This Year (a mountain goats playlist, track 4)

a quick note: I went to see the mountain goats, I tried to write about it, it turned into something bigger, now short essays about mountain goats songs are an occasional feature on this newsletter. these songs are not in the order I would put them in if I were actually making a playlist. I’ll post a mountain goats intro playlist to spotify, and share it with all of you, soon. There will still be regular essays about other things from this newsletter (on Friday, probably).

The Mountain Goats are a word-of-mouth band; their fanbase is at its core a bunch of people passing notes to each other, making person-to-person recommendations. I would guess that the reason for a large percentage of their fans’ attachment is that they discovered the band when a friend played them one of the songs right when they really needed it, so that forever after the music seemed to be something that had appeared out of emotional necessity.

I probably never would have figured out where to start with them, and might never have listened to them at all, if a friend’s boyfriend, a person I had never met before and have never seen again since, hadn’t played The Sunset Tree on my laptop one night when both of them were staying at my apartment while they visited New York the year after I graduated from college (that these were friends from livejournal feels somehow on theme with The Mountain Goats, too). I was doing ok then, on that particular night, in the middle of that green and windy summer. But it would be a hard year, and by the end of it I would need this album more than I could have realized. 

However people find this band, I would guess that a lot of them start with The Sunset Tree. (If you haven’t listened to the Mountain Goats before and want to start with a whole album, you might want to try The Sunset Tree). Although it builds on the previous year’s We Shall All Be Healed (a less accessible album that I actually like better), it was something of a departure when it first came out in 2005. It is the band’s most straightforwardly autobiographical album, depicting Darnielle’s childhood relationship with his stepfather. In the liner notes, Darnielle names his late stepfather as the person who made the the album possible, wishes him “the peace which eluded you in life,” and then dedicates the album to “any young men and women who live with people who abuse them.”

The Sunset Tree doesn’t have an obscure theme or a hook or a gimmick. It doesn’t have any head-banging songs that remind you of the band’s origins in death metal. It barely even has any jokes. It is almost jarringly approachable. The whole thing sounds just a little bit more like all the other sad-boy-graduate-student-with-a-guitar bands who were popular at that time. The story in The Sunset Tree is discernible and real, and the songs are about the things they’re about, single paragraph confessions, clean as a bone. I’ll never remember why this person I never saw again put on this particular album, which wasn’t exactly new at that point, but the next day after they left I proceeded to download everything by the band that I could find. It felt so much like a gift, later, that it was difficult to remember that he hadn’t actually handed me something I could hold in my hands. 

If you don’t listen to the Mountain Goats, and have only ever incidentally heard of any of their songs, “This Year” is likely one of the two you have heard. It is among their biggest hits for very obvious reasons, namely a chorus -- I am gonna make it through this year, if it kills me -- so relatable that it barely seems to count as a piece of written text. I know people who scream along to this track every New Year’s Eve as the year turns over from one to the next. I love this because it is a profoundly pessimistic gesture, giving up right from the start. The song is not a pleasant emotion; no one needs this song if they are having a good year. The blessing “next year in Jerusalem” (which the song very nearly quotes just before it ends) is in fact a reference to the likelihood that next year will not be the year we find ourselves in Jerusalem. It is unlikely that the coming year will be meaningfully different from the past one, that circumstances or our reactions to them will improve or that our ability to move outside of the patterns of our own traumas and fatigue and habits will shift. The structures in which we live and work will probably not relent or suddenly prove merciful. There is no reason to expect miracles to fall from the sky. Singing this song in the first moments of a new year is not a defiant gesture but a resigned one, admitting that we are likely to need this song again, that this year, like the last one and the one before, is probably going to feel like it might to kill us. 

Even if you listen to it much later in the year, the hope its lyric offers is still something pulled up on deck breathless and gasping. Sometimes the greatest achievement is simply that you survived, but this doesn’t make basic survival any prouder or shinier or more fun. The story in the song’s verses is, in the immediate, an uneventful one: Two dirtbag teens hang out drinking and flirting and playing video games after the narrator has stolen his stepfather’s car, which he then drives home, drunk and thundering with youthful recklessness, to face the inevitable violent consequences. The story suggests a darker chapter follows, “the scene ends badly, as you might imagine, in a cavalcade of anger and fear,” but refuses to hold its camera’s focus on it, swinging instead to the promise of the chorus in another, familiar form with the next line: “there will be feasting, and dancing, in Jerusalem next year.” 

The Mountain Goats are part of a handful of bands, gathered messily under the genre heading “indie rock” that made mental health, all the pills and appointments and diagnoses and ambivalences and technical terminologies, their direct subject in the mid-to-late aughts. “The blues” gave way to depression and trauma, and the generalized anger and apathy of ‘90s grunge-rock gained specific, medical origins. On The Sunset Tree, the childhood abuse that Darnielle’s narrator suffers is not filtered through euphemisms or sideways fictionalizations; it is recognizable because it is specific, rather than striving for some more universal obscurity.

This particular kind of diagnostic vulnerability was a part of a minor-key trend in the ‘00s, buried underneath the major-key trashiness of the decade and the culture. It located a push and pull between external circumstances - the corruption and apathy of the larger world - and the lacks and imbalances in our own faultily-wired internal systems. It’s no secret that I think Livejournal is one of the big origin stories of the reality we all inhabit now, predictive of and maybe even partly to blame for the version of social media in which a vast number of us find our lives trapped. Livejournal was the cultural heart of a small-hearted era, of this moment when grown-up kids with guitars started to get up onstage and call their depression “depression.” On LJ, as in these songs, people began to depict their pain not as something distant and illegible, but rather something small and boring, laid out in details as mundane as a shopping list. This impulse, this kind of art, was and is a Livejournal impulse, making a plodding, factual humanity their subject.

The Mountain Goats have always been a Livejournal band, and not just because so much of their fanbase gathered and strengthened itself there before it migrated to Tumblr. The Sunset Tree, with its small-voiced confessions that describe not the dramatic event but the small objects in the room where it is about to occur, may be their most Livejournal album. Livejournal is still annoyingly relevant, confessionalism made weird and congregational and isolating, the ancestor of all of us who are here having feelings online, at once alone in our rooms behind our computers and crying in public together. 

The more painful event that follows the song’s short story doesn’t get told because it doesn’t need to be told. What the song wants to tell you about is the useless moments one can grab outside of one’s traumas; these are the things, small and dirty and impoverished as they are, that promise a better world. Each small defiance is a way forward, into the next year, into the unspectacular triumph of basic survival. There is no real promise here, no guarantee, no steps for getting through this year or making the next one better. The survival is guttural, and lives at a fingernail-grabbing edge. “Make it through this year if it kills me” is of course a bleak joke-- if the year kills you, you didn’t make it through. But that bleak humor itself is a kind of rusted-bottom-scraping hope, the giddiness of knowing the worst is coming and driving up to meet it anyway, “ready for the bad things to come.” If there is such thing as hopeful pessimism, that may be where these songs live. It was also the prevailing mood of the Livejournal communities in which I spent time, and from which I learned what I thought was the language of the internet, around when this album first came out, long before I knew it existed. 

This is the time of year when I start to think about this song, halfway through, in the bright and relentless days of early summer, with all their yelling, mandated fun, all the large-print stories about how happy everyone else is with their body. The remaining calendar year stretches ahead, both too slow and too fast. “This Year” sounds like it’s being sung through gritted teeth, in defiance of forces arrayed against it. The thing about hope, which this song understands, is that it’s stupid. It’s the stubborn willingness to believe in the less likely outcome, to believe without good evidence, in something as outlandish as making it through one more year.

Every year is the next year in Jerusalem. Every year is the year before it all cracks open, before it all finally gets better. The Mountain Goats didn’t play this at the show I saw recently, but in other shows I have seen that ended with this song, it was that shared acknowledgement of its bleakness that made the song so rousing, such an anthem, all of us raising up again our stupid little hopes that this year might be better, that this might be the time we overcome it, crack the ceiling and push ourselves out, a damp baby bird emerging into the light of a better world, the land of milk and honey at last, all together now, one day at a time, if it kills us.