Tonight’s selections from The Mountain Goats’ tenth full length, 2002’s All Hail West Texas.
All Hail West Texas is a lonely album, a product of idle time and summer boredom recorded alone, quickly, in an empty house. John Darnielle wrote most of the lyrics in the margins of the stapled, mimeographed handouts given to him in the orientation sessions at his new health-care job in Ames, Iowa. It was 1999. Every day he’d come home at three to an empty house, dishes crowding the sink (his wife was away at hockey camp) and pass the solitary evenings leafing through his handouts and editing the day’s work. When a melody came to him, he’d grab his guitar, mute the TV and hit the red button on a dying, decade-old boombox that had documented hundreds of similarly fractured, bleating folk songs since he began recording as the Mountain Goats in 1991.
There were obstacles to recording this way-- sometimes the tape ran out mid-song, very occasionally the phone rang-- and once they were resolved, the composition in question had sometimes already fallen out of Darnielle’s favor. “In those days, a song got exactly one day in which to either resolve its issues or be cast forth from the company of its brethren,” he writes in the reissue’s liner notes. The lucky survivors, though, have a palpable immediacy. Most of the takes you hear on All Hail West Texas were recorded within hours (or, when the juices were really flowing, minutes) of being written. — Pitchfork
The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton
After work, he reached for his guitar and spilled the tunelets in his head to an old cassette recorder, the Panasonic RX-FT500. The machine was more than a little worse-for-wear; as he recalls in the vinyl reissue liner notes, “the designers hadn’t thought to situate the actual moving parts (that is, the gears) as far as cosmetically possible from this unusually sensitive microphone.” The result was a low, grinding whirr in the background of every track.
Another songwriter might have looked for a way around the nuisance, but Darnielle heard something more. In the liner notes of the vinyl reissue, he’s explicit on this element’s importance for the album’s mood, going so far as to call it “a painfully raw sound that can legitimately be thought of as a second performer on these otherwise unaccompanied recordings.” There’s a romantic appeal here, too: supposedly, when it came time to start recording, the FT500 somehow started working again after being completely out of commission. “Its inexplicable self-originating will to go on echoes some of the boneheaded ideas that motivate the people who populate these little songs,” says Darnielle. This uniquely perfect marriage of form and content is inseparable from the legacy of All Hail West Texas.
Over the FT500’s wheel-grind, Darnielle gives us 14 interlocking vignettes of “seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.” Speculating on which of these characters pop up in which songs is one of the albums many pleasures (is that the disgraced football player from “Fall of the Star High School Running Back” traveling after three nights in jail in “Jeff Davis County Blues”? Who’s exchanging those postcards in “Source Decay”—could it be the dreamers Jeff and Cyrus of “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton”?) — Treblezine
Fall of the Star High School Running Back (with a LONG intro on local politics)
What makes John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats almost unique among contemporary songwriters is that he is one of the very few whose lyrics, when written out on paper, are not just song words they’re also rather good prose. And among all of his albums All Hail West Texas, the last of The Mountain Goats truly lo-fi output, recorded in the basement on Darnielle’s Panasonic Boombox and now reissued in a remastered and expanded version by Merge Records, is one of the prosiest. [...]
What raises All Hail above the merely glum and depressing is Darnielle’s knack for incorporating the textures of everyday speech into his songs while delivering remarkable levels of emotional and physical detail. The songs are reminiscent at times of the storytelling style of Haruki Murakami, elliptical, obscure but always intriguing. I’m thinking here particularly of After The Quake – a collection made up of stories connected only by the characters peripheral involvement in the aftermath of Kobe. On this album the bad things that happen to one character seem to spill over into the lives of others, almost without anyone realising.
It all seems at times to deliberately defy conventional song writing wisdom. These are songs with an untrustworthy narrator who clearly has a point that he is determined to make, which he spells out very carefully. — Louder Than War
Fault Lines
Across its 14 tracks, Darnielle constructs his small version of West Texas, and if some characters reappear, it’s only incidental. Yes, the “Japanese bike” bought by the dommed high schooler in “Fall of the Star High School Running Back” is probably the “new Kawasaki / all yellow and black” that pulls up in “Jenny”, with the narrator’s celebration of their lack of “outstanding warrants for [their] arrest”. But this is not something Darnielle lingers on or delivers with a knowing wink. [...]
Ultimately though, Darnielle finishes West Texas with a message of hope. Closer “Absolute Lithops Effect” is, as he’s affectionately explained many times, named after a plant that disguises itself as a rock to avoid being eaten. Therefore, it’s something that “seems non-living but is secretly alive”. The track’s narrator could be Jeff, Cyrus, or any other characters that appeared across the previous 13 songs. It doesn’t matter. Again, a clear, central emotion drives the track: the determination to get up and “find the exit” from whatever situation the narrator has found themselves in.
The listener, not tied down by any strict narrative, is left to imagine the characters in “Fault Lines”, “Balance”, or “The Mess Inside”, finally leaving their doomed relationship. Likewise, they perceive the fallen “High School Running Back” being released from prison, just like they’re free to picture what kind of Satanic revenge Jeff and Cyrus eventually took. — Pop Matters
Jenny
If you were to make a Venn diagram of fans of the Mountain Goats and people with a complicated relationship to the concept of home, you might as well draw a circle. Though all of us have unique personal connections to the band, one of the constants among Mountain Goats fans is that each one of us has, in some way, found a home in their music, however fleeting that may be.
The first time I saw The Mountain Goats live was almost four years ago, during my sophomore year of college. It had been a tumultuous spring semester, to say the least. I’d gotten caught up in my friends’ infighting and said things I regretted in an attempt to protect the reputation of someone who didn’t deserve my loyalty. I felt as though all my peers had found some sense of academic and professional direction that I couldn’t seem to attain. My childhood cat had recently been put down while I was away at school and unable to properly say goodbye. I was just starting to process traumas that I’d spent months, even years repressing, believing that if I pretended hard enough that these things hadn’t happened, it would eventually become the truth.
For a couple of hours, a venue located inconspicuously in an Upstate New York strip mall became a sanctuary. With the second encore came a moment I’ll never forget. During a slowed-down rendition of Transcendental Youth’s penultimate track, “Spent Gladiator 2,” I locked eyes with John Darnielle from the back of the darkened concert hall as he sang the words, “just stay alive/stay forever alive.” His words have stayed with me ever since, their meaning evolving alongside my own growth. Sometimes it’s a command, sometimes a mantra. Sometimes a plea, sometimes a prayer. Whatever shape it takes, it’s a promise I’ve made to John and to myself.
At its core, All Hail West Texas– and The Mountain Goats’ music as a whole –is about staying alive. John Darnielle’s characters are flawed, but what makes him such a compelling storyteller is that he doesn’t judge them for trying to survive. These are songs about doing the best you can with what you have. Darnielle isn’t here to show us the way out of whatever darkness is plaguing us, but he can remind us that a way out exists. — Swim Into the Sound
Pink and Blue
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Absolute Lithops Effect
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Jessica Williams, Mark Rober, Wolf Alice, guest host Tiffany Haddish
Jimmy Fallon: Russell Wilson, Lola Tung, Gavin Casalegno, Christopher Briney, Clipse (R 7/15/25)
Stephen Colbert: William Shatner, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Doobie Brothers, Evie McGee Colbert (R 6/9/25)
Seth Meyers: Peter Dinklage, Jerrod Carmichael (R 7/21/25)
After Midnight: Gillian Jacobs, Chris Fleming, Alaska 5000 (R 7/17/24)
