In Memory of Satan

Lyrics

Got my paintbox out last night
Stayed up late and wrecked this place
Woke up on the floor again
Cellphone stuck to the side of my face

Dead space on the other end
Perfect howl of emptiness
Cast my gaze around the room
Someone needs to clean up this mess

Tape up the windows
Call in a favor from an old friend

Make some scratches on my floor
Crawl down on my hands and knees
In old movies people scream
Choking on their fists when they see shadows like these
But no one screams 'cause it's just me
Locked up in myself
Never gonna get free

Something sacred, something blue
Cannons in the harbor dawn
I crawled down here to dig for bones[1]
One more season then I'm gone

Black drapes over the crosses
Call in a favor from an old friend[2]

Banter

• I have narcissistic and unrealistic dreams of this song being used at children’s birthday parties in the future. (2012-05-06)
• This is a song about how you look back on when it was necessary in your life to worship the dark powers and evoke them and hold them and possess them inside of you because you had a choice: you could resist the dark powers inside of you and then feel defeated all day or you could embrace and accept them and carve an interior pentagram in your brain. And then you say to yourself: "That's who I am right now. I don't have to be that person forever, but that's who I am these days." This is a powerful moment if you've had one like it. Or two. Or several over the course of many long seasons. (2012-10-15 Bowery Ballroom)
• Short version is it's about how you have to worship the devil sometimes. It's not that song. Different kind of worship, same kind of devil. It's about the evil things inside you that you have to learn to celebrate and live with and think of as a part of the whole that makes up you instead of rejecting them because you won't be able to shake them and sometimes they will need to be, as we say in our Wiccan circles, honored. And I frequent several Wiccan circles. My dancing is celebrated at them. (2012-10-16 Bowery Ballroom)
• We’d like to play a song about how when you remember the times that were so dark that you couldn’t really believe how dark and alone and horrible they were, that they are sort of a time that it feels as though you were in league with dark powers and you made a bargain with them to get out. And you feel like you’re always somehow in debt to those dark powers because maybe they were horrible at the time but somehow or another, they had to be complicit in getting you out of there or you wouldn’t be here today. (2012-12-14)
• This is a song about making a contract with your solitude that you want to hold it to later on and expect to be able to wag your finger and say, ‘You said.’ (2013-01-15)
• This is also a song about those periods that you go through in your life when you are totally mentally ill, right. But I’m serious, because I really strongly think that, like, I think there’s two- well I generally resist there’s ‘two kind of people in this world’ ideas, you know, because I think that can’t be true. If that’s true, then it’s just a football game and we should all play a gigantic football game and whoever wins gets all the toys. But I think there are people who struggle with feeling that they can’t keep it together and then there’s people who are lying. But you have those times, especially for me, if you’re living by yourself where you sort of retreat into your own self a little too hard accidentally, right. And then before you know it, it happens very quietly where you’re suddenly, like, somebody calls you and says, 'Hey man, I was thinking about going to breakfast at Larry’s. You want to go to Larry’s?’ And you just immediately, without thinking about it, go, 'Nah, I don’t think so.“ And this means that you have sort of entered into this other realm. Whereas a month ago, you would have said, 'Yeah, Joe, let’s go to Larry’s. Why not?’ And now, no. This is your best friend, he knows you very well. You could show up in whatever condition you want to and he will understand. But now you’re just instinctively now saying no to everybody because you have now come to this sort of relationship with the room that you live in. And the room has it’s own needs. And it is funny in retrospect, but at the time, it’s this sort of weird dark pact that you make. I consider that environment Satanic in the extreme and when you leave that place, you remember it with fear and trembling. (2013-06-22)
• Everybody has a time they spend in darkness, and in that time they meet the darkness and personify it, and shake hands with it, and make a deal with it in some way. (2013-06-28 The Soapbox)
• This is a song about how, when things are going very badly for you, like really badly for you in your personal life, not in your relationships – I mean that's part of it – but it's all rolled into one, right, because things are bad in your head, and in your heart, and in your body, and everywhere. Like bad, terrible. And you reach this point of stasis with it, and then it begins to feel like progress. It's not like you're getting better, but you're getting better at not being well, right? [Audience laughs.] But I mean, it's funny now, right? At the time, it's maybe less funny. At the time, it feels more like demon possession. But it feels like the moment of demon possession where you go, 'Man, if I'm gonna be possessed by a demon, then fuck it. Let's just demonically possess this world. Let's just do the things we demon-possessed people do. If people can't handle my possessed self, that's between them and whatever god they worship, but as for me, in my house, we shall worship the devil.' That's what you say, right? [Audience cheers.] But this is the thing I'm always trying to point out. We say 'woo!' about that, but the devil I'm talking about is not the devil you actually like, it's not the devil of whiskey and smokes or whatever. It's the devil who stands between you and the things you hoped to become. The devil who stands between you and your better self. The one with whom you form an allegiance at some point in your life, because you can't escape him any other way. And then later, you recall this time with great trembling. And this is called 'In Memory of Satan.' (2014-06-14 Bottom of the Hill)
• This is a song about how you remember your times that you spent in the thrall of the evil that lives inside of you. We identify these evils as external evils because it’s a lot easier than suggesting that your dark times actually are a function of some… thing that’s always in there, like the Blob. It’s like, no matter how hard you freeze it, you know, it somehow thaws and comes out and ruins you for season after season. But it’s never permanent; it feels like it’s going to be permanent, but it’s not permanent. But it feels like it is. And you get away from it and you remember, ‘Oh, that was- that was a dark demon running my house at that time.' (2015-04-22)
• This is the other one from Transcendental Youth. It's about something I assume [giggles] One key to my songs is that I assume they're all universal and they're not. But then I would contend that the narrator of this song is doing something everybody does, as people just do it without obvious signs and signals. So this is about that sort of time in your life when you notice you're not calling your friends. At all. Or answering the phone when they call you. Because you don't want to talk to anybody or see anybody or be with anybody for an extended period of time. (2021-08-08 The Saturn)
• [the sustain pedal is not working] This piano is offering us two choices: permanent sustain, or none. The piano is a metaphorical character in a Mountain Goats song. You can have all of it all the time, or none of it ever. [audience: sustain forever!!] Matt Douglas as a musician is less interested in the theoretical possibilities of the all or nothing position. [poking keys] You remember seeing Peter Pan as a kid? You know how when Tinkerbell dies, you have to believe hard for Tinkerbell to not die? Give your love to sustain pedal, I hope the sustain pedal is trying so hard to [unintelligible]. [sustain pedal works! cheering] (2022-09-20 Saturn)

Live Performances

• 2012-10-16 Bowery Ballroom
• 2013-06-28 The Soapbox)
• 2021-08-08 The Saturn (recording)
• 2022-09-20 Saturn

Footnotes