to the true believer, everything’s a sign

☀︎ fiver - tmg blog - it/its ☀︎ what i lack in subtlety, i make up for in radio

[solomon-revisited]

"The canary in the mine saves you from what killed the canary when you released it into the mine, but you also don't get to see the inside of the mine. That is the trade-off."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

"I don't, ever, sit down and say: "What am I doing next?"—I just work; that is my process, to just start writing and see where it goes. The Sunset Tree was considerably more successful than anybody expected, I think it's fair to say. I am proud that my natural impulse was to follow up with an album that digs itself a dark tunnel underground and builds a little bunker inside it. The songs on Get Lonely are closer to the poems-set-to-music standard I'd aspired to early on, but with the advantage of more mileage on the tires."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

"I made a bunch of hand-drawn little booklets while I was writing We Shall All Be Healed—they were like homemade comic books, sort of, and they were called Chavo Guerrero Is Champion of the World. Doing these and thinking about the Olympic Auditorium while writing The Sunset Tree got me meditating about pro wrestling, which I'd been absolutely marked out for when I was eleven and twelve years old. Ox Baker came to LA once and said he was going to kill Chavo Guerrero. I believed him then and I believe him now. Rest easy, Ox. Your ability to scare the shit out of me was without any earthly peer."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

who's ready to get lonely !! tomorrow is the beginning of july, which for many of you means hot hot summer (especially right now), but here it means the middle of winter. cheers to winter loneliness and i hope everyone is keeping well i.e. not overheating too much — or staying warm and dry, for my other southern friends. and that everyone is safe also 🐐

[solomon-revisited]

"This is the one that got away, one of my favourites of the Get Lonely bunch. We did not manage to better the demo in the studio. That's the yardstick: Studio version beats the demo or the song doesn't make the record. At some point I shared that demo online; had I not done so on the day I did that, it'd be lost forever, most likely, since the laptop from which I shared the demo is now dead. Those studio sessions still exist, though; they're on two-inch reels in my dark basement, magnetic particles slowly shedding, seeking their destiny. Going away. Going invisible."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

"We can have our disagreements about the existence and nature of ghosts but on one question I will give no ground, ever: They feel pain. Even in their insubstantial bodies they experience pain like what they felt while still corporeal. If they don't eat, they get pangs. What they eat and how they eat it, about this we can all have our little opinions. But it hurts to be a ghost. That is why they try to make themselves known. So you'll notice."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

"Astrid Lindgren, the author of Pippi Longstocking, once gave a reading at the library where my mother worked; when it came time for questions, the children all asked variants of the same question. Is Pippi real? Is Tommy real? Is Annika real? Is Villa Villekulla real? "Oh, yes," Lindgren replied to each question with grandmotherly patience. "Pippi is real, Tommy and Annika are real." In the spirit of that legendary villa, so are the black pumps, and the long-sleeved Oxford, and above all the need for some money to keep the information emgine humming on its way to where it's headed."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

JUNE 27 — CAME HOME LATE

munitions-grade plutonium dealer / came through town in his eighteen-wheeler / I crawled out from underneath / by the skin of my chipped front teeth / College Avenue near first / where the demons did their worst / when the sun shines through the glaze / I remember awful days

poison candy puff cream cloud / all the good air leaking out

tortured stucco architecture of the / uncompleted parking structure / got ready for my burst of glory / and climbed up to the second story / college avenue near first / call the coroner, book the hearse / my whole God damned family was crazy and I / was just 14, and ready to die

strike while the iron's still nice and hot: / you people can stay here but I will NOT

crawled up on the railing there / ran my hand through my long brown hair / looked down at the railroad track / felt the cool wind on my neck / cloudy poison candy cream / had a girlfriend named Marci Dehm / she was going to be mad as hell / when they scraped my brains up from the stairwell / looked down maybe a minute too long: / who's strong today, and who's not so strong?

train crossing tolling: ding-dong bell / back to the castle where the monsters dwell

"Written in the dressing room of a club in Amsterdam during the We Shall All Be Healed tour that led to the Peel Session at Abbey Road. I was, by the time of its writing, deep within myself: grieving, I say now, not having said so about that time prior to this very moment but knowing, now, that it's the right word. All capitalisation and line-spacing preserved as nearly as possible from the handwritten draft. I wrote music for it in that dressing room, too, and I can still remember the verses, but this is too private to take it further, and I record it here only to give the Sunset Tree songs their proper context. It is a true story about a day when I wanted to kill myself and could not. Later that day I put my fist through the window of my bedroom. I was just a kid, I know now, but I could not imagine, on that day, ever getting any older."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

"Tyler Lambert was Dana Plato's son (see February 17); Plato struggled with addiction from an early age, like many child entertainers. She was twenty years old when she became a mother. She lost custody of her son, Tyler, in divorce proceedings, when he was six; nine hard years down the line, in her Winnebago RV parked outside her manager's mother's house, she died of an overdose. Tyler was fourteen. A decade on he took his own life with a shotgun. "These past ten years have been pure Hell", his grandmother told People magazine. This is a sad story of people trying without success to break free from the past, of compulsions and apparitions. It is a song about the desperate feeling you get when you have run out of hopeful synonyms for "try"."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

"The most metaphorical song on The Sunset Tree is also one of my favourites; formally it's of a piece with "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life", but turning inward and with a lot more road behind me. It's one of three songs on the album whose vantage point is from a little farther down the line; of those three, this one is nearest to what I'll hesitantly call the action, maybe two years after getting out of the house. Loose internal ends were fraying within me just as anybody might have predicted, with predictable, if spectacular, results."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

"I wrote this sometime in the Tallahassee span of time, and my home recording of it served as a B-side for the first single on our new label, 4AD. It is not part of the Tallahassee cycle. It's a study for "You or Your Memory"; the bargain-priced room on La Cienaga was actually in the Pico-Crenshaw district (and was not, truth be told, on La Cienaga at all). I was working weekends in Pico-Crenshaw and staying at a motel overnight so as not to tax my car's engine. Time alone in a motel, as we'll see in July, can take you some places when the elements align."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

JUNE 23 — NEW LOVERS REGGAE

I bite my lower lip / dig my nails into my hand / clench my fist / as hard as I can / and shut my eyes / real tight / paring knife in my pocket / safely tucked away / wait til everyone's asleep / make sure everything's OK / hop through the window / tunnel toward the light / and if I starve to death, well, that may be / but you all have seen the last of me / and that's enough / and that's enough / and that's enough

window open wide / I sneak a cigarette / I may get a- / way with this yet / I keep cool / breathe deep / I listen to the noises / out in the hall / ear pressed up / against the wall / until the whole house drifts off to sleep

my whole family's crazy / and I / am fourteen years old / ready to die

"This is an unfinished draft, transcribed here verbatim, from the notebook that contains the original drafts for "Up the Wolves", "You or Your Memory", "Song for Dennis Brown", and "Lion's Teeth". It's a mess; I'm telling a story and trusting myself to tighten the prosody later. Because I don't date my notebooks, I can't tell you whether this pre- or post-dates "Came Home Late" (June 27). If the former, it means I remembered this line while writing a song that felt like a good home for it. If the latter, it means I knew I wasn't going to sing "Came Home Late" to anybody, but wanted to save at least this one line. Drafts are organ donors, most of the time. This one had a couple of functioning kidneys. But in the end its real use was to get me thinking about Dennis Brown."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[mountaingoatsfirstlineaday]

obsessed with the way that zopilote machine has no track listing. anywhere. the back of the cd case just says "kid you fell in the milk". the booklet is mostly latin

[mountaingoatsfirstlineaday]

@catilinas HOLD ON. THATS what that means??? Wait wait please explain

[catilinas]

the orphic gold tablets are these 4th century bcs tiny sheets of gold leaf found in burials, inscribed in greek with Mysterious Instructions for navigating the underworld?? becoming immortal?? reincarnation?? unfortunately the texts themselves are all scholars have to go on and they are super cryptic. no-one really knows what's going on with them. but several of them mention the 'kid falling into milk' image. i was thinking of this one (translation by sarah iles johnston):

if you want to know more i recommend the book 'ritual texts for the afterlife: orpheus and the bacchic gold tablets' by fritz graf and sarah iles johnston :-)

[mountaingoatsfirstlineaday]

@dahniwitchoflight coming at us with some BANGER theories in the comments

[chronologicalimplosion]

[[Screenshot ID:

1- catilinas' tumblr tags, saying: I don't listen to The Moutain Goats but "Kid you fell into the milk???" As in, "You have become a god instead of a mortal. A kid you fell into the milk." from the orphic gold tablets?? Like the orphic ritual texts for the afterlife?? Actually, yeah, that tracks with everything I know about TMG.

2- ID in alt

3- Tumblr replies from daniwitchoflight, saying: I think what's being missed here is the phrase "falling into milk" back in the old days was like coming into milk, the kid here is a baby goat, a kid falling into milk was a young baby goat suddenly becoming full of milk and miraculously able to provide, not like, a human child falling into a bucket of milk literally lmao. That's why it's paired with become divine instead of mortal, the word of falling into milk implies it happened suddenly rather than gently coming into. Also why it's paired with the idea of coming into sufferings you haven't experienced before, a transformation that's sudden and possibly painful, a mortal becoming divine, a baby goat suddenly pregnant and producing milk.

End ID]]

[solomon-revisited]

JUNE 22 — (UNTITLED)

you in your white shirt / head full of dreams / I got my eye on you / deep in the crossbeams / me and my long hair / poised at the door / butcher knife in my fist / shadow stretching across the floor

all dead, all dead, all dead, all dead

sirens and children / sing in the street / the sky's looking overcast / I turn up the heat / our habits possess us / they've taken the reins / I'm coming in with a baseball bat / to knock out your brains

all dead, all dead, all dead, all dead

and inside, in your bedroom / you've gotten undressed / all of the young waves / ready to crest / everyone's waiting / there's nowhere to go / my big plans like seaweed / rushing back through the undertow

all dead, all dead, all dead, all dead

"I chose not to record, nor even title, the song I wrote about one of several nights I spent doing the math in my head about how things would play out if I tried to kill my stepfather in his sleep. It is a vivid and unpleasant memory. Upper right on the page it says "Cars song in C", so the idea was that it be snappy and mid-tempo. The next song in the same notebook is "This Year"."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[solomon-revisited]

re: today's book of days entry, Whon has been played live once! it was at one of the Zoop shows, which were to raise money for the farm sanctuary; he improvised chords and the lyric sheet was raffled off. i don't have a link at hand but I know the audio can be found on youtube and the internet archive. it's one of my basically unknown favorites! - @jennyfromthebes

oh awesome! here's the link on youtube:

funny that john doesn't check whether he's played something live or not hehe

[solomon-revisited]

JUNE 21 — WHON

The garbage man is never going to come / the cans out at the curb will bloat and stink / the rot will work its way through cracks in the foundation / the water will go stagnant in the sink / and you, you will know / where it is that memories go

The migratory birds will not come back / the charms that summer held will all turn sour / and from the treetops when the wind stops / sweet blossoms will rain down and you will stand beneath the shower / and it will be so clear / you will never quite escape last year

The wind will blow or else it won't / sometimes you just move on and sometimes you just don't / you think the matter through, you try hard not to think / the water all goes stagnant in the kitchen sink / and you will know, and I will too / what it was I might have left to you

"The notebook remnant predates The Sunset Tree by several years; when I stumbled across it, the couplet "and it will be so clear / you will never quite escape last year" sounded like something with its eye on the future. Given that it was never released nor, to the best of my knowledge, ever played live, it's surprising how well I remember the melody, and where the changes are. But what I remember wrong, every time, is the last line. In my mind, it's "meant". On the page, it's "left". These are two very different words—even more different in this context! Something more about this song's prophetic half-existence rests in this phenomenon."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

[bigbluehorse]

[Image ID: A pale yellow design bleached onto black fabric. The words "some moments last forever, but some flare out with love, love, love." are written an old timey font. A painting of an explosion in space is in the background, with stars around the edge and a black circle in the centre. It is bordered by a box with embellished corners.]

tshirt bleaching using my dear friend's tutorial (X)!! lyrics are from the mountain goat's song love love love. background image is based on this NASA artist's depiction of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy ✨