This is the first of a series of essays discussing things I have actually liked about the year 2020.
Back on April 8, I took a walk on an eerily quiet night, and
then I wrote the following:
In years to come, there will be poems and movies and novels and songs about these weeks, but if they don’t at some point try to evoke that silence, they won’t be capturing the truth of this moment, which has not shocked us with explosions or rubble, but has pressed down like a smothering pillow.
It’s tempting in reading that to wish that I’d cut
everything after “moment,” since violence and anger became the news of the
day just a few weeks later. But I think I was right that the heavy silence of
early April is as much a part of the truth of this year as the incendiary
summer and ominous autumn that will probably dominate historical memory.
Surprisingly, though, it took only eight days for me to hear
a new song that answered my hope for something that would “evoke that silence.”
The Mountain Goats’ album Songs for Pierre Chuvin, which came out in
mid-April, is a big deal if you happen to be a fan of John Darnielle, who effectively
is the band. For the first several years of the Mountain Goats’ existence, Darnielle
recorded all of his material solo on a Panasonic boombox, culminating in the
2002 lo-fi masterpiece All Hail West
Texas. After that album, though, the boombox got put away and Darnielle
began recording with a full band. Plenty of the full-band material is good, and
a little of it is great, but if you got into Darnielle’s songwriting through
the scratchy, warts-and-all sound of those early albums, the Mountain Goats
with a rhythm section and studio engineers wasn’t quite the same, even if
Darnielle’s major themes remained constant: hope despite sadness; troubled grubby teenagers; spectacularly failed marriages; everyday beauty.
Like the rest of us, Darnielle had to stay home beginning in
mid-March, and he used this as an opportunity to get out the old boombox. He wrote
and recorded a song a day based on a book by the French historian Pierre
Chuvin called A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, which according to its blurb at Harvard University Press is “a history of the triumph of Christianity in the Roman
Empire as told from the perspective of the defeated: the adherents of the
mysteries, cults, and philosophies that dominated Greco-Roman culture.”
Honestly, that’s about all you need to know to get the gist of the album. I’m sure
there are nuances you could pick up by reading the book, but a couplet like “Me and my pagan crew/ We will deal with you,” or, in a very different register,
“Return the peace you took from me/ Give me back my community” pretty well
speaks for itself.
So, yeah, it’s a concept album. Moreover it’s a concept
album about the last of the ancient Roman pagans. If this sounds Rush-level
dorky it probably is, but Darnielle is able to use this concept to create
something remarkably moving. These are small songs about enormous loss. They
are quiet, meditative, and almost reticent in their accounts of state-sponsored
violence being used to stifle a culture of inestimable richness. They are songs
about powerful Christians ruining everything. They make a lot of sense in 2020.
My favorite song on the album, which is also my favorite
song I’ve heard anywhere this year, is the closer “Exegetic Chains.”[1]
“Favorite” isn’t exactly the right word—it’s more that I haven’t heard another
song that does a better job of sounding the way that 2020 feels. It is muffled
and repetitive, centered on a few spare chords. There’s a lot of “space” in the
recording, as they say. Darnielle singing is restrained, almost sotto voce, like he wants to make sure he’s
heard but not overheard.
The singing style fits the theme of hidden messages that
fills the verses. Darnielle sings about echoes of old myths you can find “in
the shadows on the ground beneath the trees”; secrets whispered in city
squares; or the warmth inside the “panasonic hum” of the song itself. The title
“Exegetic Chains” gives us some clue as to what he’s up to with all this cryptic
evocation of things cryptic, since exegesis is the act of critical
interpretation or explication—we’re being asked, in a sense, to parse mysteries.
But then there’s the second word in the title: what’s going
on with these “chains”? One the one hand, a chain can be a series of connected links,
even connected historical links, as in the European transition from paganism to
Christianity. But chains are also
restraints. Indeed, in rock music, chains are almost never good things,
whether it be a “Chain Gang” or a “Chain of Fools” or “Battleship Chains” or
the chain that keeps Fleetwood Mac together.
Here’s what Darnielle does with the chain image in his
chorus:
Say your prayers to whomever you call out to in the night.
Keep the chains tight.
Make it through this year
If it kills us outright.
The line “keep the chains tight” comes right after a line
about saying your prayers in the night, in a spot where you would expect the
thing you hold tight to be a blanket or a loved one.
One way to read this is as violence or threat—presumably you would keep the
chains tight to control a prisoner, which is jarring in a song that
otherwise feels a bit ethereal. It could also be read as a directive to “keep
it together,” whether metaphorically as in keeping a family or community linked
together or literally as in keeping a mechanism or tool functioning.
Then the last two lines of the chorus are a tip of the cap
to Mountain Goats fans. Darnielle alludes to one of the band’s most popular songs, the
rousing sing-along “This Year,” which is basically “I Won’t Back Down” for white Gen Xers with literature degrees. In that song, written fifteen years ago, the
chorus is joyously defiant: “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” Last
summer, when I was in a good deal of pain and taking more vicodin than would be
ideal, I listened to “This Year” a lot. But fast-forward to 2020, and in
“Exegetic Chains” the same words slightly rearranged read more as stoic than joyous, and
more cognizant of the possibility of absolute defeat.
“Exegetic Chains” is a song about fear, loneliness, and watching
an era end in calamity, which is as relevant to the 21st century as it was to the 5th.
But in the last line of the last verse, the speaker says that he is “headed
somewhere better if I have to crawl there on all fours.” Here’s hoping.
[1]
That title, to be sure, transcends Rush-level dorkiness to achieve Yes-level
dorkiness. Nevertheless, the song works.
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