This is a rewrite of a piece I published two years ago on a local music website in Tucson, which has since purged its archives. As I kept no personal record of the piece on my computer (and have since learned from that mistake), I am now attempting to reconstruct the useful parts of it.
If anyone asks, I like to say that I like The Mountain Goats a normal amount, a statement that anyone who is also a fan of The Mountain Goats will know is a lie. It’s unusual for someone to be into The Mountain Goats in a normal way, because people who really like The Mountain Goats are rarely having a normal one, in life or otherwise. My friends like to joke that saying your favorite band is The Mountain Goats is a real indicator of something – usually, your specific flavor of depression. There’s definitely some truth to that; for other bands I like, I can usually summarize my opinion as some variation on “their music’s good.” I can’t stop there with The Mountain Goats. Yeah, some of it can be described as good music, but I don’t listen to these songs because they’re good. I listen to them because there’s a part of me that’s rarely illuminated in any other way.
This isn’t a review of The Mountain Goats – there’s a wiki for that. It’s not even a recommendation to listen to their music, though I definitely think you should do that and have supplied some gateway songs at the end as options. This is about how The Mountain Goats, which is largely one guy and his wide range of collaborators, managed to help me crawl out of a really deep hole.
I guess it’s a thank-you note.
The images in this piece are taken from times I would wander Indiana listening to The Mountain Goats at dawn or dusk. That I have so many of these is definitely A Sign.
Saying I had a bad time in graduate school is, to those in the know, roughly equivalent to saying that Canada gets wildfires in the summer. It’s technically true, but it vastly undersells the scope of the problem. The years 2021 and 2022 were, bar none, the absolute worst years of my life. Some days I was so angry I felt like I could claw my own skin off, and some days I was so miserable I spent hours face down on the floor. I was stuck in a bad situation with one way out (getting the PhD), and each second that I didn’t spend working towards getting out was spent berating myself for not working towards getting out. Around this time, a lot of people tried to tell me that bad situations allow us to triumph over adversity, to become stronger and better than we were before. Platitudes like this bounced off me like a paper airplane off a brick wall. I didn’t feel like I was getting strong or better. I mostly just felt like I was getting more deranged.
If you’ve hung out in my particular corner of the internet for long enough, The Mountain Goats will reach you long before you listen to a song. I spent years seeing tumblr posts extolling the virtues of specific songs, each with vaguely impenetrable names and descriptions. There’s even a genre of tumblr post dedicated to spoofing these posts! I usually decided I was far too mentally well to figure out what was going on there, and kept scrolling. That was, of course, until the day in 2021 that I realized I most certainly was not mentally well, and I wasn’t getting any better, so I might as well see what The Mountain Goats had to say about it.
The thing about music is that it cannot save your life in the practical sense. Music can’t close your wounds or pay your rent; it can’t make the world stop hurting you. My situation after listening to The Mountain Goats for the first time was, materially, the same as before. Except, in a way that I still cannot articulate, I was now certain that someone out there was holding my hand. I saw my misery, and my anger at my misery, lovingly reflected back at me. I was messy and horrible and on the edge of self-destruction, and it was, for the span of a song, okay to be that way. To this day, I haven’t found another artist that articulates the intense pain of failing and being failed by the people and institutions that are supposed to protect us, as well as the chaotic anger, indignant joy, and lingering sadness that we carry after we keep living.
Everyone’s gateway Mountain Goats song is probably very different. Not every song resonates with me, but the ones that do always hit me all the way, like a stone falling straight to the bottom of a well. For me, my gateway song was “Up the Wolves.” In 2021, there were very few places I could go that could hold the full scope of my anger, and “Up the Wolves” was one of the few things that could. I listened to it on runs, at dawn on the bridge, at midnight on my floor, and began, gradually, to accept that sometimes we are forced to enter a state of both survival and self-destruction, and now it was my turn. But I also came to understand that no matter how awful and dangerous and mean this state can be, it is still better to be there than to be nothing at all. That kind of optimism – hope with blood in its teeth – was the only kind I could really believe in.
The thing people don’t often tell you about being very depressed in a bad situation is that the actual manifestation of the depression can be a lot of different things. In 2021 and 2022, I sucked to be around (now, of course, I’m a delight). I was deeply angry in a way that made me hurtful to my friends, while craving affection from people who would return it the least. Sometimes it was almost fun to be righteously angry, like holding on to a lit match. But when the anger ran out, only the sadness was left, and anyone who’s tried knows that it’s a difficult fuel to burn.
The cool thing about the vast discography of The Mountain Goats is that somehow, buried in all those albums, is a song for each flavour of this feeling. For me, songs like “Up the Wolves,” “Palmcorder Yajna,” and “Heretic Pride” perfectly capture the sudden certainty that nothing you’ve done will matter at all, and the intense accompanying desire to go out in a great burst of…something… that can at least also vaporize a few of the things that dragged you down. I would listen to “Sax Rohmer #1” and “Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1” and, yes, “No Children,” and think: sometimes living is wanting to be fixed while also wanting to destroy yourself and everyone around you, and not getting to do either. Instead, you have to hold that feeling in your chest, and then just get through it, and get through it, and get through it, and then one day you’re a little bit better.
I am, indeed, better now, in a way I didn’t think I’d get to be – and hey, there’s a lot of The Mountain Goats songs for this feeling too. If you’ve met me in the last few years, you’ve maybe seen me slowly returning to my actual, baseline personality, something I’m really excited about. But I don’t think I’ll ever really get back to that pre-grad school person, even if I want to be. Even if these days I can remember what it was like – to be me.
“Never Quite Free” is probably one of the most misunderstood songs by The Mountain Goats. It’s also the most important Mountain Goats song to me, because it’s one of the few songs to articulate that you can make it through something awful and become almost entirely okay again... but never all the way. Sometimes we outrun the terrible things chasing us and make it to a new world, but there’s a little bit of the horror left in us. Sometimes we come back wrong. I made it out – I got my PhD – but I will be recovering for the rest of my life. “Never Quite Free” understands this. There are experiences for which the happy ending stays a little complicated, and a little sad. For some reason, I find this song extremely comforting. At least I’m not the only one who’s never quite free. The Mountain Goats is right there with me.
So yeah. Music didn’t save my life, and neither did The Mountain Goats (which would probably make them very relieved to hear). But, back in 2021 and 2022, as I crawled deeper into The Mountain Goats’ discography, I found someone who was/is/would always be as unhinged and angry and horribly sad as me, who was still, viciously, alive. I think of getting out of grad school as a victory, but I also think of it as a coming back wrong. Staying alive has an edge to it now. It takes effort. Even today, listening to The Mountain Goats feels like someone looking me in the eye and nodding, as each of us keeps on doing whatever it is that we’re doing with our time here. Both of us are doing it – living, very messily; growing beyond and passing through and reaching around our worst instincts.
So, thank you, The Mountain Goats. I’m sorry that I called you Mr. Goats one time when I was explaining your whole deal to my Mom and saying you were one guy, because now she thinks your name is first name Mountain last name Goats. I’m sure you would forgive me for this oversight.
When I listen to The Mountain Goats these days, the most overwhelming feeling I have is that of watching the Sun rise, and thinking: Aw, man. Another one. Well, here I go! And then starting to walk, because it’s what you do. Turns out I’ll probably always need to find the kind of hope with blood in its teeth. And if you’re reading this: maybe some of you need that feeling, too.
This is it. This was the bridge I spent the most time on while I lived in Indiana. It was a very sad and very beautiful place for me. I listened to The Mountain Goats here a lot.
My Top 5 The Mountain Goats Recommendations for New Listeners:
Up the Wolves, The Sunset Tree (2005)
No Children, Tallahassee (2002)
Damn These Vampires, All Eternals Deck (2011)
Cry For Judas, Transcendental Youth (2012) (oh god, I’ve become this post)
Dawn of Revelation, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan (2025)
My Top 5 The Mountain Goats Recommendations, Deep(er) Cuts:
This specific live version of Family Happiness (originally from The Coroner’s Gambit (2000), performed 2011)
This specific live version of Palmcorder Yajna (Originally from We Shall All Be Healed (2004), performed 2004)
This live performance of Ethiopians (a never-released song cut from Tallahassee (2002))
Never Quite Free, All Eternals Deck (2011) (Obviously not as deep of a cut, but wow do people struggle with media literacy on this one so it’s for the advanced listener)
Heel Turn 2, Beat the Champ (2015)
My Personal Top 5 The Mountain Goats Songs (I am not accepting criticism):
Up the Wolves, The Sunset Tree (2005)
Autoclave, Heretic Pride (2008)
Old College Try, Tallahassee (2002)
Bleed Out, Bleed Out (2022)
Never Quite Free, All Eternals Deck (2011)