2013-04-13 Union Transfer (Philadelphia)

Setlist

• Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan
• Cry for Judas
• Animal Mask
• The Young Thousands
• Get Lonely
• Foreign Object
• Never Quite Free
• Jam Eater Blues (JD solo)
• Island Garden Song (JD solo)
• Noche del Guajolote (JD solo)
• Southwestern Territory
• Love Love Love
• Luna
• Game Shows Touch Our Lives
• Choked Out
• The Legend of Chavo Guerrero
• Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1
• Woke Up New (encore)
• The Ballad of Bull Ramos (encore)
• No Children (encore)
• This Year (encore)

Banter

• There's a type of wrestling match where everybody starts kicking everybody else's ass all at once. And you can't even really tell what's going on. Say, well, how would anyone win? It's hard to see the path to victory through all the flying fists and blood and hair and all the stuff that's going on. But eventually, a victor emerges, and then alliances are formed. [cheering!] It sounds like there's reverb in my monitors. And this is called Animal Mask. (Animal Mask)
• Last time I was in this building I was in a mosh pit right there. Municipal Waste was playing. [woo!] And it was rad. I think it was probably my final pit, though time will tell. You always think you've seen your last pit, because I have some bad news - obviously I don't age and will be 29 forever, but - but it is the case of, mysteriously, even if you're immune to aging, if you take a knee in the pit, it seems to hurt worse when you've been 29 for 10 years, than when you've only been 29 for two years. Somehow your knee is not down with the program. You can yell at your knee all you want, but then people on the bus get mad at you. This is a song about the kind of people who yell at their knees on the bus. (The Young Thousands)
• I don't know if this is true for you all, but Peter and me grew up east of Los Angeles, about 50 miles. The thing about that is that you grow up with a severe inferiority complex. All the cool stuff is going on 50 miles inland, and nobody has any respect for where you're from, but you actually have some cool shit going on where you're from, but nobody wants to show any respect to that. And I always wondered whether towns that were in spitting distance of, say, New York had the same complex that we had. But I mean to tell you, and I have experience with this since 1997, Philadelphia audiences are among the best in the world. We appreciate you. [kick drum and bass noises] I can't shed my guitar because I was skipping the next song on the set list. It is not time to shed my guitar. [off mic unintelligible] This is a song about how you may think we are wrestling by the rules, but when you turn around, I am going to stab you in the eye with a foreign object. This song is called Foreign Object. (Foreign Object)
• This is kind of like, a depressing song that gets mistaken for an optimistic song. [woo!] Which is cool because on the plane of the absolute they are equivalent. That mistake is in fact a deeper insight, so. There was, oh man, this is going to be a meaningless reference to literally 100% of people in this room. There was a zine in the mid-80s, I do not know what it was called, it was a bunch of collages or sometimes just a page from Good Housekeeping or whatever, images, you know, like, a Buick Sentry, and a turkey, and a happy family, and a dog, and each page would say "all the same". That was the whole zine. It was about the greatest thing I ever saw in my life. And it was sort of, in my opinion, the zine was trying to explain to people how a song can be both extraordinarily depressing and also a little uplifting. (Never Quite Free)
• It's funny, some of the old songs you go, "Aw man, I remember when that song was the new song". But it's not the new song anymore. [Plays intro] Do you guys even know what song I'm playing now? [audience, with force: JAM EATER BLUES!!!] You're goddamn right I am. (Jam Eater Blues)
• [yelling] No I already know what I'm gonna play. Because I had to practice it backstage, 'cause I wasn't sure if I knew it. And then I went through the, like, I wanna tell you how I feel about it, and why it's on the setlist, but if I say how rare it is that I play it, then people put cameras in front of their faces and stuff, and I feel angry and sad. And I don't wanna have those feelings. So put 'em in your goddamn pockets. [cheering] I don't think this song has been played live since 1994 [ed: 1992, but I have the internet]. I know. There's some people with itchy, itchy, itchy phone hands right now. Leave 'em in your pockets. It's gonna be cool. You don't have to record everything you observe in life, it's actually gonna be okay. [confused archivist noises] [off mic, inaudible] This song is actually about offline media experiences. (Noche del Guajolote)
• [audience yelling for various songs] Next song on the setlist! It will be much better! Yeah! Next song on the setlist! [audience laughs] I'm gonna tell you a short story. Not a short story in the literary sense of the form, but it's not terribly long. So for most people, when you think of wrestling, you think of a vast monolith that is in fact run by a dude named Vince McMahon, whose father was also in the business. [boos] Well, now, on the one hand, there's a lot to say about Vince McMahon. Business wouldn't be what it is if he hadn't done the things he'd done. But at the same time, prior to Vince McMahon was called the age of the territories. It was very much like scenes, if you used to read maximum rock n roll, read the scene reports. Go, aw man, stuff going on in Cleveland. But you wouldn't know, because it was pre-internet, and unless you were trading tapes, and I hope that you were [yeah!] you didn't really know what was going on in Cleveland. You read a little report and go, I gotta go to Cleveland and see what's going on. The territories were their own places. The LA territory was one thing, portland was another, San Francisco was totally separate. There wasn't a whole lot of bleed through. The territories were small, and it was a small stakes game. Lotta these guys had day jobs, and at night they would go get themselves blasted to bits. Bruised up, banged up, for the sake of a craft they believed in. (Southwestern Territory)
• So this song has four verses, and I have a habit of jumbling them. Because they're independent entities, and they could have gone in a number of orders. But then if I put the wrong one in the wrong place, I get lost, and the band becomes confused and angry, and they hire Michale Graves to replace me as a singer. And I wish Michale Graves well, but I don't think he makes a good frontman for the Mountain Goats. And then I become angry at Michale Graves, and we have to go to therapy together. And I don't want to be in therapy with Michale Graves, again, wishing him well. This is a song about therapy for Michale Graves, no it's not, it's about Luna Vachon, who was the daughter of Butcher Vachon, one of the greatest workers to ever face the camera. Like a lotta people who work in businesses where your body gets punished, lost her way and never found her way back. (Luna)
• [audience: SETLIST!!] My man. I could kiss you so hard. So bruised today, John Darnielle kissed me too hard. [plays guitar chord] In good times, in less good times, high water, and a low tide, in the fat years, in the leeeeeeeeean years, game shows touch our lives. (Game Shows Touch Our Lives)
• Because you are not privy to the demos, you do not know the spoken intro that preceded the demo that I sent Peter and Jon. It went like this: THE VOICE DESTROYING SONG KNOWN ONLY AS.....CHOKED OUT!!! (Choked Out)
• Thank you all so much for coming out. I'd like to dedicate this last one to the Shikara (?) wrestling promotion that comes out of Philadelphia. Some of the finest wrestlers on the planet working extraordinarily hard, and you should support them as much as possible. (Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1)
• [audience: setlist!] Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. There is no encore list. [cheering] Other bands do have encore lists, that's how you know they're posers. [more cheering] Who presuppose on the good will of their audience. Who have a feeling of entitlement. We stand in direct, diametrical opposition to posers. That said, [audience yells for Source Decay] no, I already figured out what I wanted to play, if you consult setlist dot fm, you will see that I haven't used it as an encore yet this tour because it's not what I felt like playing. (Woke Up New)
• Man, so it's like, 9 am on a Tuesday. Depending on which partner you are, you've either got a smart skirt and a blouse but you're not really the smart skirt and blouse type, but you have a couple just in case. Or you got a tie, and a blazer, and you're not really the tie and blazer type but you got a couple in the closet just in case. They smell musty. And you show up at the place, and you don't recognize any of the four names on the tile, but you know that the LLC afterwards means that they are some kind of a legal corporation. And you say to yourself, time to talk to the lawyers, time to talk to the lawyers, time to talk to the lawyers. You got called in here because you ignored their emails, they had to send you a summons, the summons looks real official like. Summons looks funny after three drinks, but serious after four. And around the fifth one you say, I guess I better answer the summons tomorrow morning around 9 am. And that's you, showing up: 5, 6, 7 drinks, wearing their way slowly out of your body at the lawyer's office. What's up, lawyer, didn't think it'd come to this, but it has come to this. (No Children)
• JD: I wrote this song, and I sent it to Peter, and Peter was having a bad time that year. He was like, not really having a lot of fun. People say 'woo', but for Peter, it was not really 'woo' time. It was hard. It was hard times on the American Dream, Peter Hughes.
  Peter: It was still kinda 'woo' time.
  JD: It was 'woo' in a sort of a, dark 'woo'.
  Peter: Yeah. The dark 'woo's.
  JD: The dark 'woo' era of Peter Hughes. And I sent it to him, and I went on vacation, and you know, on vacation you should try to refrain from checking your email but you can't help it, because of what we've all become. On that vacation I opened it up and Peter went, 'dude, I know you're on vacation, but this is a cool song, I wrote a bassline for it'. You're about to hear that bass line. It's called This Year. (This Year)