the Mountain Goats // Beat the Devil
hauling peanut butter crank through arizona,
gotta keep the glow stick babies fat and happy.
cactus standing taller than goliath,
all the vultures come directly at me.
we stash it in between some bales of lumber,
on flatbeds coming in from colorado.
i don’t know what you’re doing back in memphis
all winter you’ve been incommunicado.
take a picture, do it fast.
for the good times,
for the good times that won’t last.
hot sun peels the paint down to the primer,
overheating engine spits and whines.
try to keep our minds on what we’re doing,
try to keep the wheels between the lines.
the feeling when the cop car flips its lights on
the near electric tension crackling here inside the truck,
the lack of any word from you in memphis
the sounds of someone running out of luck.
take a picture, do it fast.
for the good times,
for the good times that won’t last.APRIL 16TH, 2013
The Mountain Goats - Liza Forever Minnelli (live on KEXP, 03/29/2011)
Woah, this is one of the coolest things ever! I have a song on it along with lots of my favorite bands around!
Big thanks to Andrew Lips for putting this all together.
http://andrewlips.bandcamp.com/album/birthday-songs-the-mountain-goats-covers-compilation-v-1
This rules, it is pay-what-you-want and any money goes to Farm Sanctuary, check it out!
the Mountain Goats // Counting Song for Bitter Children
One, two
I don’t love you
Three, four
Anymore
One, three
Stay away from me
Five, seven
Good children get nothing
Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na na na na
one, two, two and a half
Stick around here, don’t make me laugh
Two and a half, three, four point five
A new day’s dawning and my hours arrive
one, two
I got things to do
one, three
I got people to see, I got people who wanna see me
Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na na na naMARCH 29TH, 2013
“ But I’m talking about the Satan who drives you to do things that are bad that you don’t feel proud about, that you spend some dark times with yourself going ‘well, right now I seem to kind of be worshipping the devil,” right. And you don’t realize it at first, it’s after you’ve been living four or five months in your condition when you say ‘oh, I’m really not in the best shape I’ve ever been in my whole life, I’m kind of wrapped up in shame and guilt but this seems to be how I live now’ and you make a little pact with the darkness inside of you and you say ‘if I can, if I can be with you this long, can I leave at some point?’ And then when you do, you remember it with fear and trembling.
— John Darnielle w/r/t In Memory of Satan (via vizwrtsic)
Back in 2006 when we shot the Woke Up New music video for the Mountain Goats, I wanted to also make something for my favorite song on the album, “Wild Sage.” So I shot John Darnielle singing the song in front of a black background, turned the footage black and white and high contrast, and printed out every frame of it on 8x10 paper. I then took these stacks of paper to Cape Cod and began to animate them as stills, shooting with my Canon 5D. It took much longer than I thought, and my vacation was over before the video was shot, so I took them back to NYC intending to finish the video there. I never did. So this is all there is.
The printouts somehow ended up in my cousin Nathan’s possession, and seven years later he found them stacked in a box and asked me what these thousands of bizarre photos of John Darnielle’s face were for.
And I said “oh yeah, that thing. I should upload it to Vimeo or something.”
John Darnielle has written a boatload of amazing songs over the course of his 14-album career in The Mountain Goats, but few are held in higher esteem than “This Year.” Watch Darnielle and his band perform it live with brass accompaniment for opbmusic in Portland.
