to the true believer, everything’s a sign

"Further exposition on the action of the game Odin Sphere (August 2). Much of the game takes place in Hell, really. In this sense, it's less a game than a philosophical essay."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

"A song for Nancy Chavanothai, who was born in 1948 in Sibley, Iowa, and who died on the second day of October 2007, in Ventura, California, surrounded by the family she loved."

"The Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the golden toad are all extinct. People sometimes say they saw a Tasmanian tiger—in their yard, out in the bush, crossing a road. But the last footage of a known Tasmanian tiger was through the bars of the cage in which he died, more than a hundred years ago. You can watch that footage online if you like: It is hard to watch. Say whatever nice things you may about human beings, but the trail of destruction we leave in our wake is littered with blameless beings who were in our way."

"There are several Mountain Goats songs in which the narrator goes back to a house where he used to live, figures out a way to get inside, and then looks around in there, trying to establish some connection between the person he was when he lived there and the person he is now, elsewhere. My explanation for this theme is deeply esoteric and hermetic: It's because I have, on several occasions, gone back to a house where I used to live, figured out a way to get inside, and then looked around in there, trying to establish some connection between the person I was when I lived there and the person I am now, elsewhere, which is to say, here."

"Really, it's a simple song about how, when things are hard, you can locate a point or person in your past and fix your attention there, and then hold on for dear life. It is a hopeful song. But because I'm the guy writing it, I have, of course, set the action inside some nonspecific imperial Rome-like arena, where the narrator expects to be eaten by a wild animal as soon as he's done talking. It looks grim! But in the broader and more personal sense, this narrator seems still to not be done talking, so our wild animals will have to wait a while longer. One bright day, they will be fed, no doubt. But until then!"

"The physical scene being described here is from Black Sunday by Mario Bava (1960), but the song that grows out of these images is one of the most personal things I've ever written—about feeling ownership of my body and my self, about tending to and caring for the things within myself that are soft and good; about growth. It is, therefore, pretty opaque, because I don't have any artistic interest in just speaking these things out plainly. For me the magical transformative power is in the image, and in the transformation of idea into image. I haven't read Jung but I suspect thinking this process through is more his domain than mine. My job is to occasionally write songs where it happens, and to otherwise write songs whose tension resides in a kind of resistance to the whole process."

"This story pretty clearly has its roots in my time working in hospitals and in home care, but it won't surprise you to learn that this is also me: not dying, not hospitalised, but at home, unable to sleep through the night because of a couple of chronic health matters that had descended on my house in 2008 and liked the view well enough to stay. Of all our albums, The Life of the World to Come comes closest to confessional folk, the very genre whose existence led me to call my act the Mountain Goats as a distancing tactic. Sonically it's careful, curated; polite, even, for the most part; but lyrically it's raw like uncooked meat. It was attached to a living creature just a little while before you saw it."

"The chorus refers to Odin Sphere, a game whose intricate plot can fairly be described as "convoluted" but features an arc in which a character finds himself in the netherworld, transformed into a rabbit. One of the game's mechanics is that characters can pick vegetables from the ground, to either eat them or have them cooked into dishes for restoring health. Playing this game one day, I was struck by how this mechanic still applied in Hell, and that grapes require cultivation. As a child of nineties postmodernity I fetishise ambiguities, but being who I am I can seldom fully embrace them: but in this song's narrator, a huckster who is nonetheless protective of his clientele, I approch the ideal."

"The first Bible reference on a Mountain Goats record dates back to Taboo VI, and there'd been several songs along the way whose titles were chapter and verse citations ("Genesis 19:1–2" and "1 Corinthians 13:8–10", just going from memory), but people still seemed a little shocked when the track listing for The Life of the World to Come was announced. All Bible, all the time. In retrospect it would have been an even more aggressive move to call the album All Bible, All the Time, but the whole matter was pretty serious to me back then; I was having a hard time of things, and I couldn't see my way out of the dark, and I did go get a prescription that I never filled. This song is, therefore, fairly autobiographical, and the chorus is meant both as a bitter irony and as an actual cry of hope. "Both are true" is a mast to which I will still be happily tied on the day the ship finally goes down."

"In the song I say "'cause someday, someday", but I have an aversion to abbreviating "because" on the page—almost every instance of "cause" can be replaced in print with "because"—or aloud, for that matter, but in this case no. This may seem a small sticking point, but I think it's actually near the centre of how I think about songs on the page: The page is not the song; it's an echo of the song, or a wobbly mirror of it, or a clarification of its position. They are different, and one is not the other, and for this cause there shall be no 'cause beyond the great cause, viz., learning to walk again when we have been made limbless, which was kind of my situation at the time I wrote the song, cf. the album we'll be looking at next month."

"One of the great cliches of the promotional cycle is a band claiming that they're getting back to their roots, which in our case is hard to do: Our roots are a boom box in an empty apartment. We don't live there any more. But formally and thematically, Heretic Pride is much nearer to the early days than to the albums the preceded it. Images come fast and loose; words packed tight and quivering together like popcorn kernels in oil; image after image after image. It's the rabbit who gives up somewhere by which you can measure the distance from those earlier songs to now. That rabbit seems to have been running for quite some time at this point! Whatever will happen to him? One hates to consider it."

My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.

— H. P. Lovecraft, "He"

"Lovecraft hated Brooklyn for all the wrong reasons—his racism was septic, it teemed within him—but the image of a guy who finds himself alone and paranoid in a Red Hook apartment in 1925, his wife having hightailed it to Ohio not from estrangement but for work, that's the good old Mountain Goats vintage source text material right there. A guy waiting for his chances to improve, learning on the fly about how chance really works."

"Two things: First, this is kind of a riff on "Dover Beach", right? I think you could go through my extended body of work and find a pretty decent handful of things that are versions of, or responses to, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"; second, "the great fire" is specifically the 1965 MGM studio fire, about which I should probably write a novel, but, knowing me, it will instead be a chapbook of poems that lives on my hard drive but only two people know about from screenshots I very occasionally and quite excitedly send them of the poems themselves, often in the middle of the night. The hard drive dies with me and the poems vanish into the ether. It's nature's way!"