2023-10-02 Belly Up Tavern
Notes
Isa Burke, John Darnielle, Matt Douglas, Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster
Setlist
Recording (Taper: Tape & Bake)
Banter
- This is a love song. I would like to dedicate it to violent and prolonged death. (Dark In Here)
- JD: (off mic) Peter Hughes, what are we playing next?
Peter: (off mic, sounding surprised) Fresh Tattoo!
JD: (off mic) He'll tell ya! (back on mic) I got so excited when I wrote this song. Because it took like two days, three. If you listen to old mountain goats songs, those took three minutes. You are listening to how long it took to write the song. This one I remember working through the bridge and going, oh, it's going somewhere. This is the song in which Jenny takes a boarder. It's called Fresh Tattoo. (Fresh Tattoo)
- (off mic) It helps so much to be in the right key. (on mic) You hear, I won't name any names, but you hear about singers who have had their songs pitched lower as they age. Three weeks ago I sent an email to the band saying, can we play that one a step higher. Score one for the Mountain Goats, minus one for all the other bands. My new brand is hating on all the other bands. (Night Light)
- JD: I'm asking Matt about the chord changes, because I would always watch for these two to switch places. [Plays two piano chords, a Cm and Fm] Which one will come first? It's, it's, y'know, that's the fun of the song.
Matt (I think): It's a surprise!
JD: Everybody finds the song really fun for that reason. The band loves it. What chord's he gonna go to, I wonder, they say to themselves. They're super into it. They send me physical mail about it: John, thanks for going to the C minor when it was an F minor in the song [very close to mic] you wrote. This is called Before I Got There. It's actually my favorite one. [three people woo] So were the three people who said woo, those are my people. I love it so much that I refuse to learn the chord sequence. I feel that would be a violation of the intimacy between myself and the song. (Before I Got There)
- [Plays opening chords on piano] Look at me going to the right key! Pretty stoked about that! As you may notice, we're playing a bunch of songs from the new record, which is not out yet. Don't tell anybody. Cause this is the only show we're gonna do that at. That would be great. They played five from the new record at San Diego, and then no matter how much they asked after that, like, no. (Cleaning Crew)
- Here's a thought exercise. I'm the only person who thinks it's funny but I've thought it was funny before. What if, we do the solo section, there's people who are like, ah, cool, now maybe we'll get to hear some of the older stuff, and I played three Beatles covers. [woo!] No, you say woo now, I don't care how much you like the Beatles, by the third Beatles cover you'd say, this is not as good as the Beatles version. Really. I'm not sure what the function of this is. and I'd be like, this is called Help. [JD giggles and plays an open chord]. Sorry. That's the only thing I know about Help, that it opens with a big open chord. I don't plan the middle section so it's like, really awkward. YOu gotta have some awkward energy to get through. [woo] YOu can go to stadium shows and spend a lot more money to have no awkwardness at all. If you came here tonight, you must want some awkward pauses and so forth. (Transjordanian Blues)
- The person who played the melodica on the original of this isn't here but I'd like to think of her while I play it. I was in Paris, France, in 2003, I think, and well, I think it's time for a long story. If you gotta plug the parking meter or something, I won't be offended. I know, like all men in my family, once I start talking you never know how long it's going to last. But, Paris, in 2003, and they were having a heat wave. I wanna say a tropical heat wave but that's not true. Just a heat wave. And they weren't used to that over there. They probably are now, because the planet's warming and we're eventually all gonna boil. [approximately three people woo] Three guys cheer. I'm sorry, it's going badly for you fellas, I'll be thinking a good thought for you not wanting to be boiled in your own skin. So I go to Paris and there'd been a thing that seemed very sort of European, said this'll be a week long thing, and you'll be at this place called Mont Doux (??) which has since actually burned to the ground, I"m sorry to hear about that. It was a pretty special week when they said, come on over, and you'll recird some stuff, and there'll also be opportunity for collaboration. Now I'm more agreeable than I was when I was younger, but I'm still a pretty cantankerous guy. And I think, I'm not looking to make any new friends, thanks. But they like this, in Europe, they like the idea of throwing a couple of musicians in a room and seeing what happens. This is sort of the opposite of what I have done most of my career. I meet one person and I make music with them. And then ten years later, we add a drummer. But, they were bent on it. You're gonna work with other musicians. And I dunno, I don't know any of these people, and I met Kimye Dawson there. [woo!!] and Kimya remembers, and I don't want to believe her, but I'm sure she's telling the truth, that the first thing I said to her was "I don't work well with others". [laughing from JD and crowd] So she's a really open person who registers what you say when you say it to her, so she goes 'well, good to meet you," and then we went in to record, in this complex, with a bunch of recording studios. I went in to do my thing, write some songs, one of the things, you put me in a room with a notebook and you get a song in about an hour. I sat down to work on a song and Kimya sort of weaseled in, and stood up against the wall with a melodica and this was the song I wrote there, I wrote based on a sign that I saw on the Paris subway, and what it said was - I can't pronounce French at all - Attention Aux Pickpockets, which means beware of pickpockets, but I called the song 'Attention All Pickpockets'. (Attention All Pickpockets)
- [JD's guitar breaks, Ben the tech fixes it, much cheering]
JD: Ben, what do you do for a living? I lick batteries for the Mountain Goats. [laughing, drum fill, guitar works, more cheering]
Peter, ben has licked the battery and made it feel better. To Peter, I said, what am I gonna do now, and he says, you're playing piano now. So.
Peter: It's alright, Ben was gonna have to lick the battery at some point. [laughing]
JD: Better to get it out of the way. There's several Ted Nugent album covers that would agree with that general theme. That's what this song is really about. Right, Jon?
Wurster, yelling due to his criminal lack of mic: that's right! (Clean Slate)
- Peter says to me one day two years ago, you have to write songs with more relatable content. [laughing] Out of nowhere he calls me from Rochester New York [Peter laughs] dead winter, says, John, we need relatable content. So I told Peter, I just wrote a song about being servile and respectful in the presence of our robot overlords. He says, that's what I'm talking about! (Incandescent Ruins)
- With only the sick, sick, sick, sick fills, Mr. Jon Wurster! [Wurster plays cool drums, crowd cheers loudly and several cries of "SICK!!" are heard.] Sick. I should be better at staging, this is the last song on the set list, I should know what it is and go right into it, but I had to pause, and get, oh god I'm going to do this, and get, if you will, Down With The Sickness. That's by Disturbed, Peter. (Up the Wolves)
- When I think about this song, sometimes I think about a lawyer I went to see once. When I did not have enough money to pay the retainer. I was facing a three year charge, and I didn't like my chances. I was young and real dumb, and I thought, maybe they'll feel very agreeable that day, and he'll just pro bono this. He did not pro bono this, and I got three years supervised probation. But in the courtroom, you see all kinds of people waiting for their turn in the halls, in the wooden benches. Gathering up energy to testify in divorce court. I would wager, that some of the people I walked past leaving the courtroom on the day Roy Orbison died, learning that I was gonna have to pee in a cup for three years, I would wager that some of the people I walked past that day have sung this song since then. (No Children)
- Mountain Goats songs don't get used in a lot of TV shows. I was ecstatic when Weeds said, oh, we'll take this song, and we'll have three different couples having sex to it. (International Small Arms Traffic Blues)