2013-05-27 Urban Lounge (Salt Lake City)
Setlist
Recording
Banter
- Sorry, I - you may or may not be able to tell, but the monitors are doing a constant hum that's pretty hard to work with. I know, you were thinking, this is part of Darnielle's master plan, to expose everyone to harsh noise. But that's not actually part of my master plan. There is an apocryphal version of the master plan that involves harsh noise exposure. That is heretical. That is a heretical master plan, that I do not support. I stand with the true, original master plan. As this song goes, there is no harsh noise component. (Heel Turn 2)
- Pretty sure I don't know how to play this song, I just got the idea to play it last night. It's one of those old songs that, like, I listen to it and I go, Wow, what the hell is that young dude doing? It sounded so harsh, it was hard to listen to a lot of, but I did it anyways. (Going to Norwalk)
- [audience: up the wolves!] Nah man, we're in the solo segment, I don't think so. [someone else: love love love!] That is also....not in the solo segment. These are like - I dunno if y'all went to Disneyland before it became, like, a thing where everybody, like, goes on all the rides and it becomes truly democratic. When I was a child, you went to Disneyland, there were the A ticket rides, those were the ones if you were under 5, those were the only ones they'd let you go on. Someday I'd get to go on the B tickets, like all the big kids, and I'd be filled with resentment. Resentment at Disneyland, that was your experience if you were under 5. And then someday you'd get to on on the E ticket rides, that was the one that remotely resembled a roller coaster, because Disneyland was more of a mild kinda vibe; if you wanted a real roller coaster you'd go to magic mountain. Love Love Love is an E ticket ride, you don't do it in the... however, in fairness, this was also one of the singles, and I always do it by myself. (Woke Up New)
- We're having an object lesson in this release cycle, you how when you're young, you make your first record, and somebody hates it, and you get all depressed, 'cause the person who wrote the review goes, oh, this is the worst thing I've heard in my whole life, and you go, aw man, I didn't mean to make the worst record that guy has ever heard in his whole life. Now I feel bad. Then you get mad, and you go, argh, I bet he likes terrible music, but, nah. You feel bad again, you thought you liked your record and now you feel like you've wasted your time. Takes a long time to get over that. And then you go, ah, people who review records don't know anything, but you go, no, I review records, and I know some things, so, by extension... But then, we had a miraculous thing happen this year, that has totally changed my relationship to what people would write about what we do. Because normally, it's like that, normally somebody says, oh, this record is not as good as the last one. Fuck, I thought it was better, man! I wouldn't have bothered with it if I hadn't thought it was better than the last one! There's no point, going, "ah, here's the new record, it's not as good as the last one, but why not!" That's not our position. So, I wrote this song, it was really hard to write because it was totally unlike anything we'd ever done. I'd been playing Gershwin and Ellington at the piano, and I was like, I could do something remotely in that vein maybe, and I wrote a little tiny fraction of two bars. And then I had to spend the next two weeks teaching it to myself, because it was way above my normal pay grade as far as [inaudible]. And I worked really, really hard to learn it, I worked so hard to keep it a secret, I told Peter, "I'm doing a thing, man, it's really weird", I maybe played him a little snippet of it on the phone, 'cause I was having to write four bars at a time, it was very different. I finally di dit, and then me and Jon Wurster went in to do a pre-production demo, which - the Mountain Goats generally do not do pre-production. Pre-production is for bands that have a large budget. But I knew this song was gonna be hard to do, so we went into the Rubber Room in CArrboro and practiced, I was doing all these count-offs into the mic so we could get the timing right, and Isent the demo to Peter, and he goes, [deadpan Peter impression] "well this is quite insane". And we wondered, is it gonna fall off during the recording session? The songs you can't get right, they just go into the scrap heap and you recycle some of their lyrics if you need to. But we did it! I said, oh my god, this does not sound like any other Mountain Goats song, even close. What's [inaudible] gonna say about it? Well. Down to the last critic, they said "this one song is jazzy". [cheering] Well, thanks! This jazzy song is for you. [plays incorrect chord, stops] Hey Matt, what's the opening chord? [Matt, proving a point: Ebmaj7/F]. (Fire Editorial)
- This is a song about how there may come a time when you have an opportunity to show, or not show mercy to the Diaz brothers. I wanted to write a song to encourage you to follow the righteous path when that moment comes. (The Diaz Brothers)
- Because I feel the need to confess my shortcomings to eternal witnesses and stuff, before people, and what feels that need too is self serving. Because you enjoy it, you confess your failings and then go "now I've confessed my failings. I'm kinda cool." But there's a thing, I learned this all over this city, and I'm religiously obsessive, so I'm like, wow, this isa place where a staggering percentage of people were raised with the same faith. That is really fascinating to me, and if you've seen me play SLC before, you know this about me, because then I can't shut up about LDS stuff. You're very nice with me about it, but I'm sitting here going, oh, well, the thing about the LDS is in upstate New York they found the tablets and... And you all already know that, right, you all don't need me to hip you to any of that. So I'm patting myself on the back for how little I've talked about it. [cheering] And I only mention that because there's a lot of stuff in my thinking around - there's heavily - this is a long story. I might have told you this story last time. But when I was 18 or 19, I was kind of a train wreck of a person, but I was also a snotty goth. And then, so, at that time, few people in the room were old enough to remember this, but there was an outreach program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that they were trying to - they still do this - to get people just so they'll know what it is, becuase people have a lot of misconceptions about the whole thing. I mean it's quasi-evangelical, but I assert having had the elders in my home many times, I really firmly believe that their main issue is "just so you know what we're actually about, just so you don't think funny things about us, because for a long time the US government thought funny things about us, and really persecuted us relentlessly, so we'll tell you what we are actually like." And so they did, right, and they would come every week to my hovel of a drug-infested house and say, hey, you guys want some God? Nah, nah. And he'd read to me from the book, we'd have a word of prayer before and after. I don't care where you are in your faith, it's nice to have a little word of prayer, you know, and you can still be a total atheist and enjoy yourself a nice prayer. It's a good thing. So, y'know, like I said, I was a mess, and suddenly, my lease was up and I had to go back to California next week, and I had no idea what to do, and the room's a total absolute fuckin' - it looks like a rocket hit it because that's how I lived then. And at this time, to be honest. But, so, I"m sitting here looking here at this giant wreck going, where am I gonna put this stuff, I know where the storage space is, but I don't have a car or friends, so I don't know what I'm gonna do about this. And the phone buzzes. Who is it? It's the elders, and they're here to talk about Heavenly Father, so I go, let's do this. They come up, is now a bad time? And they look at you, and I say, yeah, man, I don't know where I'm gonna put all my stuff! And they say, oh, we know a guy with a truck, and they called him up. This is how you get people to wanna join your church. If you're like, well, the baptists didn't help me, the Catholics don't even know who I am...but the Mormons helped me out. And the why that they had come over was because I had ordered - this is a long story but trust me, it's going somewhere, because I"d been up late, high every night, very very high, on very heavy drugs, [woo!] no, not woo! And some drugs are nice and woo, you can do them and go on with your life, the drugs I'm talking about, they leave scars. That means you get to tell stories about 'em later, but there is a tradeoff. But yeah, I'm doing the kind of stuff that you don't brag about doing. And it's two AM and there's this commercial for a tape called Bounce Back, which is part of the outreach, and it's about how if you are depressed, there's stuff you can do, right? And this commercial aired at 2 am every single night. And I know, because I was up at 2 am every single night with the tv on and a cigarette in my hand, and I said, man, I wanna hear your tape. went out to the hall phone, didn't have my own phone because I'd been cut off for not paying the bill. Said hey man, send me that bounce back tape. They said, yeah man, do you want some missionaries to come and explain the church to you? and I said eeehhhh, and they said, come on, and I said ahh why not. [laughter] So, and they taught me a lot of stuff, and some of it has to do with the idea of your body and your rleationship to it, because as most of you know, there's this heavy idea in Mormonism that if you get a good one, if you go to the afterlife, you have a perfect body later on. For those of us who have a difficult relationship with our bodies, this is a teaching with a real appeal. (Never Quite Free)
- [off mic - something about clapping?] Man, this here's a song about divorce. You may not know this but up in the afterlife you're still married to the people you divorced, whether the courts down here recognize it or not. That's what I heard from some guys up in Portland, anyways. They gave me a really weird vision of my mother and my father having to hang out with each other. For a hundred billion years. [Mormon laughter] (No Children)