Wear Black[1]
Lyrics
Rain every day
Fog all night
Wind in the evergreen cypresses[2]
See me, Lord of Wind and Rain[3]
See me, guardian of the Underpasses
Wear black when it's light outside
Wear black when there's no light
Wear black following the left hand path[4]
Wear black when I get right
Waves at night
Hard waves at dawn
All this coast is vanishing[5]
Check me out, I can't blend in
Check me out, I'm young and ravishing
Wear black on your forgotten radar
Wear black in the present tense
Wear black when you come around
Wear black in your[6]
absence
Wear black high as a kite (wear black)
Wear black dead sober (wear black)
Wear black when the trouble starts (wear black)
Wear black when it's over (wear black)
Sun through the trees
Head for the sun
Can't find the path back to the main road
See me, Lord of The Thomas Guide[7]
See me, Keeper of the Source Code*[8][9]
Wear black to the intervention
Wear black back to the car
Wear black wherever I go
Wear black wherever you are
Banter
- It used to be if you heard me say ‘this is a true story’ during like a solo set or something and then I sing some song about a guy who had horse head or something, you’d say, 'Oh, well John’s being funny.’ No, it’s just that the true stories- it’s harder to figure out where exactly I sit. But this… this is a true story. It takes place in Portland in February of 1986. (2017-05-25)
- So, the Mountain Goats are a band, but there's one guy with a 51% vote. It's not Peter. The Mountain Goats are notoriously resistant to unnecessary change. For example, we didn't have a drummer for 12 years. So you'll notice like every other fuckin' band you ever see, behind the drummer, there's a big backdrop that says the band's name. I feel like, personally, y'know, they kinda know who you are. SBut then people present the case to me, look, it's cool. It adds to the staging. And I go, plegh, staging. The weak need staging. But on the Goths tour I ahve been trying to be open to the haze machine a little bit. But after hte fourth song, I'm like, that's enough on the fog machine. So Jordan, who just brought me tequila, please give it up for Jordan, he's a good dude [crowd obliges], he comes on, and I say, hey man, can you tell them to back off the fog machine a little bit, then I look at Peter, and say, what song is it? He says, oh, Wear Black, so I say, oh, can you leave the haze machine on for one more track. If there's one thing I love in this world, it's an enabler. (2017-06-01 The Fillmore)
- There’s people in this room that knew me when I was a child. There’s at least one person in this room who knew me when I was a young child who wanted both to embrace the fantastic things in life - the dragons and unicorns - but was also beginning to adopt a sort of hard and dangerous shell, which was a pose. You learn later when you get into heavy metal that there’s no room for posers. Prior to that, if you’re struggling to establish any kind of identity, you learn to pose and to pose very hard indeed. There is a case to be made for posing. When I moved up to Portland, Oregon in 1985, I was a deeply damaged person and I couldn’t stand for people to see my eyes and I wore aviator shades for nine months. I had, like, intimate relationships with people who never saw my eyes. Most of them are dead now. (2017-06-02)
Live Performances
Footnotes
1. "Wear Black is partly about when I wore dark sunglasses, dark clothes and white oxfords and walked around looking like an undertaker. That's what I looked like in Portland." (JD, 2017 interview)↩
2. Cypress is a symbol of grief in ancient Greece; this comes from the myth of Cyparissus as told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, book 10. Cyparissus is turned into a cypress tree by his lover Apollo after accidentally killing his beloved stag. ↩
3. Likely a reference to "Here I Am, Lord", a popular Christian (originally Catholic?) hymn with a lyric that begins “I the Lord of sea and sky”. It goes pretty hard and was always a banger in my Protestant church as a kid, only outstripped by the one set to "Finlandia". ↩
4. The left hand path is a concept in occultism, typically associated with dark or malicious magic. See also Hindu/Tantric vāmācāra or vāmamārga. ↩
5. "Vanishing coast" is a term in habitat ecology referring to erosion and loss of wetlands.↩
6. The "you" here is God, per authorial intent. "There are two songs, “Unicorn Tolerance” and “Wear Black,” with “you,” the second person or addressee, where I went back and forth on whether to capitalize the “Y” or not. If I didn’t capitalize the “Y” it’s only because I wanted people to figure it out, right? I don’t like to telegraph my punches." (2017 interview)↩
7. The Thomas Guide was a series of paper atlases of Southern California.↩
8. Source code is the underlying programming of a computer, that the user typically does not interact with or see. ↩
9. "Undying keeper of the source code" (2017-06-01), "risen, keeper of the source code" (2019-05-07)↩