2013-04-11 City Winery (New York City)
Setlist
recording
Banter
- There's a thing about the minor villain wrestlers from the local territories that was great because you'd be really scared of them and their powers, but you'd go to another territory and nobody's ever heard of them. Just this guy who's terrorizing Los Angeles and in San Francisco, he can't get arrested for stealing from a convenience store. (The Ballad of Bull Ramos)
- This is a song about the inside of a motel. In particular, it's both a single motel that I could point out to you where the building stood before God in his infinite mercy wiped it from the face of the earth, replacing it with, I would guess a CVS, just you know, just playing the odds there, rolling seven, it was probably a CVS. But before the CVS that we all know today, there were beds that smelled funky and stale in a particular type of stale that's yet ever new, and cigarette burns that miraculously reappear if you replace the sheets with fresh ones and yet the burn returns, because the burn is a metaphor and you can't, you can't just change a metaphor out. You replace the sheet and the metaphor persists. That's in the nature of these guys, right. I went to this motel in Los Angeles and I went to it in Pomona and I went to it in Portland and it wasn't a chain. They were all independently owned. And yet miraculously, they were all the same motel. Not hotel. That's for the people with money. (Palmcorder Yajna)
- Audience: We missed you!
JD: I missed you too! [woo] You know, last time I was in here, Roseanne Cash was in the building. I was so starstruck I had no idea what to do, and she came up here and did Seven Year Ache in this room and I was like, against the back wall, feeling like I was going to be blasted into the street. It was the greatest thing ever. She is the best [unintelligible, off mic positioning talk, cheering for position 2]. But all the beer's over at position 1. I have a feeling some of that beer will find itself to position 2. I love this - this is the best job, because they clap for you when you drink. So many poor drunks out there wishing they had someone to clap for them when they drink.
Peter: So many jobs where htey just, they frown when you drink.
JD: Yeah, I've worked some of those jobs, they say, hey, you can't drive the flour delivery, man, John, you're too high. You can't prove it and they haven't legalized that kinda stuff yet. And what do they say? Yeah, I'll go home. You know, I have to drive home too, so...put me in the van. That's a true story. [piano chord] This is about Luna Vachon, one of the finest wrestlers to ever lace up the boots. (Luna)
- This was on Life of the World To Come. [woo!] Yeah, fellow Bible obsessives. Finally, I get some Bible here. That's what they're saying. I was worried that there was not enough Bible, except for the one that quoted I Corinthians. This is kind of a song about hopelessness, and the long, steady contemplation thereof. (Deuteronomy 2:10)
- I wonder if I'll be able ot locate my glasses where I stuffed them somewhere. [off mic discussion with Avel] What if I had a guy who I had put my glasses on for me. I always wonder about, like Madonna wears glasses, is there a guy who's like ah, I gotta put her glasses on. [puts glasses on] They don't feel the same without the guy. Still can't see that well. [audience yells for something that sounds like Sarcofago Live?] I don't know, naaaahhh, I've got a thing I wanna play. Or do I want - waitasec. [cycles through keyboard settings to comical effect] Nahh. [sings "the next time I fall in love..."] Not actually gonna happen. I'll only do it if you can promise that Amy Grant is gonna emerge from the wings. I don't think you can make that promise.
- [starts Land Before Time cover] And then the little dinosaur, who's like, very skeptical of all this stuff, because they're singing - this is from the Land Before Time VII? And Sara Triceratops is very, you know, everybody else is very excited about this Mysterious Beyond, that they keep singing about, that they all have faith in, in their hearts there must be something beyond this world. But Sara Triceratops is skeptical by nature, and she will not be persuaded by this just because some people are standing around singing a pretty song about it. It's not sufficient for her. She needs to know more. She needs to see some evidence. She's not entirely cynical, but she thinks it's perhaps naive to sit around singing about some place you've never seen just because these brightly colored dinosaurs from some unknown country have arrived to preach about the mysterious beyond, so she steps right up and grabs the microphone - there's no real microphone, it's the figurative microphone, and she steps up and has to share her opinion, and share her feelings, and she has a right to do that, and she sings... [continues song] But as we know the idealists win in the end. [key change, completes song].
- I haven't played this song at position 1 [guitar] this tour, I didn't really check to see if I know it at position 1, so I'm going to do a little of this irritating sort of noodling, and you can pretend that it's soloing. [chords] That's right, that's right, that's right, and when I come to the bridge, what will I do? [F#m chord] That's an F#. Minor. And then a G. It's a Mountain Goats song. It's not actually that complicated. Cool. [audience: uncomplicated! woo!] Uncomplicated is good. Most of the best rock music is uncomplicated. Except for Allan Holdsworth who is a prog guy I'm totally into. [audience: but the feelings are complicated!] That's exactly the point. This song kind of exemplifies that concept. Exactly. (Steal Smoked Fish)
- I always feel like saying what it's about is cheating people out of a more comforting misinterpretation... What the song is about is what its title says. It's about not being able to ever fully entirely feel loosed from something that bound you, no matter how you see the evidence of your bondage growing old and desiccated underneath you and no longer actually has its grip on you. But there's still the marks where the ropes were. (Never Quite Free)
- This seems like a crowd that wants to hear songs about wrestling. And wrestlers. And the bloody deaths of wrestlers in faraway places. This is about the time that Bruiser Brody got stabbed to death outside San Juan. It's called 'Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan.' (Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan)
- There's parts of every record you don't hear, because we cut them off before they go to press. Spoken intros are the main thing. 'Cause if a record has a spoken intro for every track, that's cloying. Nobody needs that, 'cause everybody would know, you could have taken that off, but you decided to leave a bit of studio patter. But I will tell you that, on the rough mix I have of this song, probably about the 5th take of the song that day, I say, [announcer voice] 'We're going to poke you in the eye! With a foreign object! By the Mountain Goats!' (Foreign Object)
- JD: [crowd whistles/cheers] If you join a jam band, they do that to you for smoking weed. They do!
Peter: We gotta start a jam band.
JD: Yeah, because people are lined up to hear me solo. Well. I mean, I don't like to presume upon the goodwill of an audience, but I have a feeling people in the room know this song.(This Year)
- This is a song about the terror of South Texas! The master of the moonsault! El gran señor Chavo Guerrero! (The Legend of Chavo Guerrero)
- Peter asked me what we were gonna play for the encore, I said, well, I'm gonna go do You Were Cool, and you guys tell me what we're gonna do when you come out. He said "go over to position 2" [piano]. Some of you catch on fast, I just invented that tonight.
audience: paint it black, you devil!
JD: he said 'paint it black, you devil'.
[Jon begins to play what is presumably Paint it Black, after a couple bars Peter joins in]
JD: I don't remember how we play that one. We had our own version...
Jon: We did our own version of that, that's right!
JD: I don't remember how it went. It's on Youtube, I think. (Southwestern Territory)
- You may...come upon a time in your life, when you see rather more of your lawyers than you expected to. Like in the previous years you might have talked to that lawyer down at H & R Block. That would have been the sum total of your lawyering. Then suddenly, you're in a rather nice office, and you say, wow, this guy makes a lot of money. And you know because you're having to write him large checks. Because he's taking care of the divorce. The divorce that was so ardently worked toward by the people heading toward it, and yet seems so bitterly resented when they get there. It's a paradox. This song is about the burning love at the heart of that paradox. (No Children)