The New Hydra Collection
Lyrics
Down in the lab
With the hopeful few
Hell bent on doing
The work that you cowards won't do
Weaving the future
From bright new threads
Prices on their heads
Someday the abomination
Is going to finally make land
We stay silent as a snowdrift
Focused [waiting] on the task at hand
Dream of the day
When the calm waters break
And something rises from the lake
Someday, all of you people will know
The safe way isn't the only way to go
Movement in the grid
As fish leap [rise] in the air
It's only a test run
And still the tension's too delicious to bear
All around the monitor station
Big smiles, high fives
According to my projections
Everybody's going to run for their lives
Still we wait until our time has come
Down here where the engines hum
Exiled priests of Rome
Bringing our troubles back home
Someday, all of you people will know
The safe way isn't the only way to go
Banter
- This is off the new one, Dark in Here. [Woo!] Thank you. You may know this but we recorded that March....like, 7th through 15th, 2020. I like, I had played what turned out to be the last three Mountain Goats shows that would happen for a long time, in San Francisco in February. And I had played a song whose chorus ran 'All of you must die', and some people asked me if I was singing about this new virus that was around. 'Ah, no, c'mon, that would be rude, y'know'. And that was the first sorta hint of it, people asking in San Francisco about this thing. But we had two albums to record, we did the first one in Memphis, things seemed pretty mellow in Memphis. Then we drove down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, quite a place to be at the outset of a pandemic. Beautiful place where people don't believe in pandemics a lot of the time. And so, I don't actually mean to dismiss Alabama. The thing is, Alabama fucking kicks ass and there's a lot of great working people in Alabama to whom the state rightly belongs. But for 200 something years, people with a lot of money have managed to suppress their voices and votes. It's actually a great place. But having said that, there's plenty of yahoos who were like, making a run on toilet paper while we were down there, like, you'd go to the CVS and it'd be cleared out on the hand sanitizer and the kleenex, and you'd think, that's not gonna help really, and we were down there, and a lot of the songs had this apocalyptic tone. And I remember recording this, this is a song about some people creating a monster and trying to unleash it upon the land. (2021-08-18 The Black Sheep)
Live Performances
Footnotes