windjamm | Entries tagged with analysis

Source Decay

We're returning to All Hail West Texas for this one. JD says there are two stories inside of this song. There's a past tense song that the POV character is trying to understand and the present tense, where they make a weekly drive two hours East to Austin to check a PO box, always detouring through their old neighborhood to reminisce.

The mail is always from their "old best friend" and it's always postcards asking what the singer remembers, asked as "indirectly as [they] can."

The singer then goes home to take all the postcards they received and sorts them, trying to piece together a story, trying to find a pattern that might fill in details, give any information about the story they hope they're trying to tell. They always come up empty.

Through the things we've learned in the information inside of and surrounding Jenny from Thebes, we learn that it's certainly Jenny the speaker is talking to, which is a theory fans have held for years. Because of this, it's worthwhile thinking about Jenny's impact.

For the moment, I just want to dwell on the beauty of this song. The weekly two hour drive may not seem so long; that's a half hour commute four times a week. But it's such a labor of love considering the things the singer speaks of remembering are from 1983 and the album came out in 2002 with no sense of when it takes place, but if it's the full breadth, nineteen years, consider the impact of someone on your life if you haven't seen them in years and yet there you go looking for their postcard weekly. There they go sending one.

Who gets continuity like that? Imperfect? Yes. Lonely? Most definitely. But extant. Present Tense, Regular. Who is loved so regularly for almost two decades from afar via postcard? Missives from another land. That's what this song leaves me with the most.

Night Light

This is a song from Transcendental Youth (2012). If I'm not mistaken, this is the first time Jenny is mentioned in a decade. The singer's unknown.

This is the first song where I heard about Jenny and she stuck to my bones. I suppose she does that to most people.

It's a song about someone in a downward mental spiral from having contemplated lost, sad things for too long. It's thinking about your breakup at 3am. It's thinking about all the things you can't fix when you have no armor left to weather the blows. It's haunting and beautiful.

Pull my mask so tight

Til it pinches my skin

Nerves strung so high

I am a mandolin

Jenny calls from Montana

She's only passing through

Probably never see her again in this life I guess

Not sure what I'm gonna do

This whole verse is gorgeous. Someone at the end of their rope, at the end of hope stops to take a phone call from someone from a past life. She calls from Montana, but she's only passing through. Not only is she from a past life, not only is she fleeting, but you'll probably never see her again in this life and you don't know what you're going to do.

Devastating. Devastating in four lines.

Pair this with Source Decay. Jenny calls this person, which feels rare and eventful. But to the other, she sends a weekly postcard, vulnerable, asking how much they remember. Maybe Jenny chases the events from this person as well, why not? But the absence here is so poignant.

Can't ever set aside the sweetness

Of the days before the crews put up the border

Fields full of wet rain

Cling tight to their memory forever

Think about Montana when I close my eyes

Possibly Jenny's headed east

Count a couple of stray hopes out loud

May their numbers one day be increased

How evocative. Thinking of the past in picturesque, exploded detail. And here's Jenny. Think of the time you shared in Montana, possibly her next stay once she left Texas behind, possibly one far down the road. But there she was again, making an impact again, sticky to the ribs of this person who doesn't believe they'll ever see her again in this life.

And for my first exposure to her, how utterly transformative she was to my experience of longing, of loss. When I'm lonely, when I miss people I listen to this song. I'm going to be thinking about it forever. "Probably never see her again in this life, I guess/Not sure what I'm gonna do" lives inside of me and has for years. And all this time I've wondered who she is, who she could be to make this sort of impact on this person.

I researched to get into this album. I listened to All Hail West Texas, an album I couldn't get into intitially. I read up on both the things JD has said, things fans have said, and I've picked these songs apart trying to get a sense of it.

And it's all for her. I wanted to get the full impact when I met her, when I could finally see what she looked like.

Cleaning Crew, "The next best thing to an actual goodbye"

This is a song about Jenny looking down at someone she loves as she considers her inevitable exit. JD says on bandcamp that she's speaking to the writer of Source Decay. And now we know how important this moment is. We've seen what that writer means to her, we've seen what she means to people around her.

JD says in the bandcamp release,

"Who is to blame when the cleaning crew comes through,I want to ask: the one who made the mess or the one who insisted somebody needed to clean it up?"

I believe the cleaning crew here is the manifestation of the destruction of their home.

There's a feeling you get when you look at an empty room that hasn't been empty for most of the time you've known it. A room that's been filled with life, with love, with heartache, with loss and god has it been filled with stuff. You never realize how much of the placeness is attributed to the objects within it. How much does a dresser lend to the sense of it? A bookshelf?

Then you walk into a room when all of that is gone and there's a feeling of such potent loss. The world here is not as it used to be and things have been taken irrevocably. You can put things back. The occupant could move back in immediately and put all their things back, but you'd have to contend with the Void. The Negative space. Maybe you never even thought it was permanent. Maybe you knew things would have to shift one day and yet. And Yet. Contending with the temporary, with the fact that maybe all of this is temporary.

And one day soon, in thirty or less, all of this will be gone. The City has deemed your occupancy unfit for the house and will be removing you and all signs of your presence from it. This was safe. Once. But no longer. The end is on its way in coveralls and power washers.

And with all of that looming, Jenny looks down to someone she loves and wonders:

What are you gonna do?

What are you gonna do when the cleaning crew comes through?

She considers her own time limits

I can hear the timer

Ticking in my chest

She considers a future where she may see old faces again

When you get out on your own again

If you ever do shake free

If you find yourself in Portland

Ask about me

And she thinks about what may stick

I saw the future in an oil slick

It told me what I needed to know

Leave a little stain behind you everywhere you go

And she's very successful at this, isn't she? At leaving a little stain behind everywhere she goes?

There's a song later called Jenny III and there really isn't a Jenny II. I've been thinking about that a lot. What is Jenny II? Maybe it's this album. As I've said, we've never had a whole album about a single thing before, both place and space. This is the clearest look we've gotten at any one subject in the Mountain Goats body.

And in this telling, in this album I've felt things that have augmented how I feel overall about Night Light, about Jenny I, about Source Decay. So many that I couldn't just leave it in my head and heart, so many that I had to let it all bleed onto paper here for anyone to see.

I can't believe I've only done five songs off of this album so far. Sure, I took detours, but even so. What an album.

Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: Jenny from Thebes

Ground Level, "There was, en route to greener pastures, a small house in the city"

This is another song that illustrates the lives people live in Jenny's house. This one is more focused on the realities of life here. It isn't glamorous or particularly restful. Yes, this is a place where outcasts can live their lives, but here in this Ranch-style safehouse beneath the cloverleaf interchange the world affords them very little else.

I think it's a fair expression of what these spaces feel like to twenty-somethings trying to find places away from home. It's shitty apartments, friends who haven't figured out who they want to be, and the inability to have a feeling of permanence. I think one thing this entire album has done for me is illustrated just how the safehouse refuses to be comfortable.

It's easy to glamorize and romanticize the past, but through the shifting viewpoints across all of the songs I've mentioned until now we get a panoramic of this place that doesn't allow room to hide. You can't push all the trash out of frame, you can't hide that sketchy friend in another room. However, I think like many of the things JD writes, by pursuing that genuine, authentic thing it allows the concept of glamor to transcend the superficially, aesthetically perfect and pull a sort of humanity from it all that is the mundane stuff of myth, the parts of the world that are true and real.

Only One Way, "They consider one another in the often harsh light of how the world is"

This is a fun song thematically. There's this overarching sense of foreboding, of prophecy but it's paired with the sense of inevitability.

You're going to get a wrinkle on your forehead

You're gonna get a click in your knee

You're gonna tell the doctor that you can't sleep

We discuss the truth of aging, the truth of life and the world. These things will come.

You're gonna make a bargain with the bad guys

You're gonna make some choices you regret

There's no place to hide from the prophecy

Since nobody told you it falls to me

And so too will the parts of life we aren't told about. Sometimes you make bad choices. This will happen.

You're gonna have to watch for the signs

You're gonna have to learn how to read

Nobody's gonna hand you a flashlight

You're gonna have to steal what you need

And the world may not give you what you need and so you'll have to provide for yourself. And if means aren't afforded to you, well, you'll still have to find a way, won't you?

There's something about this song that reminds me of the place in video games where you no longer have options available to you. You had them, once. You could have persuaded this character to help you, you could have stolen this item two hours ago, you could have done a lot of things. But all of those options are closed to you now. You failed the speech check. You missed the item. Now you have a fight and only a fight, maybe with characters you hoped you could win to your side, but not anymore.

Maybe that's just because I've been playing a lot of Divinity Original Sin 2 lately.

In any case, JD says of this song,

“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I work a job where a couple guys clap when I drink water. I want you to know, out there in civilian life, when you drink water, I’m on the bus applauding for you. It’s a solemn ritual, I say ‘Fellas, you gotta get out of your bunk. It’s time to clap for the people who are drinking water with nobody to clap for them.’ In an elliptical way, this song is kind of about that.

I think, as a monument to mundane, dogged survival it's a lovely piece.

I've been trying to work out whether or not the "one way" this mentions is germane to the album and the Greek Tragedy of it all. It certainly does ring to the tragedy, but I think that might just be thematic.

Fresh Tattoo, "She commemorates her present station on her forearm"

This is the song JD calls the flashpoint of the story. Everything else is setup, but this begins the actual journey of this self-described Rock Opera about Jenny.

In this song, Jenny gets a tattoo of the Seventh Shield, the one we discussed in Clean Slate on the previous post. The words in Greek surrounding it, "I will bring this man back and he will have his city and move freely in his father's halls." Months before the album released, when it wasn't clear how much of an album about Jenny this would be, some fans were debating whether she was supposed to be the woman on the album art or Justice from Seven from Thebes. This song is the album sealing that firmly in place. (I would posit that the album being called Jenny from Thebes gave it away, but perhaps not to all.)

Until this point we haven't heard a lot about Jenny on this particular album, despite her being the titular character. It's the moment in the musical where the main character comes into frame after the overture, after the ensemble songs. Where has Jenny been? Well, she's been here getting a tattoo that symbolizes returning lost people to their rightful lands.

We setup the album's plot, in thirty days she will be evicted from the safehouse. How novel to have an album with a plot.

And here, Jenny finds the narrator of Jenny I on the curb, strung out and helpless and she does what is in her nature. She takes them in and the song wraps a kind of knowing transitory nature to this entire encounter. Yes, it's a beginning, but it's a beginning inside of an ending.

All of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye

But there is a sense that it will matter. This is a POV song from Jenny, so specifically, all of this will matter to her.

Well, you may forget the whys and wheres

Of an old tattoo on your forearm there

But usually you recall the day you got one

And usually it fades in the sun

But not this one

All of these things wrap together and form a kind of coherent first arc to all of this, first act if you will.

Jenny is the owner of a safehouse for outcasts. It is as safe as she can make it, but still vulnerable to the world, still a part of it despite everything and there's no greater evidence for this than the fact that her eviction is forthcoming. All of this will end and, judging by the portents, by the words of the oracles, this will all end quickly. But to those who survive it will matter terribly.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: at my desk
Current Music: Jenny from Thebes

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.