windjamm | Jenny from Thebes Study: Part 1, Jenny I, Color in Your Cheeks, Clean Slate (Reply)

This is a really interesting album in a lot of ways. The Mountain Goats (TMG) Albums are largely tied together thematically or on a settings basis. Tallahassee is about a toxic relationship, but many of the songs can be pulled in every direction, metaphorized to fulfill other purposes. Songs for Pierre Chuvin is from the POV of the Last Pagans under Roman occupation and its metaphors are plentiful, though it's one of those situations where specificity breeds more relatability than generalization.

Jenny from Thebes does both, creating a sort of prism that takes and alters songs already established and explodes them out with the color and vibrancy herein.

Jenny

It would be foolish to start this endeavor without first discussing the first song she's named in, Jenny (Jenny I from here on).

In her first eponymous song, Jenny is described by someone who is in love with her. She's a beloved character and her impact is seen across the body of The Mountain Goats from All Hail West Texas (2002), the album Jenny appears, onward. Often she's a symbol and even here she's romanticized greatly, but from ground zero.

I hopped on back of the bike, wrapped my arms around you.

and I sank my face into your hair.

and then I inhaled as deeply as I possibly could.

you were as sweet and delicious as the warm desert air.

and you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon,

we were the one thing in the galaxy god didn't have his eyes on.

This is also a song that contains the lyrics

whoa-whoa. whoa whoa.

the pirate's life for me

Which is a call to the way Jenny and her associates live like outlaws in the margins, in a place that society deems them Other, Outside, Outcast in their Southwestern ranch-style house. Though, as so often happens in TMG albums, this is a cloak the speaker wraps around themselves like armor.

Color in Your Cheeks

We would also be remiss to avoid another Jenny song on All Hail West Texas before we jump into the main album itself.

This is a song that paints the experience of living in Jenny's house, in this place where people come and are welcomed warmly. The last verse does a fair job of encapsulating the vibe:

they came in by the dozens, walking or crawling.

some were bright-eyed.

some were dead on their feet.

and they came from Zimbabwe,

or from Soviet Georgia.

east Saint Louis, or from Paris, or they lived across the street.

but they came, and when they'd finally made it here,

it was the least that we could do to make our welcome clear.

come on in, we haven't slept for weeks.

drink some of this. it'll put color in your cheeks.

Clean Slate, "New arrival at the safehouse"

Onto the album proper, these are now subtitled on the back cover of the vinyl edition of Jenny from Thebes (2023). This song is from the perspective of a new arrival at the safehouse, one of the people from Color in Your Cheeks.

It's also a good look into a shifted version of the house, lyrics like:

Remember at your peril

forget the ones you can

And just when you think you learned how to forget

you learn it's just the ones who haven't risen to the surface yet

bring a certain bleakness to the experience, as if in this place of safety, the hope is also temporary. Perhaps it's the nature of the people who come here, the pirate's life, as outlined in Jenny I.

I think think this is a good place to discuss John Darnielle's (JD) love of Greek Plays here, because the album title and art is based off of the play Seven Against Thebes, which is a play largely focused on the reading of shields that portray different pieces of information. A woman who proclaims herself Justice reads the shield of one man, Polynices, and says to the assembled, "I will bring this man back and he will have his city and move freely in his father's halls."

This is the portrait depicted on the album art.

Jenny, our heroine and subject of this album, can be likened to the woman defining herself as Justice. Her work is often the leading of people out of loss, out of the cold and into a place they can belong.

As Clean Slate proclaims:

This world is sad and broken, gotta fix a crack or two

He or we will have our city and move freely. We belong here deeply.

However, this description would also be incomplete without discussing the concept of a Greek Tragedy, the idea that things can be fated, can be doomed from the moment they begin. As Clean Slate says:

Every endpoint fixed forever on the day its arc began

One more thing, perhaps superflous to this album but important to me. Of his song Love, Love, Love, JD says:

I don't know that the Greeks weren't right. I think they were--that love can eat a path through everything--that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself [...]

We'll see if that comes up again as we go.