2016-10-29 - Hi-Dive, Denver
John Darnielle, Peter Hughes
Recording
Setlist
Banter
- Audience: YOUR HAIR LOOKS GREAT!!
JD: My hair is great. [starts playing] My favorite stuff is always what I'm working on now, but my second favorite stuff is Get Lonely. (Moon Over Goldsboro)
- This is a song about drug addicts. [woo!] Friends of mine who have lost the ability to say 'woo' about their drug addictions. Because they're in the ground. (Lakeside View Apartments Suite)
- This song is also about things that died and won't come back. (Deuteronomy 2:10)
- JD: I hadn't noticed this when I wrote the setlist, so, we're staying at the Holiday Inn Express here in town... [woo!]
Peter: Don't tell 'em, dude!
JD: I'm gonna be there for all of 3 hours after this show, so it's a [mumbles]. So uh, the reason I tell you that is that both Woke Up New and this song were written in a Holiday Inn Express, in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. You may say, oh, then I should go stay at a Holiday Inn Express for inspiration, no, it was not exactly, these are songs off Get Lonely. So the thing was, we had lost the will to live, but we had like, 9 days left on the tour, so we had to live whether we cared about it or not. So, and I couldn't be in the room, the room was just terrible, so I was sitting in the hallway, waiting for somebody to come up and ask me what I was doing. Sitting there, sitting with my guitar, writing, y'know, when Peter would go into the shower, then I'd quickly demo the song in the room. I would like to dedicate this song to the Holiday Inn Express. (Maybe Sprout Wings)
- Once the medicine wears off you can get pretty lost in the music. [audience: going to georgia!] Have people not read my Tumblr ask on that one? The earth will glow before I play Going to Georgia again. It's over. The song is over. It's not by the Mountain Goats. It doesn't exist. I will never play it, so long as I live. I will play a song off Sweden people haven't heard in a little while.
- Well, there's only a couple left so I might as well start talking now. [woo!] I am so - this was such a fun run of shows, we played more, like, '97 songs than we have played in a very long time. [more cheering] And I look forward to people in, like, other states, going 'well, you played it for Colorado...' Well, you should have been in Colorado, not my fault.
- Peter: We should play some more songs!
JD: I always try not to repeat myself, but we did the same thing last night, there's not a lot of schtick you can do about how you can't get off the stage between the set and the encore.
- JD: Alright, person who asked for something from the Hound Chronicles, Peter Hughes happens to have one of the earliest copies of The Hound Chronicles.
Peter: I used to cover this song with my old band.
JD: Fuck yeah! What band was that?
Peter: DiskothiQ!
JD: By the way, if you haven't noticed the tenor of things, in tribute to the Grateful Dead, the set is good and the encore is better. Peter was in a band called DiskothiQ, when they started covering Mountain Goats songs, that was, like, shocking to me, because I really looked up to DiskothiQ. The first time I saw them play, they opened with 'I'm Straight' by Jonathan Richmond, but I didn't know that song, so I thought Peter wrote it, and I was like, holy fuck! Listen to this guy! OK. I'm gonna try and sing this old song that I haven't practiced or anything. Cross your fingers. (Torch Song)
- I know some people are like, do we get to hear some of the hits at some point? Yes, but first I have to play another song I wrote in '93. (Tulsa Imperative)
- One of these years, I'm gonna make good on my New Year's threat to practice my scales and modes. Then I will be able to open this song with a long jam session. It's gonna be very sweet to jam, you think I'm makin' this up and being funny, but this is a thing I write every year: practice scales, learn to solo. That is my goal, musically, to learn to play a guitar solo. I know I'm getting somewhere, because when I wrote this song I couldn't have articulated the chords like that. All I could do was this. [wins fight with guitar] (No Children)