2024-04-12 The Palace

Setlist

Recording

• Azo Tle Nelli in Tlalticpac?
• Sicilian Crest
• Murder at the 18th St Garage
• Extraction Point
• Only One Way
• Lucretia My Reflection (cover)
• Waylon Jennings Live!
• Fresh Tattoo
• Against Agamemnon (JD solo)
• Island Garden Song (JD solo)
• Horseradish Road (JD solo)
• Jenny III
• From The Nebraska Plant
• The Diaz Brothers
• Bell Swamp Connection
• Cotton
• Only Takes A Few
• No Children
• This Year
• The Slow Parts on Death Metal Bands (encore)
• First Blood (encore)
• International Small Arms Traffic Blues (encore)
• Palmcorder Yajna (encore)
• Up The Wolves (encore)

Banter

• This is a song mainly about a murder at the 18th street garage. It's called Murder At The 18th St. Garage. (Murder at the 18th St. Garage)
• That song [Murder at the 18th St. Garage] only has one dead body in it. This one has a few more. (Extraction Point)
• This song takes place in the land where our liberties we prize and our rights we shall maintain. And those of you who are from Minnesota but recognize that as the Iowa state motto, I respect that! This song takes place down in Iowa, most likely around Tama county, but. It's about a fella who figures there's no better place to hide from the Federales than central Iowa. And y'know, he's right until he's wrong. He's just watching Waylon Jennings play and waiting for the cops to show up, circa 1998. (Waylon Jennings Live!)
• I would like to play some perilously old songs for you all. [raucous cheering] (Against Agamemnon)
• If you wanted a Kawasaki 750 Turbo, chances were it was actually assembled in Nebraska. This is called From the Nebraska Plant. (From The Nebraska Plant)
• Like so many songs in the American tradition about people who pass out and have a vision, this one is called Bell Swamp Connection. (Bell Swamp Connection)
• It's that time. This is the altar call part, now it's time to talk to you all about your eternal destiny. Nah, I'm not gonna do that. That's my solemn pledge to you. I may wanna talk to you about your eternal destiny, but I will forego this. To tell you instead about a song that a friend sent to me who was making a TV show and he said, hey, I was pals with Jonathan Larson and I got these songs he was working on when he died. Jonathan Larson is the guy who did Rent. So he'd left behind a bunch of demos, and my buddy sends me one, says, you think the Mountain Goats should do this? And it sounded New Wave. And I said, well yes, I have a New Wave bassist, in fact. [Peter does a cool bass thing, audience cheers]. This is that song, it's called Only Takes A Few. (Only Takes A Few)
• The difference between the Mountain Goats and the Grateful Dead among other things, is that we don't hurl abuse at you while we tune. Because it's uncouth. Casting no aspersions on the members of that fine band. Jack Straw from Wichita, [unintelligible]. I was on interstate 35 in Iowa, going to the airport, heading down the Merle Hay Road. Used to be a car dealer out there, everybody who ever lived in Iowa knows the song. [sings] the mile, the mile, the miracle mile, the Merle Hay Auto Mile. Those were all the lyrics to the song. This must have been in the year 2000, maybe early 2001. A British label called 4AD had called me up and said - this is how labels work - they said 'what would you do if you were gonna make an album for us'? And it's like - a job interview question. I'm like, I dunno, do Mountain Goats songs? But no, you can feel - there's an answer. It's job interview style. You're supposed to come up with an answer. So I said, well, I used to write these songs about this divorcing couple. Always sure thought it would be funny to give them a whole album and make it as brutal as possible. That was the right answer to the interview question, so we got the 4AD contract and I started writing songs. By the time I'm on 35 driving to the airport a couple months later, I'm thinking about nothing but this divorcing couple. All the time. They are living inside my brain for the first time in about six years. It's uncomfortable, but it's a groove, you know. But in the meantime I'm listening to Iowa radio. Iowa Public Radio is cool, but after that, it was some lean pickings in the 2000s. I worked in the nursing profession, and all the nurses I worked with liked this kind of song. It went, [sings several stanzas of I Hope You Dance over No Children groove that the band is rocking in] ...and when you get the choice to sit it out or dance...I knew the Mountain Goats had to write an answer song to this. 1-2-3, 1-2-3. (No Children)

I was there on the front barricade in the Peter Pit and it fucking ruled.

Videos