization of dogma. As the Gateless Gate continues:

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature. ↩

"It's a cryptic little song that seems not to actually be about anything. But it's about — it's like one of the first four or five Mountain Goats song ever written, I didn't really know what I was doing, that's kind of the charm of that first cassette, if it has a charm to speak of... So the song is about how I had this real bad blackout when I lived in Portland, I was kind of a mess up there. And I had this blackout where when I came to I didn't know what day it was and I think I had been out for four or five days, but I had in my mind that I had been out for longer than that. So I elected to stay in the house longer until I could figure out what day it was. This was not really too bright, but, so, but I was there for a couple more days, you know, convinced that I didn't have, I was pretty crazy, and you know, and finally I was like, 'Oh, fuck it, I'm going outside.' And I combed my hair and I put on my hat and my sunglasses with[out] which I did not leave the house, and I walked outside and it wasn't cold anymore, as it had been when I had blacked out. And I looked around, and they'd put flowers in the planters in downtown Portland. I was like, it was like the whole world was transformed, and it wasn't my body anymore, because, and that's what the line, 'whose bones are these' is in that song, is because my hip was clicking. It clicked for another 2 years, the hip. That's the end of that story." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 13, 2006. ↩

Sigmund Freud was a 19th – 20th century Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, a theory of psychology which postulated that suppressed urges from forgotten childhood events determine much of human behavior. His tremendous influence on psychology lives on today even though many of this theories were ultimately proven false. ↩ ↩²

This is from Midare Gami by the famous Japanese singer Hibari Misora. The song takes its title from Midaregami, which means "tangled hair", itself a collection of short poems (called a tanka) written by Akiko Yosano in 1901 depicting the sexual awakening of a young Japanese woman. Transliterated into rōmaji, this reads:

... [shiaw]ase o
Inoru on-na no saga kanashi
Tsura ya omota ya waga koi nagara
Oki no se o yuku sokobiki ami no
Fune ni nosetai...

This is from the second stanza of the song. In full, the song goes:

髪の乱れに　手をやれば (Kami no midare ni te o yareba)
赤い蹴出しが　風に舞う (Akai kedashi ga kaze ni mau)
憎や　恋しや　塩屋の岬 (Niku ya koishi ya Shioya no misaki)
投げて届かぬ　想いの糸が (Nagete todokanu omoi no ito ga)
胸にからんで　涙をしぼる (Mune ni karande namida wo shiboru)

すてたお方の　しあわせを (Suteta okata no shiawase o)
祈る女の　性かなし (Inoru on-na no saga kanashi)
辛や　重たや　わが恋ながら (Tsura ya omota ya waga koi nagara)
沖の瀬をゆく　底曳き網の (Oki no se o yuku sokobiki ami no)
舟にのせたい　この片情け (Fune ni nosetai kono kata nasake)

春は二重に　巻いた帯 (Haru ha futae ni maita obi)
三重に巻いても　余る秋 (Mie ni maitemo amaru aki)
暗や　涯てなや　塩屋の岬 (Kura ya hate na ya Shioya no misaki)
見えぬ心を　照らしておくれ (Mienu kokoro o terashite okure)
ひとりぽっちに しないでおくれ (Hitori pocchi ni shinaide okure)

This translates to:

When I extended my hand over the tangling hair
The bright red slip of kimono fled up in the air
Bearing hate and longing at the same time, at Shioya am I now
The mental threads of my heart can't reach him by any means
The threads left in my mind will cause me to shed tears

A woman wishes happiness for the man who dumped her
I feel her woman-nature, rather too sad
Bearing pain and heaviness, this is, though, my love
I wish I could ask the trawling ship on the sea
To load up and carry away this, my one way love

In spring this belt was fastened in two turns
In autumn, surprisingly, it goes, more than three
Bearing gloom and no ending at Shioya am I now
I wish his heart could be lit up by the lighthouse
His image is always on my mind; so don't leave me alone

See the Usenet thread which provided the above transliteration and translation for additional details on the translation.

B. Ito et. al. Big Boss. sci.lang.japan Usenet newsgroup, April 17, 2001. Retrieved September 14, 2015. ↩

Also sung, "New morning, cold comfort". Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 13, 2006. ↩

Sometimes sung, "New morning, world breathing". Nall reports that this is the album lyric but I'm pretty sure what I transcribed as the default is the original lyric — the 's' sound is very clear. WNUR session, April 8, 2002; Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 13, 2006; The Independent, San Francisco, April 7, 2007; Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014. ↩

Also sung, "Portland's living, the city's truly living". Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 13, 2006. ↩

"??? I don't do the rips - I believe in keeping things intact as they are, down with historical revisionism! If Taboo VI does not offend it has failed in its mission!" Mountain Goats forums.Taboo VI Dialogue. January 21, 2009. Retrieved September 15, 2015.

This was posted after John discovered that the copy of Taboo VI that was circulating online had the analingus clips removed. ↩

"There are these samples from some like, you know, book on tape about improving your sex life that I used, 'cause samples were the big thing in the cassette community at that time. And in one of them there's a guy being very candid about how he likes for someone to 'lick his asshole', that's the way he puts it. And he puts it in a very loving voice." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 13, 2006

As John explains above, this seems to be a clip from some sort of sex advice tape, but I've never found the source. If you know what it's from, please contact me! ↩ ↩²

"Oh yeah. Man, this is a song that's easy to sing. It's one of two on the setlist I'm pretty sure have never been played live, 'cause the world wasn't ready for the deep truths I was spitting back then. But if the spirit moves you, if you already know the words, or if you only learn them the first time through, they're not gonna change during the dream pop interlude between verses." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014 ↩

"During the song on the tape, you hear a sound during this section. You may wonder, what is that solo, what is that innovative musical technique that young John has stumbled across? But it was that my mom found me trying to overdub some piano and she came up and started up a conversation, and I tried to wave her off, because I was recording a take, and I didn't want to have to redo it. And so then she picked up a little pig — a toy pig — and began to squeeze it into the microphone." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014 ↩

This Magic Moment is part of the informal series of cover songs. ↩

This Magic Moment is a cover of the famous song written by Doc Pomus and recorded by the Drifters in 1960 and by Jay and the Americans in 1969. ↩

I unfortunately have been unable to either transcribe this dialogue effectively or find its origin. If you can help with either, please let me know! ↩ ↩²

"This song expresses a certain universal human feeling. I'm puzzled to this day as to why it wasn't an international top ten hit making me and Dennis Callaci tycoons." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014 ↩

"This is the first of the Alpha songs, which was the project that gave birth to the Mountain Goats. I was writing these poems called 'Songs from Point Alpha Privative' and, but I was discovering with poems, nobody wanted to read any poems. If you show up with your poems, people like, they're busy, they have a thing to do. But if you're writing poems probably you're like, 'No, I would like some attention for these poems, that's why I write them, because they need attention.' So I started setting them to music. And then they seemed less offensive then to people. So that's where they went. And this was — and then also it opens you up to using a lot more rhyme, because rhyme on the page, people, the people who do want to read poetry don't want to read the stuff that rhymes, whereas the people who listen to songs, which are better than poems, are totally into rhymes. So anyway, so this song is a repeating AAAA rhyme scheme through three stanzas." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014

See also the banter for Going to Alaska.

"The Alpha series is — I think I started titling them that way largely because I was writing so many songs at the time that I needed to keep track of which ones were in the series so I'd know, and that was a nice signal, the Alpha in the title, that it was about this couple. It stemmed originally from a misunderstanding of the term 'alpha privative' which is the 'a' in front of a word that negates: moral, amoral, right. In Latin that's called alpha privative. When I first learned that I was like twenty and I was like, 'Awesome, the letter that negates!', you know. A couple years later I was talking to my Latin teacher about it and he was like, 'Yeah, it just doesn't carry that kind of force, nobody thinks of the term alpha privative as something you know, annihilating stuff.' But I did. So I called the set Songs from Point Alpha Privative. And, so I started writing these Alpha songs to look at, to try and inhabit the divorcing mindset a little bit, maybe to come to grips with the fact that my parents divorced, and to see what thoughts and feelings I had about all that. And then as time passed the characters got more blood and bone on them and I just sort of would play with them, torture them." VPRO session, Zeldzaam Dwars, March 27, 2004

As John says above, an a privative, or α privative, is exactly what he explains it is: the prefix a- or an- which denotes the opposite of the root word. It is used in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and many modern languages. ↩

One Winter at Point Alpha Privative is part of the Alpha couple series and the informal series of Biblical references. ↩

Also sung, "How much should we dance..." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014. ↩

Also sung, "Should we dance, should we listen, should we sing, should we pray". Bottom of the Hill, June 15, 2014. ↩

The lyrics of the second verse, particularly the second and third lines, and parts of the third verse are extremely muffled and maybe not even preserved on the studio recording. These lyrics have been reconstructed both from the original recording on Taboo VI and from the only known studio recording at the Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014. Where any disparity exists, I've transcribed the lyrics of the original.

Notably I disagree with Nall about the first line of the second verse, which he transcribes as "What the hell's going on at the end of the debate". After listening closely to the original and the live version I'm confident that this is instead as I've transcribed.

The live recording switches in a number of places 'we' for 'you' but is otherwise structurally similar, except as noted. ↩

John has changed the emphasis here to "Is there something we can do..." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014. ↩

Sometimes sung, "Every last pair of sneakers..." Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014. ↩

John sometimes changes the colors, for example, to, "All the reds, all the yellows, all the blues, all the greens". Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014. ↩

John: "We used to play this in every set. This was the high point of a Mountain Goats set. This is it. Everything built toward this one."

Peter: "Well, it would be the last song. When I was, when I was first going, when I was first seeing the Mountain Goats, which was what, like, a year after this tape came out? Less, maybe? And every set would end with this song, and everybody there would sing."

John: "'Cause I knew it would kill. I knew they would all love me once they heard about this song... What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in radio."

Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014.

"This was the last song — except that then Dennis put another song, he thought, two songs he thought was good on the tape, right, I was like, well, I can't be bitching out to people who put out my tape, but I was thinking, 'Aw, man, that was supposed to be the last song on the tape! Now what have you done? Now everyone will think the sequence is all messed up when they hear this magnificent tape, Taboo VI: The Homecoming, oh no, oh no! History will not tell the truth about this album.' So, that's why it's being remastered in 128 bits... I used to enjoy playing this when I was opening for people who other people had come to see and, like, pretending like this was the song that actually everybody really came to see, and making them sing it." Zoop, Farm Sanctuary, New York, June 17, 2007

Note that the last song would actually have been Going to Alaska, but John gets it close. ↩

Solomon Revisited is part of the informal series of Biblical references. ↩

In the Bible, Solomon was a 10th century BC king of Israel and the son of David. He built the First Temple in Jerusalem and remains a cultural icon of wisdom and fairness, although he ultimately led to the dissolution of the Kingdom of Israel. ↩

"That was the only mountain goat reference I ever made in a song, by the way. 'Cause mountain goats could climb rocks that are vertical. Now you know the dreadful truth of that line. I apologize." Zoop, Farm Sanctuary, New York, June 17, 2007 ↩

Similarly to No, I Can't, John has occasionally added in his Panasonic to the lyrics, for example, "I've got an AM/FM Panasonic dual cassette radio". Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, June 15, 2014. ↩

"people ask me about 'the creative process'* and here's this song, I'll tell you a little about it: I was living in employee housing in Norwalk. I had been writing poetry since I was 14: about eight years. When you're 22 'since I was fourteen' feels like 'all my life,' or did to me, though time gives one perspective on this feeling. Anyway, I'd gone from free verse crew to meter and rhyme patrol, as many do, and had arrived at a nice synthesis for me, where I was comfortable working in meter but admired writers who could work in variable line-lengths and still have their verse sing: whose poems still felt like verse, like song, which I still felt & feel is the parent tree from which poetry oughtn't fall too far.

"I had written some songs, and I don't know where in the writing of that first batch I did this, but I still consider this the first Mountain Goats song (or second; 'The Pieman' also vies for the title). It began life as a poem, which I'll transcribe below; I'm not 100% sure that I'm getting all the line-stops right, but it's close. (I have consigned as much of my poetry from back then to the trash can as I have been able to lay hands to.) One day I was sitting around with this Hawaiian guitar I'd bought for thirty bucks and a heavy steel slide, bottleneck guitar, and I had a progression I liked and wanted to sing something to it, so I sang that poem, and that's what happened.

"Huge credit to Lewis Turco, whose book I had been studying — when I say 'studying,' I mean 'spending several hours a day with, writing poems and lines in notebooks on the floor of my apartment, doing this to the exclusion of other activity' — the introduction to that book played a huge part in getting me comfortable with rhythm and meter, in getting from the 'ok, yes, technically that's a pentameter line' stage to somewhere near the goal of 'these lines sound natural, and they're also metered.' I was trying, too, to write poems that worked like Browning's Dramatis Personae (and like the stuff in Norman Dubie's Groom Falconer, which was new-ish, and which I was freaking out about): where the narrator, who seems to just be talking, tells you a lot about himself (much of it often not very pretty) and tells a story in the process without actually laying down a clear narrative line: puzzles. I suspect that I submitted this to several poetry journals, who I now thank for rejecting it. It works better with a little guitar.

"*I am allergic to this term though, it's just work, a kind of work, better to think in terms of baking or cooking: what are the ingredients, how much of each, how hot does it gotta get in the room they're put together for things to come out right"

William Caxton Fan Club. fishingboatproceeds: 42 Days of the Mountain... Retrieved September 16, 2015.

"That song was a poem first. I was writing poems, and I had that poem, and I thought, 'Boy, the language in this is pretty decent, this is a nice piece of writing', and then I had this new guitar and I had a slide, a Hawaiian finger covering slide, and I tuned the guitar to a chord, and worked on it, and I thought, you know, that sounds pretty cool, you know. And you can hear the rhythms, the speech rhythms, in a way that you can't looking at it on the page, so I mean I will, I'm sure the performance is kind of rough, I haven't listened to that in a long time, but I do know all the words and I think they're all right." Sound of Young America interview, April 7, 2011

"This song was originally a poem. This is, if not the very first Mountain Goats song — it's not the first one, but I was writing poetry. I was going to be a famous poet. It was gonna be amazing. I was going to remind people how, that they have poetry in their spirits and bodies, that they really enjoy poetry. There was gonna be a thing I was gonna do, and so I was going to poetry readings. Poetry readings will disabuse you of your idea that people are gonna love poetry and it's really gonna inspire them in their minds and their bodies. Because although I love all the poets, every last one of them with everything in me, they are the only people at the poetry readings. So I started putting some of them to music because I liked them and I wanted people to hear them in some way. And this was one that was a poem that I had labored very hard on, and then I bought this cheap guitar that you played with a slide, right, and I tuned it to an open tuning and on the original version that I don't know if anybody's heard it before: weeeerow, wEEEErow, weeerow, just insufferably for two minutes." Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago, April 20, 2014

See also the banter for One Winter at Point Alpha Privative. ↩

Going to Alaska is part of the Going to ... series. ↩

Alaska is the northernmost of the United States, situated partially above the Artic Circle and bordered by the Canadian territories of Yukon and British Columbia. ↩

As mentioned above, John transcribed this in its original poem form. Although its nearly identical, the punctuation and small grammatical changes gives it a distinctly different poetic feeling and thus is worthy of reproduction here:

The jacaranda are wet with color,
and the heat is a great paintbrush, lending color to our lives
and to the air, and to our faces; but I'm going to Alaska,
where there's snow to suck the sound out from the air.

Up, yes, in the branches
the purple blossoms go pale at the edges;
there is moaning in the shifting of the sap, and I see, in them, traces
of last year; but then they hadn't grown so strong,
and their limbs were more like wires. Now they are cables
thick and alive with alien electricity,
and I am going to Alaska, where you can go blind
just by looking at the ground; where fat is eaten by itself
just to keep the body warm.

Because from where we are now, it seems, really,
that everything is growing in a thousand different ways:
that the soil is soaked through with old blood, and with relatives
who were buried here, or close to here, and they are giving rise
to what is happening. Or can you tell me otherwise?
I am going to Alaska, where the animals can kill you,
but they do so in silence, as though if no-one hears them,
then it really won't matter. I am going to Alaska!
They tell me that it's perfect for my purposes.

William Caxton Fan Club. fishingboatproceeds: 42 Days of the Mountain... Retrieved September 16, 2015. ↩

Both of these samples come from an episode of the original 1968 cop drama Hawaii Five-O. The episode, A Touch of Guilt, is the 13th episode in the 8th season (occasionally listed as the 14th due to the first episode being sometimes aired in two parts). The main character, Detective Captain Steve McGarrett, is investigating three football players who raped a waitress. One of the players' father is a powerful US Senator who is attempting to spike the investigation.

These lines take place shortly after each other early in the episode (about 7 minutes in and 10 minutes in, respectively). The first two lines are between Detective Sergeant Daniel "Danno" Williams — McGarrett's sidekick — and McGarrett, where McGarret assigns Danno to the case. The lines at the end of the song are between Alex Scofield, one of the cocky, rapist football players and the senator Anthony Scofield's son, and Hal Zimmerman, Senator Scofield's assistant sent to pin the assault on someone else to divert controversy away from the senator.

Thank you tremendously to Ben Franklin who found this — I never would have figured this out otherwise! ↩ ↩²

Jacaranda are, as described, a tropical flowering plant with purple petals that fade into white stripes. ↩

In the original poem, this read "moaning", not "meaning". John explains, "while tracking the 'studio'/first-tape version of this I misread the line on the page as 'meaning,' and kept it, and I've sung it that way ever since, but this was the actual line in the poem."

William Caxton Fan Club. fishingboatproceeds: 42 Days of the Mountain... Retrieved September 16, 2015. ↩

"young poets are required by law to use the phrase 'the body' often or they get thrown in young poets jail. when you age out of young poets school you get to talk a little less unreasonably and might recast the line as 'where you carry gristle packets / just in case you've gotten lost / and you have to eat, or die.'"

William Caxton Fan Club. fishingboatproceeds: 42 Days of the Mountain... Retrieved September 16, 2015. ↩

"note that I have to mispronounce 'happening' to make it really fit the meter. I judge myself harshly for this, it's something I try to avoid always and everywhere"

William Caxton Fan Club. fishingboatproceeds: 42 Days of the Mountain... Retrieved September 16, 2015. ↩

Asked about the musicians on this song, John replied:

ha I'll field this one - the players are anonymous, it was recorded at a miniature golf course at a "your voice on your favorite songs!" booth - they have generic instrumental tracks and you go into a booth and sing over them. translating as I go is my then-girlfriend Leticia.

Mountain Goats forums. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. July 16, 2009. Retrieved September 16, 2015. ↩

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry is part of the informal series of cover songs. ↩

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry was originally a 1949 country blues song written and sung by Hank Williams, Sr. Since then, it has been extensively covered, with many of those covers charting as high or higher than the original, which itself was already very popular. ↩

A whip-poor-will is an American nocturnal bird in the family of nightjars. It has left a large cultural legacy in folk songs and stories due to its distinctive, sad-sounding song. ↩

The entire song is simultaneously translated into Spanish spoken over John's singing. The translation was done by John's then-girlfriend Leticia. I believe she says the following:

Oye te pájaro solo
Te oye muy azul para volar
El tren de medianoche está pasando muy despacio
Estoy tan solo que puedo llorar

Nunca he mirado una noche tan larga
Cuando el tiempo pasa tan despacio
La luna acaba de pasar detrás de las [nubes]
Está escondiendo la cara está llorando

Has mirado un pájaro pasar tan despacio
Cuando las hojas empiezan a callarse
Eso que significa ha perdido [la voluntad de vivir]
Estoy tan solo que puedo llorar

El silencio de la estrella que caída
Ha luz a el cielo morado
Y luego pienso donde estás
Estoy tan solo de que, que puedo llorar
Estoy tan solo que puedo llorar

Text in brackets contains words that I was unable to hear but assume were intended to be there to complete the sentence. (This was a challenge to transcribe, so please, if you see Spanish errors or heard something different, por favor dígame. I think there may be some errors in the Spanish translation, which I've preserved here, but I could also just have misheard it). The Spanish phrases are nearly a word-for-word translation of the song with some creative license — for example, the third verse says, "Have you seen a bird pass so slowly", among other small changes.

Mountain Goats forums. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. July 16, 2009. Retrieved September 15, 2015. ↩

A robin is an American bird in the thrush family, commonly associated with the onset of spring. ↩

Eleven Bands is part of the informal series of cover songs. ↩

Eleven Bands is a cover of a song by the Congress, a band that John played in prior to the formation of the Mountain Goats. The band included Mark Givens from Wckr Spgt (thanked in numerous releases and referenced in Song for Mark and Joel), Caroline Poynter, Jim Banwell, and Donna Destiny. Eleven Bands was originally released on No Milk Since 1979 on the Cache Cow label in 1991. ↩

I have a number of disagreements with Nall about these lyrics, so consider both if you're having a tough time hearing them (and let me know how you decide). Unfortunately there are no live versions that I am aware of that would allow another method of comparison. ↩