to the true believer, everything’s a sign

"Henry McCarty was born in New York City in either September or November of 1859; his younger brother, Joseph, in 1863. When their father died, his mother, Catherine, moved, with her sons, to Indianapolis. There she met William Antrim; in 1870, they all moved together to Wichita. Antrim and McCarty were married three years later. By this time they resided in the New Mexico Territory, in Santa Fe. A year later, she contracted tuberculosis and died. William didn't stick around to see what would become of the kids.

In the short span of Henry's life he'd moved all the way across the country, and now he was an orphan. He's known as Billy the Kid in the popular imagination, and only one photograph of him survives, though a second disputed image surfaced in 2010. In any case, he did not live to see twenty-two. This song visits him for the second time in my catalog. Lots of us find trouble to get into when we are young. But few of us do so in such a way that our names live on forever, even when the known details of our lives are murky, and uncertain, and contradictory. Of those few, even fewer succeed in largely vanishing into the icon they've left behind."

the mountain goats, protein source of the future...now! (1999, ajax records)

"The piano in this one, recorded by Scott Solter at New York's Mission Sound, sounds unbelievably good; as a ballad of longing, I like the song, too. But there were already two piano ballads on the second side of All Eternals Deck, and both of them were more complex, lyrically and musically, and side two is where you have the luxury of complexity. On side one you bang the drum, and then on side two, as a reward, you get to complicate things. You know the phrase "I don't make the rules"? It doesn't apply here, because I made this rule."

"This was written for All Eternals Deck but is too pious to live there. The All Eternals Deck is thirteen face cards and all of them are people. This song is about God. There is no God card in the All Eternals Deck. Everybody knows this."

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

"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."