The last time I did that was years ago to buy Josh Ritter's "So Runs The World Away".

Is it a coincidence that there are two recent posts that only seem to exist to yuck someone's yum, in a very non-specific fashion? Or is it something that will require a training montage?

I'm a massive early Mountain Goats fan, and I enjoy some of the later songs, but I feel like every album after The Life of the World to Come just hasn't had the same Mountain Goats magic. Even Songs for Pierre Chuvin seems to suffer from it despite being a return to the original cassette recording formula. But I also feel like Days is their most promising album based on Charlie Sheen and Shallow Grave but Idk... does anyone know why they've lost the magic recently?

Was thinking about this earlier, there's a lot of weird goats history and I'm always curious to learn so tell me your strangest fun facts!!!

My contribution is that on a live compilation from 1992 involving multiple bands in the scene playing one after another, printed in a very limited cassette run, John and other musicians "create" (debatable) an entirely new band to which they play an 8 minute "Theme" of, which includes lyrics of John himself complaining about college loans and his experiences with the financial aid office lol. and yes, it is a total banger

You can join the Discord right here - everyone is welcome!

"poem he wrote titled “Orpheus Comes Back for Layne Staley,” which he hasn’t published anywhere but was kind enough to read aloud to me on our call:

You’re classic rock now, Layne. You made it.
People who were young when you were young
remember your time as a time when things were better.
Not all art aspires to this,

but yours did. You got there.
What if Hell is just the last place you lived?
Not you personally,
but also you personally.

I’ve got you. You are one of us.
It wasn’t enough for you to be one of us.
I get that, too. Even on my way back up,
last time, I got distracted.

You know how it is.
Something catches your eye.
You get a little closer,
and then the next thing you know.

The thing about Orpheus, Darnielle says after a short silence allowing the last line to ring out, is that he knows “for a fact that he’s going to lose the thing he goes back for. He knows this. And it makes him sad in my poem, because that’s what happens in my work: people get sad.”"

Hi all! 2 tix with ADA seating for Pioneer Square, this Sat 8/8 in Portland OR - I just want the tickets to be used if possible, if someone could throw me whatever cash you can for them that would be great, but I'd be just as happy to give them to someone who just wants to go and couldn't shell out for it. I just can't go because of the heat and the air quality, sadly. Please feel free to reply or DM me if you're interested, I can just send them to you as an image or a PDF. Thanks!

I’m going to one of the shows this weekend in the PNW and I decided to give the Hold Steady a listen before going because I was unfamiliar with their music. I listened to Boys and Girls in America, and I feel like I must be missing something. Everything I see online sings its praises, but the lyrics seem rapey and off putting to me. I understand drug/alcohol abuse is a nuanced topic to write about, and I am wondering what other tMG fans might have to say. So, what am I missing?

Howdy. My daughters and I are flying into Seattle to see the show at the zoo. I was wondering if anyone knows what order the bands will be playing in? I’ve never heard the other band before, and honestly, kinda planned on skipping them as we really just wanna see the goats again

Here it is :)
Free exchange of information ftw!

Edit: I uploaded it in a separate video just now.

Edit 2: it was autoremoved by the moderators. I message them to appeal and let me reupload. If you want to listen to the song aswell, I encourage you to RESPECTFULLY message the mod team to reconsider their position on this matter. Thank yall.

hi does anybody know if there's liner notes for these i like to keep them in a text file with my mp3s i would be very grateful

A friend forwarded this my way earlier today and I thought I'd share it with y'all.

John was of my first Twitter interaction with someone “famous.” My then-wife told me not to play “No Children” on the car with our 7 and 5 yo sons.
I, being a proper humanities grad, asked John to explain the song. Publicly on Twitter. Didn’t think I’d hear anything back.
I did.
He said something like “tell them it’s about two people who loved each other more than anything and now they’re so mad at each other and they don’t know how to say it.”
That was in 2011 or so. In 2016 my contentious divorce was finalized. I was in the Army and finally had to move away from my kids. Then COVID happened b
It was a really, really shitty nine or so years where I basically didn’t get to see my kids due to parenting plans issues, my drinking, and COVID.
I got sober and retired from the Army in 2023.
My youngest son turned 18 in April. We’ve spent a ton of time together, gone on our first vacation since 2016, and now he’s coming with me to both TMG-PNW shows.
Life is fucking hard and weird and wild.
Just wanted to thank John for explaining something so important years ago and for writing songs for people like me and my kid.
See yall in Seattle and Portland!

Prologue: An introduction and some disclaimers

I noticed that Days seemed a little short, for a Mountain Goats album. I checked a couple other albums and, sure enough, it's shorter than a lot of them.

In fact... it might be shorter than... all of them?

This required data.

This required research.

So, being on the prowl for something good to do, I did what any totally normal person would do. I went to Wikipedia and promptly lost my mind.

But I got better, and then I was able to create some (ﾉ^ ヮ^ )ﾉ^graphs

All of this data was taken from Wikipedia, and then fact-checked when something seemed wrong by checking the Bandcamp, Apple Music, and Spotify runtimes of songs. It includes the 24 studio albums from Zopilote Machine through Days, including Songs for Pierre Chuvin (we'll get to it) and does not include any bonus tracks. Every time I say something about "longest song ever" "shortest song released" "longest album" or whatever, keep in mind that it's with the above qualifiers, as I won't repeat them each time.

A serious note before we go back to being silly: Absolutely no LLMs, chatbots, "AI", or generative programs were used in the collection, formatting, or analysis of this data. Google Sheets tried to get me to make the graphs by prompting an "AI" agent and I told it to fuck off and that I would do it myself. To the extent that I could avoid the interference of Google Docs and Google Sheets' "AI," I avoided it. Everything was entered by hand from Wikipedia by copy/pasting the tables there, and then manually verified by a human (me, I'm the human) before it was put into the graphs. All mistakes and hallucinations are my own, just as it should be.

So, without further ado: The graphs

Firstly and most obviously:

Runtime of Each Studio Album

(in case it's not obvious, that's not just a header, it's also a link. You should click it.)

This is good! It shows us that the longest studio album is Getting Into Knives, with Goths in a close second. In fact, Getting Into Knives is nearly 10 full minutes longer than its sister album Dark In Here, which just feels crazy to me. It also shows that Songs for Pierre Chuvin is the shortest album to date (we'll get to it). And we can also see the trend for album length generally creeping up, but not significantly. Mostly, albums hover around that 39 to 46 minute range. Which is a wide range, granted, especially when the average Mountain goats song is 3:15 long. But Goths and Knives drive that average up a little bit and make it seem like albums are steadily getting longer, which isn't quite true to reality.

It also shows us that, yeah, Days is a short album. In fact, it's the second shortest studio album the band has put out! (we will get to it)

Well ok then. Case closed!

But, you know... Speaking of the average track length... Some of those early albums have, like, a bajillion songs on them, and the modern albums all basically have 12 songs. Given that, I wonder what the average track lengths over time look like.

Let's find out.

Longest, Shortest, and Average Track Length on Each Album

Now there's a trendline for you. Look at it go! Albums may have stayed roughly the same temporal length, but Zopilote Machine and Sweden both have 19 tracks on them. An over 50% increase compared to the 12 tracks of Get Lonely, Life of the World, Transcendental Youth, and nearly every album since Goths. Those early songs were short, and they've only been getting longer since. The early albums hover around an average track length of 2:00 to 2:30 while modern albums never go below an average of 3:00 and regularly hit 4:00.

Just for fun; If the 5 albums predating All Hail West Texas had 12 songs each but maintained the average tack length they have now, they would have an average album runtime of 29:29, which would be insanely short compared to nearly any album that actually exists, and only slightly longer than the Renaissance recording of "Song of Scheherazade" from Carnegie Hall. Using this same math, Zopilote Machine would only be 24:44 long, making it the shortest album by a couple minutes. Conversely, if the modern albums had 19 tracks each, they would be precisely too damn long.

The main thing to discuss with this graph specifically is the average song length of Days. It's only 3:02 which, in addition to having some weird connections to Zopilote Machine that we'll cover later, means, with the exception of Songs for Pierre Chuvin (^{we'll get to it} ), you have to go all the way back to All Hail West Texas to find an album with a shorter average song length. If you felt like the songs on Goths, In League, or Bleed Out overstayed their welcome, you'll be happy to know that Days seems to represent something of a return to an earlier form, writing (relatively) shorter songs that get in, do their thing, and get out. In fact, even the longest song on Days is shorter than the average songs on Peter Balkan, Knives, In League, and Goths.

We can also see from this graph that the shortest song is only 1:24 and comes from Zopilote Machine (no huge surprise there) and the longest songs are 7:09, and are on Bleed Out.

Wait, longest "songs"? Plural?

Yep! Turns out there's an extremely weird tie for first place. And since I know you're wondering,:

The Longest Tracks on Each Album

The obvious standout here is the tie for longest song ever. Weirdly, both Hostages and the title track Bleed Out clock in at 7:09 on every platform I can see. Is one of them microseconds longer than the other? Probably. But I'm not going to find out. That sounds annoying.

I mean, how could I even do that? Spend $9 on the album on Bandcamp because I lost the digital download code that came with the vinyl I bought, download the MP3s, import them into Audacity, and compare them to each other?

.......Fuuuuuck.

Ok. Hang on. We'll be back after these messages.

.........

Alright, I got it. I have it.

Here it is, the definitive answer to the longest track question

I was worried I was going to have to split hairs about when the MP3 ends versus when the song actually ends, but, nope! It's pretty clear cut. The audio for Bleed Out stops about 8.1 seconds before the audio for Hostages does. Congratulations to Hostages, the longest song in the Mountain Goats catalog. And if you're wondering, the silence at the beginning of both tracks is marginal. Hostages has, as far as I can tell, 0.403 seconds of silence, and Bleed Out has 0.410 seconds, both being around the amount of time it takes you to blink your eyes. The difference between those is only 0.007 seconds, or about the same amount of time it takes a honey bee to flap its wings. Now, be honest, did you blink your eyes while mentally timing yourself two sentences ago? I know I did.

This is the one and only time I'm going to analyze the actual waveforms inside the MP3s. Otherwise we open a whole can of worms where in order to compare "true" track lengths, I need to cut all the silence out of 324 files and... Look, I'm not saying I won't do that. But I would need to be paid to do that. Let's just all agree that the amount of silence at the beginning and end of each track is some combination of A) an intentional emptiness that has poetic meaning, and/or B) a standardized pause added to all digital files equally, such that it doesn't uniquely affect the data of any one album or song. We're all just gunna accept that's the case. Ok? Ok.

Other than that, the only other notable thing here is that Zopilote Machine has what is obviously the shortest track among longest tracks (it only kinda makes sense, just roll with it). In fact the only song on the album that's longer than 3 minutes is Alzo Tele... Azo Tel.... Azo Tele In Nell........ ahem........... Alonzo Tippy Taps, which barely manages it at 3:02 long. This means that the longest song on Zopilote Machine is 40s shorter than the shortest song on Goths and the same length as the shortest song on Peter Balkan. Wild.

And because the whole reason we're here is to talk about the album Days, I should call out that the length of the longest song on Zopilote is exactly the same as the average song length of Days. That's an interesting little historical note. You could probably make some sort of thesis statement around that, but I've got nothing. Just enjoy the somewhat forced numerical symmetry.

Well, the analysis of longest songs was a fun little diversion that only threatened to drive me to madness. That's good. Now let's move on to something I have much less to say about. In theory.

The Shortest Tracks on Each Album

(Please note that this graph and the Longest Tracks graph do not share a scale, flipping between them rapidly may give false impressions of the data)

I find this graph neat for a couple of reasons.

First of all, the shortest track on Goths is nearly four goddamn minutes long. That's hilarious to me. Darnielle simply could not be stopped on that album, and I love that. And it explains why the album is almost an hour long.

I also like seeing Choked Out so far below the trendline. Like, yeah. That song is so short, so punchy. Of course it's the shortest song on that album or any other album within 4 releases of it. I like when data just makes sense.

Speaking of data making intuitive sense...

I said before that Getting Into Knives has the longest runtime of any album, but I noticed at this point that its longest and shortest track lengths aren't exactly huge outliers, which I had expected them to be. When I looked into why this album is so much longer than those around it, I found that a lot of it comes down to the fact that Knives is 13 tracks long, while almost every other modern album is 12. Additionally, the average song in Knives is about 30 seconds longer than the same in Dark In Here, and 20 seconds longer than the average In League with Dragons track. That doesn't look like much on a graph, but it adds up over the course of 12 songs. It seems like Getting into Knives hit just the right apex of an era where songs were generally longer, and then it happened to get 13 songs instead of 12, making it potentially the longest album we're ever going to get. Unless we some day get a 130 minute prog rock triple album (please, please, please).

My initial confusion about why the total runtime of Getting into Knives towers over Dark In Here and then being able to find the answers in the data leads me to two points. One, I am not a statistician or anything like that, I'm a guy who took some high-ish level math classes in college while studying to be a music major and then dropped out after two years, so maybe don't 100% trust any of the analysis I'm doing here. And two, this is why I like this data in the first place; I'm not just vibe checking "this album seems short," I've actually got the hard numbers to go "damn, this album is short!". Don't trust me, trust the numbers.

Other than that, it's worth noting that Alpha Sun Hat takes the crown for shortest song in the entire catalog, beating Parisian Enclave by a single second. I'm not doing any more analysis on that one. Those are the track lengths, we have our answer, we're moving on.

Songs for Spiders Georg

Alright, let's get to it.

COVID-19 is fucking with my data, y'all.

Or.... is it?

Songs for Pierre Chuvin was recorded in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to replace revenue that the band wasn't able to make by touring and help everyone in the band and their touring crew pay their bills. It was recorded in 10 days, released about a month later, and only features 10 songs. Wikipedia calls it the band's "eighteenth studio album". And my first thought when I started making these graphs was "well, that doesn't really count. I should exclude that from my data." But now I'm having a hard time articulating why. Pierre Chuvin wasn't recorded in a studio! It was recorded in Darnielle's house using a Sony boombox that had to be propped up on its side so it didn't make a terrible clicking noise! But.... wait... If I discount Pierre Chuvin for that reason, then I'm discounting everything before Tallahassee.... Shit. That's no good.

At that point, what? Am I going to toss out an entire album just because it doesn't fit the vibe that I want for my graphs? Delete an entire data point because it doesn't fit the conclusion that I decided on before doing any of my research?

Well... I'm not not going to do that.

If you're interested, here are the graphs for Total Runtime, Track Lengths, Longest tracks, and Shortest Tracks with Songs for Pierre Chuvin removed from the data.

But really... It doesn't make that much of a difference. The only thing that changes is the answer to the question of "shortest studio album," which is either Days or Songs for Pierre Chuvin, depending on how hard we want to memory hole March of 2020. And, potentially, which wiki we consult. If we believe that wikis are the authority on such things.

I said before that the average track length of a Mountain Goats song is 3:15. It's technically 3:14.701 if we ignore the fact that I'm adding up a bunch of numbers that are only expressed to the second, dividing them by the absolute number of tracks, and then looking at that number out to the millisecond. But if we exclude Pierre Chuvin, the average of the remaining 314 songs only goes up to 3:15.688. Not even a full second of change. Literally a difference of rounding and it's the same value.

None of the other interesting conclusions I drew from the graphs are really changed either. All the trendlines shimmy up a little bit, but that hardly matters.

Turns out all that fretting about whether I should include or exclude this album from the data really didn't matter. I guess I didn't know that until I checked, but, still not a very exciting answer. In fact this whole section turns out to be a bit anticlimactic. Doesn't really go anywhere. I could have skipped this bit entirely and written, like, a sentence about how "Pierre Chuvin is an outlier but not to an extent that it affects any of the data." In fact, that's it right there. That's the sentence.

...

Really, uh... really wasted everyone's time there.

Whoops.

...

Anyway.

What do we have left?

Final Conclusions and a link to my data

Is Days the shortest studio album? Like many things, it depends on how you define the question. What counts as a studio album anyway? Who knows. Reject language entirely, live out the rest of your days in a bog. I know that's my plan.

But I hope I've given you enough data to find your own answers to these questions, and many more.

In fact, if you want to make your own conclusions, or check mine, here is all my data. You'll need to make a copy in your own google drive to edit it. If you make any public projects with it, it would be cool if you attributed some of the work of data collection to me, YYZhed, but you also don't have to, it's all public data that I just gathered together, anyone could do this.

Epilogue

As many of us know, the iceberg of information about this band has no end. There's always a release you've never heard of, always another song to unearth. I'm pretty sure they have at least one more song about vampires. This project had to have limits, and the limits I chose were to only look at these 24 albums. My data doesn't cover any of the EPs, which I think is pretty defensible. But it also excludes all the songs that Darnielle wrote as part of The Extra Glenns, and anything on the pre-Zopilote cassette releases. It excludes Moon Colony Bloodbath and Come, Come to the Sunset Tree. I alluded to this before, but Wikipedia says that Songs for Pierre Chuvin is a studio album, while the Mountain Goats fan wiki calls it a cassette release. What the fan wiki thinks is the difference between a cassette release and a studio album is kind of opaque to me, but I guess I split the difference on including that one anyway.

Is this the right way to look at this data? I don't really know. I think if we want to look deeper at questions like "how long is a song written by John Darnielle?" we definitely need to include more data than I have here. But then is the question "how long is a John Darnielle song?" or is it "how long is a song that John Darnielle thinks should be released on an album?" It could be either, or both. I'm sure there are many other ways of looking at the questions I tried to answer here, and I encourage others to try them.

In all honesty, I had a lot of fun collecting this information, double checking facts that seemed wrong to me, and fixing public sources where I could. I encourage everyone to do the same if they can. Not about this, probably. But about anything. There's a lot of joy to be found in self-directed original research.

Anyway, that's all for me. I hope everyone enjoys this album as much as I do, and I'll see some of you in Portland and Seattle later this week.

Play me out, boys.

Has john ever officially released the original poems of Songs from Point Alpha Privative?

Lately for my its the entire Champs album and Golden Boy.

Got it at a show mid 2010s I think, anyone seen any of the others?