When he picked up, I was already shouting. I turned the album off, and I called my best friend Bryan. This was hilarious, mysterious, unlike anything I’d ever heard. For my money, “Jenny” has the best punctuation of any song in the catalog, careening giddily into the outro: “Hi diddle dee dee! Goddamn! The pirate’s life for me!”
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In the early days, this overflow of energy often resulted in Darnielle strumming a single chord faster and faster - the driver of a tractor-trailer whose brakes have gone out. The passenger breathes in the scent of their lover’s hair, convinced that “we were the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have his eyes on.” In this moment, all that exists is the two of them and the black and yellow Kawasaki and the horizon and the love hanging thick and sweet between them.ĭarnielle has a tendency to punctuate the ending of his songs with an emphatic “Yeah!” or “Okay!” It seems like it happens whenever he has finished with the lyrics but isn’t done riding the wave of the song’s emotion. It is just a snippet of a scene that implies a whole world around it. But somehow, “Jenny” feels like a feature length film. It begins with a motorcycle headed for a southwestern ranch style house, and the only thing that happens in the rest of the entire song is that another person climbs aboard the Kawaskai and the two roar off together.
The guitar is sparse - Darnielle strums just enough to support the vocal melody - and the events described in the song take place over, like, one single minute. Nothing can replicate the experience of hearing those first two songs, but I will get to that later. That day, I waited until the sun started to set and the Florida heat began to dissipate, and I got into my car with my iPod and no particular destination in mind. The anniversary has given me occasion to think a lot about this album and what it was like to hear it for the first time. I always point people to All Hail West Texas. It can be hard to explain why investing in such a sprawling, quirky catalog is so rewarding. I resisted the urge to do the math for this article - if I was guessing, jar-full-of-jellybeans style, I’d say more than 800 at this point. Whenever a publication covers the Mountain Goats for the first time (or the first time in many years), they love to note which threshold the band has recently crossed: more than 400 songs, more than 600 songs. Since All Hail‘s release in 2002, there have been 14 of these albums.
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In the two decades since its release, it has inspired legions of loyal fans who have followed the Mountain Goats from their lo-fi beginnings into their current form as a full band churning out consistently great, well-produced albums. Tomorrow, All Hail West Texas turns 20 years old. But until now I have not heard All Hail West Texas, the album mentioned over and over in articles and reviews, the album recommended by countless forum posts as the best place to start. It is widely acknowledged that Darnielle’s story-songs aren’t curios or novelties he is writing his ass off, and has been for years and years. He has been profiled (alongside Craig Finn) by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker. I’m not completely unfamiliar with the Mountain Goats at this age: The Sunset Tree has been out for a year or so and “This Year” is quickly establishing a fanbase beyond the community of obsessive forum nerd-types that have rallied around this prolific songwriter’s rough-hewn recordings. If I have nothing far away to do, I can simply slowly circle the city, turning only onto streets I’ve never traveled before, trying to accidentally find a familiar destination on unfamiliar roads. The best way to consume large amounts of music at this point in time is - using whatever combination of legal, quasi-legal, or downright nefarious methods available - to load everything onto a clickwheel iPod and hit the road. Changing the volume requires pressing down on the stereo’s knob with all your might as you turn, which either raises the volume or doesn’t depending on the capricious moods of the Civic. The volume knob on the radio? It does not work either. The passenger side window does not work the air-conditioning, similarly, does not work. I am driving what I believe to be a red 2006 Honda Civic. I am 16 or 17 and I have just heard the song “Jenny” by the Mountain Goats for the first time.
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