fuck yeah the mountain goats
...all this empty country, and I am its king, and I should never be allowed to touch anything...
Oh. Oh. Oh my god.
All right, now I speak as one who can count all the proper concerts she's ever been to on her fingers and still have fingers left, but I hope it'll still mean something when I say that that was the best. best. best show I've ever been to see. Some of you will never understand what this kind of thing can mean, and that's fine--- this rest part is for those of you who totally get it and will appreciate my fangirling all over the keyboard. I'm just full of mad joy and wonder now, and my feet are just starting to feel three hours of moving on them in four-inch heels (because otherwise I can't see the stage even standing in the second-to-front row of people). And, uh, I am not kidding about the behind-cut fangirling. It's very intense fangirling. You've been warned.
The whole backup band was fantastic! The bassist was closest to us, sort of bent into me and Molly and Ell who were (in this order) stomping/shimmying/shaking a few times, this youngish lanky beaky guy whose energy never seemed to flag. But everybody mostly came for John Darnielle. Andandand he did not disappoint; at one point he sort of got distracted having a (yelled across a crowd) conversation about guitars with some dude in the audience, and he drank like three beers during the course of the show, and he encouraged everybody to sing along loudly when they knew the words, and I did, and we did, and that's catharsis, to have this song and it cuts right to the center of your wormy, anger- and fear- and doubt- and sorrow- and love-ridden heart and it means something to you and it means something else to the guy who wrote it and it means a hundred other things to a hundred other people, but it's gotten into all your hearts in some way and you are singing it until you aren't singing so much as just howling out the words as loudly as you can, and they stand in for so much that can't be expressed in any satisfying way through the course of ordinary daily events. And dancing and sweating and having your hair like its been electrified by the end, your toes cramped and bruised.
And so John Darnielle is barefoot the whole time, and he never quits moving, and it's clear that he is as intensely and emotionally involved in the music as anyone in the audience, which is really endearing. The guy is getting up on his toes a lot, twitching his feet around, flapping his hands or acting out song lyrics when he doesn't have a guitar, jumping around mouthing things even when he isn't actually singing. (Molly said it was like he was a little boy who's really really excited to tell you a story and is frustrated that words can only come one at a time.) He does tell stories, sometimes, in between songs, about how he wrote this next one almost twenty years ago when he still couldn't change his own guitar strings and had to pay an acquaintance-- this old high-school classmate-- to do it, etc.
Three encores. Three!! We all dance and cheer and the band seems to actually want to come back on at least a little, though they're obviously tired. And last song, every single person in the room from the kid who can't be older than eleven to the old bald man who has to be at least sixty to the tattooed woman in the wheelchair to the skinny dude with the Scottish accent, seriously everybody joins in on the Hail Satan! part, jabbing fists or heavy metal horn signs into the air.
(You have to understand that these are stories. Music is a wonderful thing, but these songs are grabbing us under our skins because they are saying true things that we don't or can't say or didn't know we wanted to say before. Because they are making sense out of our hearts full of monsters. I mean, this is why I will shriek out the entirety of Prowl, Great Cain in such a violent way my voice cracks and dies at the end and spend other songs with my eyes closed and my arms around my trembling waist and why Ell will kiss a long-haired boy she doesn't know and has barely spoken to, afterward, mouths open, and why some people who go in sober come out acting drunk and some people who go in stoned come out with clear heads. I mean, my love for this band is like my love for Remedios Varo's paintings is what I'm saying. And my mother would be baffled. A lot of people would be. That's, again, okay, and it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. I'm not saying oooh stories are salvation, 'cause they're not. They don't feed people or stop wars or mend hearts. They just give you reasons to live in the world, or, if you aren't so dramatic, reasons to leave your room on a Sunday.)
I'm exhilarated. Not tired or sleepy...I don't want to sleep now. Sleep is not on my mind. My mind is music and sweat and riding above the speed limit in a badly driven car at midnight with the wind upon me, that being how one gets home from a show in part of town with the river and the railroad and the sparse clusters of neon signs. All lit up, you know. Like sounds in the black air.