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?
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.