Heretic Pride
Liner notes
As part of the Heretic Pride press kit, John wrote about every song in a three page comic which was illustrated by musician and comics artist Jeffrey Lewis. It is referenced extensively in the text below and is available in full on Lewis's website (mirror).
Related material
Heretic Pride has two extras which were released with some versions of the album, Last Man on Earth and Toolshed. In addition, demos exist of Last Man on Earth, Toolshed, and Michael Myers Resplendent, which are discussed more with the individual songs. These demos are often collectively referred to as Songs for Vamsidasa Babaji,3 4 5 as they are all tagged as coming from that supposed album.
Track listing
Sax Rohmer #1
San Bernardino
Heretic Pride
Autoclave
New Zion
So Desperate
In the Craters on the Moon
Lovecraft in Brooklyn
Tianchi Lake
How to Embrace a Swamp Creature
Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident
September 15, 1983
Michael Myers Resplendent
Bonus tracks
Toolshed
Last Man on Earth
Footnotes
"I didn't know that I had ripped it off... I'm not trying to get away with anything. But, I wrote it in a notebook at some point, where I was storing titles... And I was like, 'That's just too good a phrase, you can't have made that up.' And I started combing through all my stuff to figure it out... Aura Noir is this sort of black-slash-thrash band, and they had this phrase, 'heretic pride', in one of their lyrics, and I had unconsciously lifted it and made what I took from it the subject of my song." — WNYC session, March 11, 2008
The Aura Noir line which John references above is from Black Deluge Night: "Bereft of air the earth trembles wide / Cracks all mountains high / Soaring demons now swarm the skies / In awe and heretic pride."
The album was originally going to be titled The Vision As It Appeared to the Serpent or Great Sterile Transparent Jellies. — Sam Means Interviews John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats (2008). Largehearted Boy, accessed May 6, 2013.
See also the notes to the title track. ↩
"[Heretic Pride] was the first one-song-at-a-time no-theme record I'd done in forever. Felt so good. I was just indulging all these old obsessions, interests, fetishes of mine - kind of like, you know, when you spend a night on eBay looking at stuff and thinking 'I'm gonna buy all that stuff — old leather football helmets, stained-glass beer mirrors, really old loteria sets': really for me, in spirit, this album felt like when I was writing the songs that became Hot Garden Stomp - every little minor obsession of mine just blowing up and possessing me for a day. So, no, I didn't conceive it as a thing I was going to do, but I've done sort of 'let the machine assemble itself' records before and I have a lot of faith in that process." — Sam Means Interviews John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats (2008). Largehearted Boy, accessed May 6, 2013.
John has emphatically stated that this is not a political record. See the March 11, 2008 WNYC session. ↩
John has clarified that this was not a real album title (although I've still included it in the Song for ... series), but that the tagging was part of his organization process:
I feel like I addressed this at one point, maybe with a different title, but: back in the old days, when every time I'd write a song it'd go on a tape, the tapes had their own titles. Occasionally these titles would go on to title a release ("Beautiful Rat Sunset" was one of them) but more often they were just spur-of-the-moment/whimsical/inside-joke titles. Now that demos are stored on a hard drive instead of on tapes, the playlists have titles like that. That's all. There is no "Songs for Vamsidasa Babaji," but there are a bunch of demos whose tags claim that they come from such an album The more you know!
tap-tap no followup questions lawl
Mountain Goats forums. songs for vamsidasa babaji. December 18, 2007. Retrieved April 8, 2014. ↩
Vamsidasa Babaji was a Vaishnava (meaning Vishnu-worshipping Hindu) sadhu from Bengal, born in 1859 and living until 1944.
Bhakti Vikāsa Swami (2010). Sri Vamsidasa Babaji. India: Bhakti Vikas Trust. ↩
Songs for Vamsidasa Babaji is part of the Song for ... series. ↩