Lyrics
No one knows where the lone wolf[3] sleeps
No one sees the hidden treasure in the castle keep
No one learns the secret name[4]
No one burns in the absent flame
No one broke D.B. Cooper’s fall[5]
No one hopes to hear the bagman[6]
call
Children piping in the main square
But no one’s dancing
No one’s dancing down there[7]
The river goes where the water flows[8]
But no one knows when the Batcave closed[9]
The river goes where the water flows
But no one knows when the Batcave closed
No promise sweeter than a blood pact
Nothing harder to go through with than a vanishing act
No morning colder than the first frost
No friends closer than the ones we’ve lost
Nothing sharper than a serpent’s tooth[10]
Nothing harder than the gospel truth
Though you repent and don sackcloth[11][12]
and try to make nice
You can’t cross the same river twice[13]
The river goes where the water flows
But no one knows when the Batcave closed
The river goes where the water flows
But no one knows when the Batcave closed
There’s a club where you’d like to go[14]
You could meet someone who’s lost like you
Revel in the darkness like a pair of open graves
Fumble through the fog for a season or two
No town more barren than our town
No haven safer than the one they tore down[15]
No greater love than to lay my life down for a friend[16]
No sweeter pleasure than to see the credits clear through to the end
No one knows where the lone wolf’s gone[17]
No one sees him camped out right there on the front lawn
We played for you but you would not sing[7]
No one was gonna get away with anything
The river goes where the water flows
But no one knows when the Batcave closed
The river goes where the water flows
But no one knows when the Batcave closed
Banter
- "When I was 16," [people woo] "There wasn't a lot to say 'woo' about when I was 16. When I was 16, we would buy magazines from England to find out what was going on. Because I lived on the west coast, and the west coast just worshipped London. We would look to London for what we were supposed to do. We had to do that because we felt that when we looked to New York for what we were supposed to do, it would make us feel bad about ourselves. We'd look further east and we would see the people with their gigantic teased up hair and say 'well, we're gonna look like that only we'll tease it up higher.' We'd see people with like, tasteful kohl underneath their eyes and say 'what if we smear it down like this, like we're dead or have been attacked, or something like that,' and that was our whole scene. When I was 16, we heard about a place called the Bat Cave. The Bat Cave was a tiny little club, a hole in the wall, you can see epictures of it now and it doesn't look nearly as glamorous at it sounded when it was just these articles saying, "well, it's all going down at the Bat Cave, Lydia Lunch and Nick Cave have a thing going on called the Immaculate Consumptive, and y'all should come on over and see it.' And on the west coast, we go, 'well I can't go over and see it, but I can look at the magazines and maybe outlive you all.'" (2017-11-12 Brooklyn Steel)
Live Performances
Footnotes
1. Soho is the entertainment district in London, England and the location of the Batcave club.↩
2. The song premiered on NPR and features the Nashville Symphony Chorus. See here for the relevant interview.↩
3. Not, as noted in an interview, a reference to any other wolves in the Mountain Goats canon. JD just likes wolves. Which is fair, they’re cool.↩
4. Possibly the Tetragrammaton - the secret name of God that has been lost to time.↩
5. DB Cooper is a famous plane hijacker who, in 1971, stole $200,000 and jumped out of the plane, never to be found again. Cooper is the subject of many conspiracy theories and many potential identities have been put forward; he probably died due to jumping out of a plane into the wilderness.↩
6. A “bagman” is an archaic term for traveling salesman. Merriam Webster defines the term as “broadly, an intermediary in an illicit or unethical transaction”.↩
7. See Luke 7:32 (“They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.”) A similar story is told in Matthew 11:17, which is referenced in “Matthew 11:14-19” on 'The Life of the World In Flux'.↩
8. See Ezekiel 47:9 (“And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh.)↩
9. The Batcave, a club in Soho, London that hosted many goth bands mentioned in the album, closed in 1985. Presumably this lyric refers to the spiritual end of the goth era, not the exact date the Batcave closed. Also a very cool name in re the Batman comics.↩
10. As neat as this would be as a reference to the Star Trek animated series episode called “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth”, it is presumably a reference to King Lear Act 1 Scene 4, “"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!" JD is a known fan of King Lear, and has hitherto unknown feelings about Star Trek: The Animated Series.↩
11. A symbol in the Old Testament of debasement and humbling oneself, see Jonah 3:5 (“The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.”) and Luke 10:13 (“”For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.”)↩
12. The Sisters of Mercy, who appear many times in this album, sang about donning sackcloth in their song “Flood I” ("In a flood of your tears, in sackcloth/And ashes and ashes and ashes and ashes/And ashes and ashes and lies....")↩
13. A reference to Heraclitus, “no man ever steps into the same river twice for it is not the same river and he is not the same man”.↩
14. An allusion (and possibly a riposte) to the Smiths song “How Soon Is Now”, where they sing “There’s a club if you’d like to go/You could meet somebody who really loves you”.↩
15. One of the shirts for the tour features a depiction of Alaric I (king of the Visigoths) sacking Rome in 410. This lyric could be parsed as a parallel to the Batcave and other goth clubs (a haven for outcasts) closing.↩
16. See John 15:13, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”↩
17. Again, nothing to do with other wolves, they’re just cool and make for good imagery.↩