“Do you believe in other people?”
-from Mountainhead by Jesse Armstrong
We still had AOL Instant Messenger when I was in college. I had a couple of friends in other dorms that I would regularly dick around with, just wasting time when I should have been sleeping or studying by typing in Arrested Development punchlines and “hahaha” responses. And I remember my sophomore year, my friend just changing the subject mid-conversation and asking “do you listen to the Mountain Goats”. I said “no”, because I had never heard of them, and then the conversation moved on to something else. But after I logged off, I remembered that name, and I went onto iTunes (dated 2000s reference!) and figured I could drop ninety-nine cents on whatever the top track by this band happened to be. It was a song from their most recent album called “This Year”. I listened to it, and then, for the next three months, I couldn't listen to anything else.
“This Year” is a very relatable song about an experience that I have never had, and in fact, I have never had anything close to this experience. Here’s a very quick, surface-level read of the lyrics: the song’s narrator is seventeen years old and living with his abusive stepfather in southern California. He’s absolutely miserable, and he’s crushing on another girl at his school, and when he hears that she wants to hang out, he goes to the arcade, and then they hang out and get drunk, and then he drunk drives back home, breaks the transmission in his car, and his stepdad beats him again. Does that sound like a toe-tapping good time to you? Well, it’s one of the greatest songs by the greatest band that ever was or ever shall be, and when they play it as the second encore at their raucous live shows, the entire crowd is on their feet, jumping, screaming along with every word, spending everything they have on the final refrain “I AM GONNA MAKE IT THROUGH THIS YEAR IF IT KILLS ME/I AM GONNA MAKE IT THROUGH THIS YEAR IF IT KILLS ME”. Trust me, I know, I’ve been to about a dozen of those shows myself. But just listen to this song:
The lyrics to the song are a largely autobiographical account by the band’s lead singer, John Darnielle, and the track sits on 2005’s The Sunset Tree, which is made up entirely of autobiographical songs about Darnielle’s adolescence with his abusive stepfather. “Dance Music” and “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod” are both about listening to records to try and feel some sort of escape before getting hit again. “Up the Wolves” is about an impotent desire for revenge boiling up inside the narrator. “Love Love Love” is about confusion and hurt and hoping to someday understand what love really looks like. “Pale Green Things” is about hearing of the stepfather’s death decades later, and remembering one afternoon with him at the racetrack. It’s a specific set of songs about one specific guy experiencing very specific things.
As you might expect, this album resonated very strongly with fans who had also been victims of abuse themselves. In a recent piece for Stereogum celebrating The Sunset Tree’s twentieth anniversary, Tom Breihan wrote:
“Every once in a long while…an extremely specific songwriter might fuck around and hit you exactly where you live, to the point where you cannot believe that you are hearing your own experiences reflected back at you — your own resentment and desperation and fear elevated and turned into art. That is a heavy experience. The Sunset Tree came out when I was 25 years old, just starting to understand and process the things that I didn’t like about my own upbringing. The first time I heard “Tetrapod,” it annihilated me, absolutely wiped me out. It did that again and again. I will have moments when I am simply unable to listen to “Tetrapod” for long stretches, and I will have moments when I need to hear it right away, immediately.”
That is a man processing his own past, feeling a string plucked deep within himself, by a songwriter who had been there, who knew what it was, who said “you are as real as I am, you are not alone, there is another person just as real as you, who thinks and feels the same way that you do about this”. So Breihan, understandably, loves the album. Other fans do, too, for similar reasons.
But why do I love it? I love The Sunset Tree so much that I can’t even listen to it that often. “I need to put some music on, should I listen to Sunset Tree? No, the moment’s not right, I’m not going to be able to give this album the reverence it deserves.” Why is that album relatable to me, a guy with no history of abuse, or teenage drunkenness, or even transmission damage? Why does this pluck some string deep within me, and thousands of other longtime Mountain Goats fans, and get us to all vibrate at the same frequency? I hear “I AM GONNA MAKE IT THROUGH THIS YEAR IF IT KILLS ME,” and I have some understanding of how it feels to have to yell that to myself. And then I think about the other character that’s actually singing it in the song, and even though this song is intensely personal, I recognize something elemental in him that’s also in me, even though we’re in two very specific and very different times and places and sets of circumstances1. Breihan gets this in his piece, as well:
“The Sunset Tree covers a lot of ground, but much of the LP, including “This Year,” focus on the moment when Darnielle was 17 and just starting to taste and imagine freedom while still being trapped with this dark force. “This Year” thrums with anger and determination and besieged optimism. It turns out that this feeling, conveyed so forcefully, applies to a whole lot of people going through a whole lot of things…Sometimes, extremely specific songwriters can take you to places where you’ve never been, and you can find yourself identifying with situations that tell you new things about yourself. I love that — granular idiosyncrasies that somehow become universal.”
Lyricist and lead singer John Darnielle - former meth addict, former psych nurse, former struggling poet, mythic-level Magic: The Gathering player, a guy who has written at least 650 songs, got called “America's best non-hip-hop lyricist” by the New Yorker, and in his spare time wrote four novels, one of which was a finalist for the National Book Award - does this all of the time in all of his music. He finds the granular idiosyncrasies that somehow become universal. The Mountain Goats have put together a deep catalogue of concept albums and tracks about local pro wrestling and the glory days of old Hollywood and tabletop gaming and friends dying of cancer and enemies being tortured in cabins and washed-up goth bassists and lots of drugs and lots of booze and lots of infidelity; The Sunset Tree is unusual in that it’s more autobiographical, but the intimate details turned into something resonant have been there since the band started in 1991. Many Mountain Goats fans have known someone like the characters in these songs, but just as many have never met any of these characters and never want to. But he can look through each of them and show you the unwavering band of light within each of them, the thing that you can also recognize in yourself. For lack of a better term: their divinity.
I need you to understand that I love this band and that their songs mean a lot to me even though I don't relate to them at all, because they make me think of other people that aren't me, and make me realize that other people who aren't me are just as real as I am. They have a song called “Wild Sage” which is about a guy who’s depressed after a breakup and walks along the road and lies down in a ditch; they have another song called “Foreign Object” which is about a guy in a local wrestling match who stabs his opponent in the eye. I know both of these songs backward and forwards, I sang both of them when I was rocking my newborn daughters to sleep because I had to think of songs I knew and I know more songs by the Mountain Goats by any other band, those are two of maybe 400 Mountain Goats songs that I relate to deeply, despite having no life experience that ties me to the lyrics. I have loved these songs since I first heard “This Year” twenty years ago, through all of the band’s middle period, through going back and listening to the back catalogue of Darnielle playing guitar by himself on a Panasonic boombox, through the albums that have come out over the past twenty years, through every album even including the polarizing Goths (2017), known as the one where the band finally learned a fifth chord.
My first Mountain Goats live show was in 2010 in Orange County, California; even though it was a solo show, Darnielle still opened with the traditional “Hi! We’re the Mountain Goats!” That was a time in my life when I was not going to Mass or practicing Catholicism at all, and after a lifetime of Catholic school including four years at Catholic Disneyland in Notre Dame Indiana, that concert felt more profound to me than Mass did2. I was there with people who knew all of the lyrics, who recognized the divinity in Darnielle’s characters, who recognized that maybe that could be a reflection of the divinity within them, and maybe it was time to celebrate that by shouting those lyrics out as loud as they could. I felt real. I felt that everyone around me was real.
A few months ago, I made a joke about Pope Francis’ final encyclical, Dilexit Nos, and how the superficial narrowing of the subject matter in each of Francis’ three encyclicals, perhaps, reflected his frustration with our inability to get what he was talking about:
“He wrote Laudato Si’, this big, sweeping, complex, multi-issue encyclical, to show us “this is how the Catholic church needs to think about morality so it can help save the world in the anthropocene era”. And then we, you know, didn't do any of the things in that letter, so five years later in Fratelli Tutti, he tried again, “okay, something simpler this time, please just treat each other with kindness, let's just start there and then we can move to the world-saving stuff once you start treating each other better”...And then we, you know, still didn't do any of the things in that letter, so he tried yet again in 2024 with Dilexit Nos, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and sighing and trying out “okay, so you understand how you're…a person, right? You have consciousness, understanding, an inner monologue, hopes, worries? Do you get that everyone around you has that too? Do you get that God can see that in you and then also in everyone who has ever existed? Can we at least start there? Now that you have this information, do you think that anything about the world, or even just anything about your life, should perhaps be different?”
Now, to say that Dilexit Nos is “just” about one thing is stupid, it’s about a lot of things, but the first chunk of the encyclical is about what Francis calls “the heart”. Later, the encyclical will touch on many other topics and cite other works of theology quite extensively, but the whole first part of the thing is “look: you have a heart. That’s you in there. That’s everything you are”:
“The heart is also the locus of sincerity, where deceit and disguise have no place. It usually indicates our true intentions, what we really think, believe and desire, the “secrets” that we tell no one: in a word, the naked truth about ourselves. It is the part of us that is neither appearance or illusion, but is instead authentic, real, entirely “who we are”...This profound core, present in every man and woman, is not that of the soul, but of the entire person in his or her unique psychosomatic identity. Everything finds its unity in the heart, which can be the dwelling-place of love in all its spiritual, psychic and even physical dimensions.”
What Francis is describing is very difficult to describe in words, but I think he trusted us to understand it intuitively. Yes, there’s this core inside you, something beyond just the chemicals firing in your brain, something beyond the performance that we all do whenever we’re in front of another person, a true self whose depths only we know. You probably have guessed what the next step is: everyone around you has that, too, right? Are you acting like everyone around you has that too? Do you realize that in order to more fully be a fully alive and fully real human being, you need to remember that everyone around you has that too?
“In the heart of each person there is a mysterious connection between self-knowledge and openness to others, between the encounter with one’s personal uniqueness and the willingness to give oneself to others. We become ourselves only to the extent that we acquire the ability to acknowledge others, while only those who can acknowledge and accept themselves are then able to encounter others.”
Challenging, but not confusing. So far, a pretty good argument for the golden rule, for humanism, for empathy, all of that is great. Here’s the next jump: the God who created the universe chose to become a human being, which means He has one of those hearts in Him, too, and is perhaps uniquely qualified to recognize it in you. How does that make you feel about how real you are now?
“Where the thinking of the philosopher halts, there the heart of the believer presses on in love and adoration, in pleading for forgiveness and in willingness to serve in whatever place the Lord allows us to choose, in order to follow in his footsteps. At that point, we realize that in God’s eyes we are a “Thou”, and for that very reason we can be an “I”. Indeed, only the Lord offers to treat each one of us as a “Thou”, always and forever. Accepting his friendship is a matter of the heart; it is what constitutes us as persons in the fullest sense of that word.”
God - like, the God! - can see the unwavering band of light within you, and even has one Himself, has this level with which you can deeply connect with Him. You are real and God sees how real you are and wants to be friends with you. And you can see His heart and have your heart be seen by Him right now if you want, it’s just that God never quite looks how you expect.
“I never tire of repeating that Jesus told us this in the clearest terms possible: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). He now asks you to meet him there, in every one of our brothers and sisters, and especially in the poor, the despised and the abandoned members of society. What a beautiful encounter that can be!”
So much of what we do, every day, is a performance. We are tactful and charming and gregarious and professional and polite and the most profound encounters and relationships that we remember are the ones where we are able to let our guards down and stop performing, and have someone see as much of our “heart” as we can let out. That is when we feel most fully alive, most fully real, and when we can recognize other people as most fully alive and real. We have the ability to have these “beautiful encounters” all of the time, with God Himself, especially in those who are unwanted by most of society.
As has happened with many of my previous essays, there will now be a Kurt Vonnegut jump scare. In Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions, there’s a scene where avant-garde artist Rabo Karabekian debuts his new painting, titled “The Temptation of Saint Anthony”, which is made up of a bright vertical line on a green background. The people around him don’t go for it at first, and he responds:
“It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”
Shortly before this monologue, in the same scene, Vonnegut, as himself, writes:
“As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales. And so on. Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.”
I am not breaking new ground here3: it is a lifelong struggle (in the developed world) to break yourself of the mental trap that you are the main character of the Novel of Your Reality. This lifelong struggle is very important, because some people fail at it, spend their lives thinking they’re in Lord of the Rings, and then become the Vice President. When you get stuck in that trap, it becomes too easy to treat other people like disposable paper facial tissues, instead of the beautiful, unwavering band of light that they have inside them and you have inside you too and theirs is just as real as yours and God has that unwavering band of light too and God sees theirs and God sees yours and God loves all of it.
On the World Day of Migrants and Refugees in September 2020, the bishop of Chiclayo, Peru gave a homily on our duty to recognize and encounter the unwavering bands of light within the people that society is choosing to reject. I was coy for one whole sentence there, but obviously, the reason I’m bringing this up is because the guy who was the bishop of Chiclayo in 2020 is now Pope Leo XIV in 2025. And he said this:
“When we speak of migrants, we too often reduce them to statistics. But they are not numbers — they are people. And when we truly see them, when we genuinely desire to know them, we begin to recognize that they have stories, lives, and dignity. To understand them, we must first come to know them…more and more, in many parts of the world, that is exactly what we find: a few who have far too much. And it is an attitude that can creep into our own hearts as well — this desire to hold on tightly to what is mine, to cling to possessions, to see them as exclusively ours. And this makes it so difficult to share. But this difficulty in sharing becomes an obstacle to living a true experience of community — including with our migrant brothers and sisters. We are called to share. We are called to accompany them, to welcome, protect, and promote them — fostering a real experience of community that looks beyond nationality, beyond skin color, beyond religion and all the other distinctions that so often divide us.”
When you see people suffer and suffer needlessly, because of hatred and ignorance and bigotry, you can’t help but be moved, not just because you’re a person who can pass the Rattlesnake Test and you maybe have an inkling of how God sees you and realize that God sees other people that way too, and that is another unwavering band of light, just as precious to the creator of the universe as you, that’s getting hurt there. I joked about Dilexit Nos being a scaling down of the world-saving vision that Francis laid out in Laudato Si’, but it’s really not. It’s the message we need right now, the message that starts with that unwavering band of light, the heart, that we are called to recognize in migrants and unhoused people and Medicaid patients and children who need an education and all of these people who we can meet and encounter the divine in, right now.
That’s a large part of why I love the Mountain Goats’ music, even though I can’t relate to it. John Darnielle shows us the heart of each of his characters, shows us how real they are, and reminds us that we have that same heart inside of each of us, and that we can recognize it in each other. He showed us his own heart on The Sunset Tree, but he does it with all of his other characters: the guy in the ditch in “Wild Sage”, the miserable alcoholic Alpha Couple from Tallahassee, Cyrus and Jeff the burnouts who aspire to start a death metal band, the addicts cooped up in a house together on We Shall All Be Healed, the person taken out into the street and beaten in “Heretic Pride”, the seer trying to reassure himself through the coming doom on “Black Pear Tree”, the hardcore peanut fan in “Golden Boy”, the pagans getting wiped out by the Roman empire on Songs for Pierre Chauvin. And Jenny.
Jenny is one of Darnielle’s few recurring characters. She first appeared on the 2002 album All Hail West Texas, where she has a song named after her, and she’s also the unnamed narrator of “Color in Your Cheeks”. I remember seeing The Mountain Goats at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music in 2018, and they4 played this song towards the end of the set, and Darnielle introduced the song by calling it one of his only “political” songs, and shouting out Chicago’s Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. They were, as Darnielle saw it, an organization that did, and does, work hard to see and nurture and protect the hearts of the immigrant children who come through Chicago.
“Color in Your Cheeks” is about the flophouse Jenny runs in Texas, a place where anyone can come who needs shelter and rest. I do not really relate to the refrain “Come on in, we haven’t slept in weeks/Drink some of this, it’ll put the color in your cheeks” - I have not ever said that particular combination of words to a person in earnest - but I sang it at that concert and I’ve sung it to myself countless times since then and I sang it to both of my daughters on the days that they were born, and I have been thinking about the lyrics a lot recently. “This Year” is, of course, a totemic Mountain Goats song and the first one I ever heard, but “Color in Your Cheeks” may be the most important Mountain Goats song for me right now. Jenny might be the most important of John Darnielle’s many characters for us right now.
Jenny made a cameo on the 2012 album Transcendental Youth, and came back and got her own album in 2023, Jenny From Thebes, and we learned that running a shelter for all comers hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park for Jenny, and that Jenny’s town wasn’t exactly happy with what she was doing, but Jenny recognized the hearts of the people that she encountered, knew that they were as real as she was, and knew that she had to do something. John Darnielle showed us Jenny’s heart, and reminded us that we had hearts too, and that, at a time when people in power refuse to acknowledge the reality of the masses that they are hurting, we could look to Jenny, and even if we couldn’t relate to her, here was her heart right here, it’s profound and remarkable and what she’s feeling is primal and elemental and relatable, and you have a heart too, you can be like this too, you can meet people with a heart too, you can encounter God and His own heart, deep just like yours, too, He’s in these people that are here right now:
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 St. Louis or from Paris or they lived across the street
But they came, and when they finally made it here
It was the least 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
There are a million other reasons why this song, and other Mountain Goats songs, work so well, not least of which: the chord structure is usually very simple, the lyrics are often verse-chorus-verse-chorus-out, and John Darnielle can project and enunciate very clearly when he sings. All of this adds up to songs that are easy to learn quickly and remember, which, of course, you want to have if you are making something that’s going to resonate and stick with people.
I mean, I had been to Masses prior to this concert that made me want to step in front of a bus. I have also, for what it’s worth, been to Masses since this concert that have made me want to step in front of a bus.
What I’m about to say is, for example, the main thesis of most of David Foster Wallace’s work.
It was actually another solo show, so it was just Darnielle this time. But I’ve seen every configuration of this band live - just Darnielle, Darnielle and bassist Peter Hughes, Darnielle and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, a full three-piece, a full four-piece, a full band with an additional eight-piece horn section.