Last night, I decided that I don't listen to enough of the music I buy. I must have twenty albums I've never heard. I don't just want to listen to it, though. I want to understand it, too; get into it, archive it in my mind, add it to my conception of music. And since the St. John's program made me read more than I would otherwise, I adopted it.

Th. 4-3
The Mountain Goats, Full Force Galesburg

Mon. 4-7
The White Stripes, Elephant

Th. 4-10
Yo La Tengo, Electr-O-Pura

Mon. 4-14
The Manic Street Preachers, Generation Terrorists

Et cetera. Or something like this.

I don't imagine anyone else does this sort of thing, except for music journalists, I suppose. After I get done with The Manics (which I want to know thoroughly in case I end up actually going to Manchester with Elise, oh my God), I'll probably make it more systematic, so that I can see connections and influences among artists.

Anyway, tonight I listened to Full Force Galesburg many, many times, and I will tell you about it. This blog will have a practical purpose. I don't want to merely talk about myself. Tonight I'll tell you about John Darnielle.

The sleeve comes with a paragraph-long story of sorts, full of images (just like his songs). "Old barn, strange sounds. Gin. Sunlight. Almost broke my own heart down there in Vicksburg." This culminates in John and a woman getting a motel room half an hour past Iowa on the other side of the Mississippi. He says "these songs are about what made that moment either possible or inevitable, depending on how you look at it." Okay, then. Is this a concept album? A song-cycle? Is he just flat out lying? It seems to be something between the second and the third. This album is close to a song cylce, but the songs are just a bit too disconnected for even that loose term. If there is a story, it is not clear, but the emotions in the songs are related and there are possibly two characters running through the album. (Oh, by the way, "Full Force Gale" is a Van Morrison song. I'm certain John Darnielle loves Van Morrison.)

The album starts with "New Britian." I can't tell if this song's immediecy comes from the song writing, or just its placement at the beginning of the album. Mountain Goats songs frequently feel like a fresh start, getting my attention on the words, keeping my mind on the song, involving my emotions. "New Britian" definitely grabs my attention, and its shadow lingers over the entire first side. It contains an image common on this album, that of watching the sun on the water; really the sun in general. The line "this morning I know who you are" haunts the rest of the first side. He doesn't say what he "knows" about the girl, but he seems vaguely uneasy with her. He says that he's not getting through to her, and that the things she tries to say make his blood run cold. If this album is a song cycle, it starts right in the middle. It seemed from the liner notes that it would involve two people traveling west, but in this song they're already on the Mississippi.

Next is "Snow Owl," which is the most beautiful song on the album. It has slow, pretty chords, and John plays a half-melody on the higher notes while strumming these chords. It's kind of like an acoustic Yo La Tengo. Someone plays a harmonica in the background, to little effect, really. The song is about a snow owl he happens to see out his window because he can't leave his house. It introduces a theme of the beauty of nature, as well as the failure of language when the beauty is too much to take: the owl "takes apart the alphabet letter by letter." If the first song is meant to introduce the story(if, indeed, there is one), this song is apparently outside of that story.

"West Country Dream" has music kind of like Violent Femmes: frenetic, tense pop. The lyrics seem to be about tension between a man and a woman, perhaps the same two characters from "New Britain." It contains the line "I know who I am, and I know who you are," which is a definite echo of that song. Their relationship seems to be on the skids, perhaps because they aren't talking to each other. This tension remains for most of the songs detailing their relationship. "New Britain" started out, "You've had it up to here with my west-country talk," and apparently here they are in the west country and she still doesn't care about his ideas. No one cares for John Darnielle. But we love you, John.

"Masher" is next, and it seems to yearn for a time before this tension. The key line in this song (not quite its chorus, but something close) is "I'm losing control over language again," which seems to be a result both of the love he felt for the girl and the awe he feels for nature (theme happening). He's losing "most of the things I used to hold on to/most of the things I used to say to you." This is yet another theme of the album, losing one's grasp of the world and over one's feelings. This is certainly something I've experienced, more than I want to at that. We love you, John.

"Chinese House Flowers" has some beautiful images, but the story of this song is unclear. My interpretation is that John is following the girl to see what she is doing; she is possibly cheating on him. The shade of the light reminds him of a specific moment when the gleam in her eyes made his blood freeze. "I want you more than I want anything," he says. "I want you the way you were." Not hard to interpret this line, certainly. She has changed, and perhaps fallen out of love with him, but he still loves her. Yep, I've been there before. Scott, you know you've been there. Oh, John. We love you even more.

"Ontario" again has the image of John's conception of the world disentegrating. "I thought I'd figured out the world and its circular way. Then I saw the sun fall out of the sky the other day." This fear of the sky falling comes up in a couple songs. John apparently feels like Chicken Little. Also, apparently orange tree blossoms pain him. I wonder why. This image seems potentially connected to the image of the sun falling out of the sky, but it's not clear.

Then there is "Down Here," which rocks. Electric guitar. Harmonies on the chorus. Earnest singing, even more earnest than usual. "It's all coming down, down here." We love you, John.

"Twin Human Highway Flares" tells the story of that motel room half an hour past Iowa. The songs on this album don't tell me what made this moment inevitable, but then, maybe it's one of those things you have to listen to fifty times before you get it. Like Trout Mask Replica or Black Foliage. At any rate, this is a beautiful song, and the images do a good job summing up the setting, characters, and situation; who needs prose? The chorus has a similar sentiment to "Source Decay" from All Hail West Texas, never wanting to forget an emotional event, everything about it, how it felt, precisely how it all looked. We love you, John.

"Weekend in Western Illinois" is the best song on the album. I want to cover it and play drums to it. There's an organ riff as good as the one on "What Goes On"! He sings about Galesburg! He calls rain "the sky opening up like an old wound"! Woo! He loves them dogs lolling in the rain! This song is so happy, the singing is so emotive, and it almost has a hook! We love you, John!

And then the story, such as it is, just packs up and leaves at this point. The remaining seven songs don't seem to reference the past events at all. The feelings and themes remain the same: disentegration of a relationship and a conception of the world, the beauty of nature (oh man, "the sky's gone crazy with stars"), west-country talk ("We're not as far west as you think we are"), memory and the effect of something distant in time on the present. A few of the songs perhaps have the same storyline we started out with, but "Evening in Stalingrad" is just . . . weird. How'd they get in Russia? They go to Chechnya for the weekend? The Chechan war had started by 1996, right? What the hell is going on here? The songs also get a bit repetitive, with similar tone, tempo, and rhythm, even lyrics; elsewhere, John usually varies those pretty effectively. But by the end of the album, there is no question that John Darnielle is the master of awesome. "It's All Here in Brownsville" wants to warn you that "it's all coming apart again." And it rocks, so you better listen to it.

I almost want to say that The Mountain Goats cross Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Springsteen, and Van Morrison. But really, although elements of his songwriting may be similar to these artists, his vision is all his own. I'm surprised he's not strictly a poet, since he really doesn't write songs; the lyrics are essentially all that matters. But then, he has an excellent, unique voice, and he's very good at matching his tone to an appropriate rhythm and chord structure. And if he were just a poet, we couldn't see him live on Saturday at The Talking Head.

We love you, John.