2019-04-30 Brooklyn Steel
Setlist
Recording
Banter
- The studio sessions for the Coroner's Gambit largely didn't get released 'cause I got sick on the Greyhound bus on the way out to the session, so most of them were not usable. Though if you listen to Elijah, and if you listen to it with the right ear, you go, oh wow, that dude is really sick, huh? Yes he is! Not anymore. He got better. But the original version of the title track was a considerably faster thing, it was a contrast between the fact that it's about a friend who died, and about the appeal of the death that eventually calls. (The Coroner's Gambit)
- This is a song that I feel has a universal sentiment. It's about how when you consider the situation with your enemies and yourself, and you say, well I hope that someday my dragon protector will come and incinerate them all. And I hope that from my position at the top of the hill, I can see their torment but not hear it, because that would be a little too much, and I'd like to think I preserve the scrap of decency that I had before I adopted this dragon protector who now stands between me and those who would do me harm. (In League With Dragons)
- This song is off Heretic Pride. And I don't know what to tell you about it, if there's two categories of Mountain Goats songs, and one of those categories is "the one where you wonder, is this gonna be the night? is he gonna have a stroke on stage right now?" This is one of those ones. [cheering] And I celebrate a people who anticipate my death as ardently as I myself do. (Sax Rohmer #1)
- I never - I don't have a sense from town to town of where they more wanna hear the super old stuff and where they don't. [cheering] And beyond that, it's like, if you think too much about that, it's not cool, because then it would be pandering, so you have to play whatever's in your mind. And then you think to yourself, if you have three super old ones, you think, God, I wonder if there's like, a town that's the town of the super old song partisans. 'Why couldn't I have been at the New York show?' You can't think too much - you can think too much about that, you are free, you know, you have the freedom God gave you, so you can think too much about whatever you want, really. I'm living proof of that. Anyway, this was on the second tape. (Spilling Towards Alpha)
- The first place in New York I ever laid eyes on was Port Washington, Long Island. (Going to Port Washington)
- Sometimes when people yell requests, like, a bunch of people request something, and there'll be one dude who will say PLAY WHATEVER YOU WANNA PLAY. But that is actually the most confounding request of them all. Then you say, well, what DO I wanna play? And that's like a 5 minute question. Sit down with a notebook and the internet and think about things. You can't really do that on stage - well, you CAN, because people have no standards now, but generally speaking if you are using the internet on stage you are fucking up. Do not do that. I don't care what your purpose - just don't. This has been my masterclass. Totally free. But I think about it, I get home from tour and think, ah, that one dude in Pittsburgh yelled 'play what you wanna play' and you couldn't think of what you wanted to play so you just played something else, but what do you actually want to play? And today I was thinking about this when I was writing this - usually, down deep in my gut, this is the one I want to play. Because I'm a goth. (Maybe Sprout Wings)
- I've had another brief insight in between dissociative moments in that one [Maybe Sprout Wings] where I realized that, I mean, most of my songs have some level of sad in them. But the saddest Mountain Goats songs are not the ones in which people wanna die. Because those people know that they will be free. The saddest Mountain Goats songs are the ones where the narrator knows he's not gonna die. and that this could conceivably go on for decades after this. This next song actually belongs to the first category. You can hear, there's a little bit of jubilation in knowing that it will soon be over. The end won't be pretty but it will be an end. It will surprise exactly no one to know that I wrote the first line to this one at a stoplight while listening to an album called Honky Tonk Heroes by Waylon Jennings. (Waylon Jennings Live!)
- This is a song about how it's important that we all make ourselves present at the prosecutor's hearing to plead our case for clemency for the wizard king. It's called Clemency for the Wizard King. (Clemency for the Wizard King)
- This is a song off of - people ask whether you nurse grievances. I try not to. But I do remember the Pitchfork review of this album. It was 2004 and we were very proud of our new album. The Pitchfork reviewer who really liked old Mountain Goats was less stoked. And he made his displeasure known. I disagreed with him then and I disagree with him now. The album is called We Shall All Be Healed. And this is one of the songs where I was like, c'mon, we did something kind of different, but all you hear is now there's piano and you're mad. (Cotton)
- [audience request] I wish I could hear you. [more unintelligible audience] So we're doing in-ear monitors this tour, which everybody else transitioned to 10 years ago. And for me, there's many things about them that are bad. And if you have the misfortune of getting 5 minutes alone with me you will hear many of them. BUt one of the worst things is that generally speaking there's a give and take between things that you say and that the things that I say back. Though on bad nights that gets out of control, where you want to say, 'NO sir, you have said four things already. This is not actually a private conversation between you and me. We can do that later, but no we can't also. But now when you yell, all I hear is, um, like the teacher on Charlie Brown. I'm grateful I hear the tone but I don't know what you said. I wanna say this song is about that but it's not at all. That would just be a good transition. This song is about a dog that they bring in to find corpses. (Cadaver Sniffing Dog)
- JD: Peter, I have a question.
Peter: [off mic]
JD: You gotta say it in the mic or I can't hear you.
Peter: What is the question?
JD: So, this song is normally an acoustic guitar song, but I've been curious all night, does it work on the Gibson or no? Should we go for it, or should we do what we already know how to do?
Audience: [cheers enthusiastically]
Peter: Uh, I don't see any reason why it couldn't work on the Gibson.
JD: Let's fuckin' do it, let's scrap the rest of the night, I think that'll make me the only Gibson playing when I mention a Gibson. Cool. This song is sung by Ozzy Osbourne. It's important to the song that you know that. Most people would like, put some sorta notation about that in the song, in the booklet, with the record, or whatever, I myself am hoping that you guess from the references, because that is me. So Ozzy, I don't know how intimate you are with Ozzy's developmental arc, but '75, kinda rough year for the Oz, 'cause Quaaludes are going out of fashion and cocaine is coming in. This was an even harder turn for the Grateful Dead to navigate five years later, but that will be the subject of a differnet song arc. I'll be focusing mainly on their 1980 album Go To Heaven, and its immortal airbrushed cover, but that's a different question. Anyway, so, there's a legendary show where somebody, I can't remember who, but I feel like it was, like, Graham BOnnet or somebody had to fill in for Ozzy, 'cause they couldn't find him. Cause he had passed out in the wrong hotel room. He had somehow gotten the concierge to give him somebody else's key and he went to the other room, and he ran out of steam, as you do when you're living on rails, and he passed out. So he couldn't make the show. I think - I find this story oddly inspirational, to actually completely miss your own show. That's a level of dedication to your addiction that even the hardened addicts will find hard to understand. And yet Ozzy was nowhere near done. That was just the beginning, only five years later he would be known to snort a line of ants. That, too, is a different song. (Passaic, 1975)
- This is a new-ish song and it is also a dance number. I encourage you to fully get down. It's also the last one we've got, it's called Sicilian Crest. I will set an example. (Sicilian Crest)
- JD: Thank you so much. I know that I have waxed poetic about this before, but you grow up on the West Coast and New York is this distant land where they judge you. You grow up in the perpetual shadow of New York. All the bands come to New YOrk before they come to LA, they come there a month before. By the time we get them they're tired. We like them tired, because that's how we are, but at the same time, you live constantly in the shadow of this place and to come here and to be welcomed as you have welcomed us. Thank you so much. This is on an album we recorded in upstate New York called Tallahassee, and it is called Have To Explode. If you push me this is probably my favorite song on the record. If you listen very closely to the recording, you can hear Peter Hughes, he's right there to my left, come in to the room with a sandwich while I am tracking the vocal and guitar. And a door creaks, and then he does this [presumably makes a face] and walks right back out.
Peter: You wanted a sandwich. [JD and Peter laugh]
JD: Yeah man! (Have To Explode)
- Man, I gotta be real with you, I'm very into the idea of the long encore right now. Why? I listen to too many Grateful Dead shows. And when you get very hardcore into Dead shows, you go, oh, wow, like the whole first set was just setting the table. And then weeding out the people who didn't mean it. That said, I suspect we have two left, because I'm not on Jerry's level. But I could probably be bullied into three. [Peter plays a bass riff that is cool, intro starts slow and quiet.] [Audience yells: THIS YEAR!] Well, that's probably gonnabe one of them. If you are the Grateful Dead in '72, you play He's Gone, that's just how it is. I thank all 10 people who got that for laughing. This is a song that I got the idea for at a stoplight while driving to the Des Moines International Airport to play the Athens Pop Fest in Athens Georgia. I was playing with the Music Tapes, and True Love Always, and Neutral Milk Hotel [woo!]. And there was a song called I Hope You Dance that was popular on the radio at the time. I hated that song so much. I mean, I hated it so bad. It was extraordinarily popular in Iowa, I was like, every time I heard it, I would get angrier. [Matt starts sneakily playing the melody to I Hope You Dance on the piano as the rest of the band continues Slow Children] I now acknowledge that was a personal defect, but at the time, it struck me at a virtue. I don't really do advice to the young, but I wanna say the things you think of as virtues may someday strike you as defects. And my antipathy toward this song was one such thing, but it did result in an ok song for the Mountain Goats, that I wrote the lyric to on the airplane to Athens, and then had to sit there for the weekend because I didn't write songs in hotel rooms because of a bunch of ridiculous rules for myself, and that was one of them. But I got home and struck a little double minor pattern, and then I went to the IV, and then the V, because that's what I do, and the song was called No Children. (No Children)
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