I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats: Episode 10, Jeff Davis County Blues

Hey, y'all, it is Jeffrey Kraner speaking to you from the year 2025.

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Hey, Joseph Fink here.

A few months ago, we shared the first episode of my new podcast, I Only Listened to the Mountain Goats.

It was, I think, a very good episode, but it was also one where we were figuring a lot of stuff out, both within how we were doing the conversation and in how we edited it.

And so I wanted to check in with you here with episode 10 of our podcast, our most recent episode, and one that I think better represents where this show ended up going.

Enjoy.

This is the notebook that I took to to

Ireland on the...

It was before Tallahassee was out, but the first time that we went over, Peter and I went over there.

And then here's the original lyric, Two Riches and Wonders.

Oh, wow.

It has...

I mean, seriously, this is what's really wild about some of the songs from I West Texas.

I don't think there's a previous draft of that.

I think that's the amount of correction that went into it.

You've got one line, no, two.

One line crossed out, and then like one word crossed out.

Invent has been changed to I learned because I think I noticed I was going to need invent somewhere else.

So there's that.

And there's also the fact that though now I'm superstitious about pen colors and I won't write in blue or red.

I will only write in black ink.

Interesting.

And this, it was pretty clear back then.

I was like, I don't care.

Oh, wait.

No, there must have been a previous draft.

You know how you can tell?

I am healthy, I am whole, etc.

It says.

So there must have been a previous draft somewhere else.

Now there's a song that I never got written called You and Your Latin Jazz.

I like that one.

Yeah, I think this notebook went through a bunch of different iterations, like it was at one point.

Yeah, then it becomes a

Sun Century notebook.

It went through, like, this one was around for four albums, and there's still a lot of blank paper in it.

It feels weird.

If I take one of these old notebooks and start writing new songs in it, it feels bizarre, even though it's just paper.

I hate writing longhand, and so all my stuff, I have like, all of my old stuff, you can tell it's the old stuff because it's in WordPerfect rather than Word.

Wow.

So I have like folders of WordPerfect files.

I learned how to type at seven.

So basically I've been

as long as I've been writing, I've been writing on computer, and it just, that's the only way I'm comfortable doing it.

I learned how to type at 12 in summer school in Portland, and it became the only way I wrote prose.

And to this day, I will very seldom write prose, but songs have always been long.

I can't imagine writing a song lyric on the laptop.

It's like that's, that's when I'm typing it up so that I'll be able to read it when I print it out.

But for the most part, there's whole takes of my songs where it's like, this is a good take.

Oops, I don't know what that says.

Welcome to Mavis Beacon Teaches the Mountain Goats, a podcast about typing and the mountain goats.

I'm Joseph Fink, and I only listen to the Mountain Goats.

This is the show where I talk with John Darneal, singer and songwriter of the band The Mountain Goats, about music, art, life, and anything else that comes up.

This season we are going song by song through John's 2002 album, All Hail West Texas.

Today's song is Jeff Davis County Blues, which, as you'll hear, is a song with a particular meaning to my life.

Later, we will hear a cover of the song recorded just for this podcast by Julian Coster.

But first, this episode was a tough one.

It would have been tough even without the subject matter, which gets a little heavy, because this was the last episode recorded on my first trip down to Durham.

We had spent three solid days sitting in John's basement recording.

Imagine us.

John cross-legged on an old mattress, me sitting in a small plastic folding chair.

Outside, the sky broils.

Inside, we sweat and we talk.

We're going to talk this episode about Jeff Davis County Blues.

Jeff Davis County Blues, which is also Jefferson Davis County, I think.

Yeah, it's

the hyperbole that people often criticize younger people for engaging, of calling everything the best.

Lots of things are the best.

Yeah.

Right.

It's like, I don't know.

It's the best for that moment.

Yeah, and it's the best in some in some way that the other thing isn't the best.

So it's always hard to pick a very favorite one, but I've been saying Riches and Wonders, you know, that's maybe the best written song on the album as far as the lyric goes.

It's really, you know,

it's very measured.

But Jeff Davis, I think it was like, it's a step up.

Jeff Davis County Blues has a kind of a maturity to the...

to the to the resolve where I'm not asking for attention.

I mean, it's like, whereas the best ever ever does Van and Denton pretty much punches you in the nose, telling you, I bet you can't not pay attention to a guy yelling, Hail Satan.

Even if you missed the whole story I told, I bet you're going to hear me now, right?

And that's that's punk energy, which I like.

And, you know, but I also am more drawn to, in part because my natural tendency is to jump up and down and yell.

And I enjoy it, you know, but I'm always wanting to try and find other ways to, you know, to leave an impression.

Yeah.

This has, similar to riches and wonders it has an over minute over a minute long instrumental out yeah when i talk about maturity in songwriting i consider like the ability for the singer to shut up and stay out of the way of some nice chords that to me is maturity right that's whereas i didn't used to have that because i couldn't play the chords that nice you know and uh and there's an a7 in here an a minor seven that keeps coming in I'm pretty sure this is the first song I ever wrote that had an A minor seven in it.

And it's nice.

It deserves to have some space.

I just love the idea of someone being like, listen to this A minor seven.

Here it is.

You know, it's interesting because this song really gets you.

So this is maybe the most specific to,

you said that this album came out of driving through West Texas.

Yeah.

And this is maybe the most specific to driving through West Texas to the point where it's basically giving directions.

Yeah, no, it's a highway map.

It's a drive you can go do if you, if you so desire.

So there's a, someone has created created a Google map.

Shout out to that person.

Thanks for doing that because I personally

have a name, presumably.

And it's really interesting.

They mapped out on Google this route.

Yeah.

And what's fascinating is it's a super long route, and it feels long when you're saying it in this song, and it feels long,

I think it is a lot of hours, but it's what you're saying about West Texas.

It is, when you see it against the state of Texas, this entire song is

maybe 5% of the width of the state.

Yeah, no, you're not even.

You can drive, you could do this thing, and it would take you a while, and you wouldn't have seen much of Texas.

So, the entire drive, according to this Google map, that who created it?

Oh, sorry, I already clicked away.

Thank you again, though.

Thank you, person doomed to anonymity.

It is a five-hour drive.

Here is what it looks like against the state of Texas.

Yeah, so it's just basically it's a very small upside-down V

in the middle of its,

where's the border?

Oh, it's right there.

Yeah, yeah, you don't go far into New Mexico on this drive,

you just go very briefly into it.

Let me hit back some.

Zachary Eldridge is our dude.

Thank you, Zachary Eldridge.

I appreciate it.

What's up?

So it's a five-hour drive is how long it would take to do once.

But he turns around, right?

There's probably an extra 20 minutes for the turnaround because he's going to keep going.

Yeah.

And he decides to go to Midland.

But yeah, there's something about that impression that going through Texas leaves on you.

It's like you go, it's a place that can teach you about your own ignorance because a lot of people, especially people who've never been to the South at all, they think they know something about Texas and they may know something about Texas, but there's a lot of Texas to know.

And that's instructive, right?

Because that's true of every place.

Texas happens to be a good place to learn it.

It's like no matter what you think you know about.

And let's take a place that people have a lot of stereotypes about, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, right?

Which became a popular place to move to circa 2000-ish.

I spent five years living in Williamsburg yeah and and and you know there were probably a lot of people your age who had moved there around the same time and it was exciting and now people dismiss it in a in a way that everybody absolutely everybody has taken part in in dismissing Williamsburg as Hipsterville or whatever but there's a lot to know about Williamsburg actually we were we took a we had a bad uber driver no a lift driver um bad lift driver through there a couple weeks ago or something.

I saw all kinds of blocks I had never walked down at all because there's no clubs there and there's no restaurants that I know there and and I was seeing all kinds of people mainly Hasidim right um that I'd never see oh yeah if you go south from Williamsburg yeah it's well that's Williamsburg too

yeah you get into the neighborhoods where there are no signs in English all in Yiddish I

the thing is I think I told you if I didn't tell you one thing I almost did when I was studying Hebrew at

at Pomona when I was going to Pittsburgh, but I was studying Hebrew and I was in classical studies and I was really getting pretty into

the tradition of

Hebrew scholarship and stuff.

I was looking in the postings for summer stuff and there was a Yiddish library thing in, I want to say it was Massachusetts, where they had like this vast repository of Yiddish books that needed to be catalogued.

And they said it was a great gig.

The one thing is there's no air conditioning in the warehouse where you're going to do this and it's July.

Oh, God.

And I knew I had never spent any time on the East Coast, and I was like, I bet it's unlivable among all those books.

So I didn't apply

for the Yiddish book scholarship.

I don't think.

If I did, I didn't get it.

But I sort of, you know, when I was thinking about doing it, I looked up and the whole tradition of Yiddish literature is so, I mean, like, it's something you would feel utterly justified in going, that's going to be my area.

That's all I'm going to study, you know.

And so, so, yeah, when I go through that part of Williamsburg, I just, I have this, I'm dazzled.

I know so little.

I'm ignorant, you know, and there's a sort of, for me, anything I'm ignorant of, I grow intensely curious about.

Yeah, I have, I think, a different reaction to the Hasid community.

Well, yeah, of course.

Because, yeah, as a, as like a reformed Jew and like a liberal Jew, to me, the Hasids make me kind of angry.

Sure, but remember also the tradition that they come out of, whether whatever they are in practice, it's an ecstatic tradition, right?

Yeah, they were the radical ones, but they were the radical ones in the mid-19th century.

Yeah,

it's a thing, it's a thing where it's like I get to hate the Hasides because

I'm not hating them because they're Jewish, I'm hating them because of the way they treat women and the way they treat other people.

And it's the sibling anger.

I only think of them in scriptural terms, not cultural terms.

Yeah, it's the sibling anger that you get to have because you're close to them in some way.

Yeah.

No, I mean, like, you know, at core, here's the thing: I saw Feeler on the Roof when I was five, and to this day, I identify with Reb Tevya.

It's like, I want when he waxes about how great it would be to just read scripture all day.

He doesn't even mean it.

He says that, but he actually likes his life the way it is, you know.

But I'm the same way.

I think, oh, what if I was a guy just reading the Bible all day?

That would be great.

It'd be great if you were a guy.

If you're a woman,

you don't get to do shit in those communities.

Oh, man.

So I want to talk, you know, the last episode, we talked about how places.

You don't want to cut all of that unless we want to go.

I mean,

are my dislike of Hasids because again, it has nothing to do with the fact that they're Jewish.

Yeah, no, totally.

It has to do with the fact that I'm Jewish.

It's a good line.

Yeah,

so

this last episode, we talked about how places can become tied up in who you were when you went to those places.

It's exactly the same with songs.

And this is a song that just happened to get tangled up in a point in my life.

Right.

And you were in New York.

I was in New York.

So we've talked about this, that

when the Mountain Goats went from a band I liked to a band that was kind of tied into my life was when my father died.

Oh, yeah.

It was in 2011.

Right.

He had had a heart condition for seven years or so beforehand.

We knew he was going to die.

We just didn't know when.

And so it was this very long, drawn-out process.

I went through like summers where I couldn't function because of the anxiety.

Man, and I know what you mean.

It's the thing when you summarize it in that one sentence, it's easy to just walk right past that.

You know, I went through a period where I was too anxious to really move, you know.

Anyway, it's like,

I always want to respect those moments when you pass them and go, like, yeah, no, I hear you.

It's like when I talk about my crying while awake period, that was real.

That was like, yeah, I would try and keep it together until my wife left for work just to not bum her out, you know, and then I would go.

I mean, it's one of the things that really bonded my wife and I powerfully is she and I started dating the summer I stopped functioning because of anxiety.

She started dating me like right before that happened.

So it was this great thing where she started dating me and then I stopped functioning.

Yeah.

Good new boyfriend.

So around my wrist, I have a piece of baker string.

Right.

She has one too.

We have friendship bracelets.

Awesome.

I don't actually wear a wedding ring because I really hate wearing jewelry.

It bothers me.

But I've worn this baker string or we switch it out about once every six months.

Oh, wild.

For

how long have Meg and I have been together?

Almost eight years.

Over eight years.

Oh, God.

And so,

because it was 2009, yeah, eight years.

So it was really early on, and I was living in New York.

She was living in New Jersey.

And I had this point where I couldn't get out of bed.

I was so anxious.

And she came and she brought me chocolate-covered strawberries in a bakery box.

And then we made friendship bracelets from the bakery string around the bakery box.

And then I've worn this around my wrist ever since to remind me of that moment.

Anyway, so that, yeah, that summer, it was an interesting one because, yeah, I couldn't function, but that was also the start of our relationship.

And so, do you now, when you, like, if you get, if anxiety starts to settle in and you feel like maybe your functionality is decreasing, you go, something good's about to happen.

I've had, so I had that wave, and then I had another wave after my father died where, again, I couldn't function for a little bit.

And then I started writing Nightfail.

And since Nightfale has started, a lot of my anxiety has not gone away at all, but it has become extremely manageable because

I just started putting all of my anxiety into Nightfale.

Like, Nightfale is a very, all of the stuff about death and about uncertainty.

That's all me just

taking all the anxiety that was building up and putting it into this work.

And so

it didn't have to live inside of me anymore.

Yeah, no, that's, that's the Lead into Gold phenomenon.

That's what that is.

It's like, it's, it's, uh,

I've talked with my therapist about it, how, you know, some of these songs where you go, well, that was a terrible thing to have lived through, but look what came out of that.

That's nice, you know.

Yeah.

So my father, so

he had a relatively minor surgery, and it went completely wrong.

I'm sorry.

And he died, but then came back kind of thing, where they got him.

out and they drove him to Cedar Sinai.

And so I flew back from New York and we just spent a week with him at Cedar Sinai and the

ICU.

It's always really weird because we've done Nightville's done a bunch of stuff at the Largo, which is literally around the corner from Cedar Sinai.

And Largo is a very exciting place.

It's, you know, I've had a lot of really amazing career moments.

Some of the first Nightville shows were at the Largo and it is literally around the corner from the room that my father died in.

So we had this week with him.

And I really take that as a gift in that.

he very easily could have died that first night instead we had this week in which we could say goodbye um we didn't know necessarily we were saying goodbye.

We thought he was going to get a heart transplant.

And then it just didn't happen.

But we spent that week singing because, again, he was a musician and we had always sung together as a family.

We sung a lot of different stuff.

You know, we sung a lot of the stuff.

You know, he was very into a lot of different music.

Who is the guy?

I cannot believe I've forgotten his name, Dying Cubs fans, Last Request.

Oh, I don't know that guy's name.

I know the song, but nobody remembers that guy's name.

Come on.

That's not even my favorite song by him.

He was great.

Steve Goodman.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

He wrote all sorts of great stuff.

He's a fairly, he's not that well known.

Yeah, my dad really liked him.

So I listened to a lot of his stuff.

We sang his stuff, but we also sang, you know, we sang this year and we sang.

I was telling you this a couple of days ago.

We sang never quite free.

Yeah.

But I, without telling him, rewrote the end of the verses to make them happy because I wasn't, I needed him to be singing a happy song.

And it's just, you know, it just just became tied to that music came tied to that moment.

Craig Finn has that line, certain songs get scratched into our soul.

Yeah, exactly.

And it has nothing to do necessarily, again, never quite free had nothing to do with that moment.

Yeah.

But it became a very different meaning.

Very soon after that, so I came back to New York.

I was trying to figure things out.

Six months later, I would start writing Night Vale, which it wasn't until years later that I realized that was in direct reaction to the grief.

Like that was me processing grief.

It didn't occur to me until probably three years after it started.

It's an insightful thing about grief that it's weird.

You know, it's like not, that's not the first thing people say about it.

Yeah, it's, you don't even know what you're, I don't think you realize how you're processing it until you have a lot of distance to see what you were doing.

I went, you played Music Hall of Williamsburg, and I went to see it.

I actually didn't know, I'm not 100% sure why I didn't know it.

I didn't know that song that well.

Right.

It's just not a song I listened to much.

And you were playing it, and I did it solo.

It It was in the middle of the set.

That sounds right.

I remember it being solo.

So you started playing Jeff Davis County Blues.

And you got to the line about old Sunset Magazines.

Old issues of Sunset Magazine.

Yes.

And my dad was an avid subscriber to Sunset Magazine.

And there was always, it was always around a room.

When I was flying back to New York, you know, we were there for the funeral and all of that.

It happens pretty quickly when you're Jewish.

You do kind of do it right away.

So we stayed for the funeral.

And then I was just grabbing some stuff to read on the plane.

So I just grabbed a couple issues of Sunset Magazine.

Oh, wow.

And I opened up.

My dad was an avid gardener.

He gardened all the time.

We had a fairly complex garden.

And so he would, and he worked from home.

So he'd spend a lot of his day doing that.

And all through that, it was the latest issue of Sunset Magazine.

And it came out the month he died.

And there was all these notes he had written about gardening ideas he wanted to try.

He had like circled a type of planting method that he wanted to try out.

And there was all this stuff, this handwriting from my dad in this issue of Sunset Magazine.

So yeah, the song that

brought up these old issues of Sunset Magazine and this idea of dreaming of home.

Yeah.

And on different ideas of home.

Yeah, and it became a song about my dad.

And so it's this weird thing where forever this will be a song about my dad, even though nothing in the lyrics supports that.

It's not a song about someone missing somebody who died, I don't think.

And it's not a song about grief necessarily, but it is 100% those things for me.

There's a big loss in that song, though.

Like I say, it's one of the more mature songs in part because it doesn't need an object of romantic affection or even a definable object.

It's actually focusing on the feeling.

Most of us don't focus on feelings at that level very often.

When we feel, if I feel, if I see you say you're angry, I might ask you who you're angry at.

Well, that's kind of a very dim understanding of anger.

And sure, you're angry at people or injustice or whatever, you know, but to sit with the anger and

have that be the feeling instead of be focused on it, that's where the song is at.

But with

absence and grief, you know,

he's looking at something,

some pictures, you know.

Well, it doesn't really matter what's in the pictures.

We know that they're pictures of something.

And that they're pictures of something means that whatever's on them, you're not with that right now.

So

it's a song of solitude and of like, of the, you know, solitude isn't just when you're by yourself.

Solitude is also when

stuff is missing from you.

You know, so yeah, fond of that song.

After three nights in jail, I

head north from Taya Vale.

Switch to 285 in Pecos, head up to Red Bluff.

My walk's real steady, and my eyes are real cold.

But I feel like I'm all at 16 years old.

Lost in a travel lodge with the television on, with the sound done.

I don't feel so tough.

Old issues, a sunset magazine

to read, sleep for 12 hours,

dream about home.

I have no place to go,

so I drive up to New Mexico.

Fix my eyes in the rear view when I cross the state line.

And I panic, I guess, although it's quite late.

I take the first exit to 128.

I am

coming back to Midland.

I hope you won't mind.

Poor odds odds of the two of us

scattered on the passenger seat.

I drive slowly and evenly, and I dream about home.

You've talked about, you know, people, and I absolutely did this when I read, I emailed you about my dad dying.

No, I totally remember this.

There's something about you, people want to bring their trauma to you.

And I I think it's because so much of your music is about

not even like,

here's some ways to get through trauma, but just that it's okay to have trauma.

Yeah, no, that's, I mean, that's to be able to sit with your stuff.

You know, whatever your damage is, whatever your trauma is, whatever your issues are.

To have a space where you can sit with that and come to understand that however much of it is, you're still there.

It doesn't actually have a knife in its hand.

It actually can't assault you.

It just feels funky, you know, but yeah, that's what music is for me in a lot of ways.

The music I listen to, I think about during that same period, I was listening to Nothing Is Beyond You by Rich Mullins in the version by Amy Grant.

And, you know, that song was not written for people to suffer with, but it was that for me.

You know, it was like, it was, it was a way of situating myself in the vastness of the universe.

And yeah, it's, you know, there's a more,

a simpler way of looking at it, which is like, you can talk a lot about the nature of your experiences with music, but music is sacred.

It really is.

It's like when you've gone that place with something, you know, whether it's Amy Grant or Katie Tunstall or Christine Fellows or whoever, you know, nothing you say about it will ever be adequate to what happened when some piece of work helped liberate you from something.

You know, it's like, that's, that's, it's indescribable.

Thank you for sharing that.

That's amazing.

Yeah, I'm,

I also, I was like, I, I'm going to be bringing some trauma to unload on you, and I apologize.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Look, I say this a lot, and I always am wanting to say it in a way that it's hard to, I'm always trying to hit the right tone here.

When people want to share their trauma with me, it is an honor.

It can be like in the signing line or something, it can be, it can be a lot.

You know, it's like, I'm not a therapist.

That's the thing is there's nothing I can say.

Like when somebody shares a trauma with if you share it with somebody whose job it is to do therapy they know how to shepherd you through that right i don't i don't i make the thing that seems to actually in some way by itself know how to help with that but i personally

i i don't know what to say except thanks and it's an honor you know but it really is a profound honor especially because Music has, how many times has music been the thing for me standing, you know, standing at the abyss, saying it's not really an abyss so you can go in there you can go there because you'll come back yeah we occasionally get you know people often you know it's people that are trying they're in high school and they're trying to come out and night veil helped them with that and i i try to think about this that it's like

what i usually respond to them with is, I'm just so glad that this could be useful to you in the way that art, other art has been useful to me.

Do you know the song To Be of Use by Bill Callahan and we talked about this?

No.

It's,

I'll look up the lyrics and read it to you, and you will think from the opening lyrics, you'll say, why are you reading this one?

But

we'll get there.

It's remarkable.

It's expressing exactly what we're talking about.

Most of my fantasies are of making someone else come.

Most of my fantasies are of to be of use, to be of some hard, simple, undeniable use, like a spindle, like a candle, like a horseshoe, like a corkscrew, to be of use,

to be of use.

Most of my fantasies are of making someone else come on a horse, over palms laid on the threshold of the coming day.

Coming day.

And Bill is like, Bill is so is one of the greatest we have ever.

And it's actually, we were talking about the songs you're with.

He had one, I think, the my lowest point ever.

I was listening to a song by him called um too many birds uh and I just couldn't get away from it uh and it was one of those things where it was like it can take you all the way down to the bottom and show you that the bottom is not a place that has to hold you yeah

and that other people have gone there and come back yeah that that it that it's a real place and like any other place you can breathe there it's not outer space

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I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from the League Veef or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

We come together to host Unschooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them.

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You know, it's like, so yeah.

Julian Coster is a member of The Music Tapes and Neutral Milk Hotel.

He also creates surreal and beautiful audio fiction, including the podcast The Orbiting Human Circus of the Air, that takes place in a ballroom at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Julian approached the task of covering the mountain goats unlike any other guest on this season.

But before we get to that, let's talk about how Julian and John met.

We psychically found each other in London at a Harry Krishna cafe.

Yeah, it was wild because I was on my honeymoon and

that was during Neutral Milk's tour.

They just stayed on tour for so long.

And because I had seen them

a little in San Francisco like a week before.

And that was when I was on tour heading down to my wedding.

And then I got married.

And then we flew to England like a week and a half later.

And there was Neutral Milk Hotel at Govinda's in,

I can't quite remember the name of the neighborhood.

It's like a very populated neighborhood.

But yeah, I always used to seek out the Krishna restaurants.

But I think,

Julian, did we discuss this?

Were you on the 94 Neutral Milk Hotel tour that played Cup of J in Pomona?

I don't remember the Cup of J, but I think as we were saying, I don't really remember a lot of stuff from the 90s.

But I do remember finding you in London because we'd been, yeah, we'd been in California.

We'd been playing at, there was a

terra stock festival which was an amazing festival and then we we had flown out to London and we were

starving and we were trying to find vegetarian food in London which was

this was before I knew that there was we knew there was a thousand Indian restaurants every ten feet in London and and so we somebody was like oh there's this this Krishna restaurant, which we sort of knew the Krishna stuff because they would set up free food on college campuses and stuff, which we were all pretty addicted to because they would, you know, they'd give you free food and it was really nice.

So we went stumbling through London, we were all jet-lagged, and we found the place, and standing like right in front of it was John, whom we just left in San Francisco.

So we were all very, very confused.

And I remember you were incredibly energetic.

You were, well, obviously, you must have been, you were on your honeymoon.

So you were, you looked.

Well, plus, me, me prior to 2003 or so had a really a huge amount of adrenaline.

Like, you know how a lot of people were really bummed when they started to get a little older, and I was very relieved.

Oh, yes, because the amount of just free energy I had floating around at any given time back in those days was pretty scorching.

That's true.

It's exactly how I remember you.

That's so funny.

I remember you being, you were kind of like a squirrel.

No, exactly.

It was an incandescent energy.

I mean, the thing is, like, I can't complain about it because it totally, like, you know, that's what people found entertaining on stage it was like i would sort of sit there and i looked kind of like the sun you know but but uh but yeah it uh i was i was a little relieved when a little of that started to ebb because it was a lot yeah yeah it's so funny i hadn't thought about that because i you know i haven't really seen you since then but that's that was you were yeah and and i always saw i feel like every time i saw you i was either jet lagged or or i just like woken up or something and i was just like oh like i couldn't even keep up but but and now so here's the interesting thing though because we've so we found you in front of this Krishna restaurant, like bouncing off the walls, even more so with happiness because you were on your honeymoon.

And

we were all jet-lagged and just half out of our minds.

But then it turns out you were actually a Hare Krishna at that moment.

Yeah, I was practicing.

I wasn't like

in ISKCON,

there's these four regulations you're supposed to follow.

And I really only ever followed the vegetarianism one.

Like you're supposed to chant 16 rounds a day.

That takes three or four hours to to chant 16 rounds of the maha mantra on beads i think i only ever chanted a full 16 rounds a couple times i chanted every day but uh but 16 rounds i mean that you're supposed to wake up at like three or four in the morning to get your rounds started and i couldn't do that back then if i started up again now i have a better chance because i sleep a lot less but uh but yeah so these four regs that you're supposed to follow that i didn't follow but i did keep deities uh and i still have them actually but i don't offer my food to them anymore okay so you were just doing the vegetarian so we were actually one quarter Hare Krishna at that point because we were doing the vegetarian thing.

Yeah, yeah.

It probably doesn't work that way, though, right?

Well, no, the thing is, so there's a teaching in the religion that says that even the smallest amount of service counts, right?

It's one of the most gentle teachings that if you, I mean, one thing I always liked about it was that, you know, in 20th century Christianity or 19th, you know,

revival Christianity, it's all about what you mean, right?

It's how do you feel in your heart is what counts.

But according to Srila Prabhupada, it's not about what you mean, it's about what you do, right?

So if you chant Hare Krishna, it's not about whether you're feeling it or not.

It's about whether you do it, right?

And

I always thought that was kind of cool.

It's less about your feelings than it is about your actions.

So

yeah, so even eating at a Govindas, you get a little bit of...

of benefit is the teaching.

I mean, as I say, I don't really follow it anymore, although I still, every time I look over at my bookshelves, it's like I have all my ISKCON books from back then.

And like, well, I don't really read them anymore, but

it would feel funny to get rid of them.

We were talking a few episodes ago with Craig Finn about that approach to religion.

It's the one that makes the most sense to me, having been raised Jewish, that to me, religion is a thing you do.

And what you think about that thing or believe about that thing is kind of irrelevant.

So I have a hard time wrapping my head around a lot of faith-based religions.

But a religion where it's a set of practices and those practices become your life and that life becomes a religion.

That totally makes sense.

I think the older a religion is, the more likely it is to follow that precept is what I think.

I think eventually religion becomes a collection of behaviors and that younger religions, like Christianity, tend to be about your feelings.

And then I think as

Christianity ages and grows, it will become...

And I think it's like, so the Catholic Church grows out of older traditions.

So it immediately goes look no one cares how you feel I care if you pray the rosary and show up at church right and so but the Protestant moment coincides with the enlightenment and all that kind of stuff where man becomes the center of the universe catastrophe of course for humankind right so but do you think that's but do you think religions become more or less forgiving as they get old um much more yeah i agree I mean, because they mature, because we know this in miniature in your own life, that as a person, as you grow, you become more forgiving and more able to see other people's side of things and less likely to say of somebody who messes up, you know, well, you're off my list now.

You know, it's like you stop doing that.

Whereas when you're younger, you're more likely to go, well, you fucked up and you fucked up for good.

I can't be your friend anymore.

You know, and as you grow, you stop doing that.

And I think religions are, you know, are people too, in a sense.

They're just a bigger expression, so it takes longer for them to reach that phase.

There's a nice story by, I think it's by Isaac Dennis, and I think there's about a, There's an abbey.

Is that how you say that word, A-B-B-E?

Is it Abbey?

I think so.

I've only ever seen it written?

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, that's one of those things.

Well, so he's on a ship on a voyage

in the middle of the ocean, and there's this island that some of the sailors are getting sort of excited about passing because there are these...

there's these three hermits who live on the island, they're brothers, and they've been there apparently forever.

The Abbey can't quite make sense of the stories because all the sailors tell these stories that seem impossible about how long they've been there and the Abbey wants to go see them and they're kind of religious ascetics.

They actually just sit on that island and pray and they seem incredibly old and he doesn't even understand how they eat or anything.

And

the Abbey, but they're praying all wrong.

They don't actually know

any proper prayers.

And so he sort of teaches them.

and he teaches them

one of the the kind of main proper prayers that you say and and and and he gives them I think rosaries and then he goes off on the ship and he leaves them behind and

about

half a day out in the middle of the ocean, suddenly they see this crazy light approaching the ship and the light gets closer and closer and the Abbey's on the deck and it's the three brothers and they're running on the water and they get closer and closer and they run up onto the deck of the the ship and they're out of breath and they grab the abbey and they say abby abby you have to come back we we tried but we forgot that prayer you taught us

and and that's the story you know it's weird julian is a good story

i think it's probably earlier in this season um since we're recording out of order i'm not sure exactly where but i told a jewish story that is very similar to that where where it's a rabbi except for in that one, it's

the rabbi tries to teach someone how to pray.

And later he finds out that God considers this person's prayers the most valuable prayers in the world.

And he goes back to find out how the person has been praying.

And the person explains that they immediately forgot the prayers, but they'd just been saying the alphabet, assuming that God will figure out how to put it into the correct order.

I love that one.

And now I must, I have to share my homily joke, the one that I remember a priest telling way back when that I'm very fond of because I remember when I first heard it, I was like a teenager and I thought, oh, that's corny, man.

That's really corny as hell.

And then as I grow, I remember it, I go, no, that's actually a really good story.

It's like really, it's not as funny.

Like it gets, it gets nervous laughter from the congregation.

You know, as a joke, it's not a great joke, but as it's, as a story about God, it's totally excellent.

So here it is.

This is a legendary one.

You've probably heard it before.

A town is going to flood, right?

The rain is coming and the river is rising.

And

the mayor goes on TV and the radio and says, hey,

it's going to flood.

Everybody needs to evacuate the town.

And most everybody starts to evacuate, but a very pious man in town says, you know, I'm going to stay here.

I trust God to rescue me.

And the water comes and it begins to rise.

And a rescue team comes by in a boat to the house, you know, and says, hey, we know you're still in there.

Come out.

Come out and save yourself.

And the the guy says, no, I'm trusting in God.

God will save me.

Well, okay.

And the boat goes away and the water rises.

And the guy gets up on his roof and he's sitting there.

A helicopter comes by and they say down through a megaphone, hey, you have to evacuate.

You're going to drown.

And the guy says, I put my faith in God.

I don't need a helicopter or anybody.

And so the helicopter leaves and the waters rise and the man drowns.

And

at the Pearlie Gates, he's let in and he says, Look, I demand an audience with God.

God has betrayed and failed me.

And they say, okay, well, God's right over there.

And he goes up and he says, Lord, I put my faith in you and you did not rescue me.

You know, I remained faithful to the very end and you let me die.

And God says, you know, I sent you the mare, I sent you a motorboat, I sent you a helicopter.

I mean, I think, I always think that's a very profound one because it is actually true that everybody looks for God to speak for the burning bush, but actually God is the guy you run into who gives you good advice.

Yeah.

Do you guys know the flip side of John's story, the one about the guy looking for the parking space?

No.

All right, so this guy is

driving.

He's been driving in New York City

and looking for a parking space for on the Upper West Side for like, and it's been three hours, and he's just beside himself.

He's going to miss what he's there to see.

He was there to see, he had theater tickets, and he just says, God,

if you give me a parking place, I will stop smoking.

I will never look at another woman again other than my wife.

I will start eating properly and I will pray and go to church every Sunday.

Oh, I see one.

Never mind.

The thing is, I was made for church jokes.

I love these jokes.

These are my favorites.

So, Julian, you know, in the earlier part of this episode, the part that you weren't around for,

we were talking about how music becomes...

Once it's written and it's out there, it kind of

the musician no longer has quite control over it and it becomes something that belongs to each person that listened to it and for instance this song

even though nothing in the lyrics is really about this it became very much a song about my father's death

and your cover is is

I think a very much an illustration of this because it's I think about as far from a straightforward cover as we have in this season.

And it came,

the process of

arranging it this way came to to you through a dream, right?

Yeah, it came from a dream.

It was a dream.

I should preface this by saying that I'm incredibly conscious of music in dreams.

I often wake myself up if I hear music in a dream because I try to go record it, sing it into a tape recorder or something.

But so I was having this dream, and I also remember these dreams really well because I do that.

And in the dream, I was in a city, but it wasn't New York City where I live.

And I was holding,

I had a bag, a plastic bag full of water with a goldfish in it.

Like you get when you're a little kid.

I actually got one when I was at school, I think like in first grade or kindergarten or something.

It was definitely this feeling of when I was a child.

I remember, and it was very much the same in the dream.

It was this kind of precious.

feeling because it was you know it was a it was maybe a small fish bowls amount of water but it again it was just like in a plastic bag that was like tied off at the top or something.

And there's this little fish swimming around in it, and I'm holding its entire universe in my hands.

And I had to walk home when I was a kid.

And in this dream, I was walking, like I said, in some city.

And so I was kind of holding it up in front of my face.

And I'm watching the fish, which is sort of like watching the big fish swim around the city.

It sort of amplified.

And, you know, people are banging into each other in cities.

And there's a lot of walking and a lot of cars.

And so that part of the dream was very scary because I was essentially just trying to protect the fish.

But then I was at a party, which is, I don't know how that happened, but that's how, you know, dreams are.

And it was this cocktail party and everybody was incredibly well dressed and it was very fancy.

And I didn't have the fish anymore, but I remembered the fish.

And also parties are really scary for me because I'm not great.

I'm terrible socially, especially at parties, that kind of a social situation.

And this was full of incredibly fancy people.

But the thing was that I'd realized that I didn't have the goldfish because I'd put it down on this bed.

It was in this bed where people were throwing their jackets.

And I suddenly realized someone could throw their jacket on top of it and hurt the fish.

And so I was feeling incredibly anxious, but for some reason I couldn't go back to the bedroom or I didn't know where the bedroom was.

I couldn't find it.

But this song was playing meanwhile and everybody was really into this music.

And it was this kind of very strange, spacey, crazy music and it actually started calming me down, listening to it and comforting me and also just interesting me.

And I think around that time was when it sort of kicked in the music alarm and my brain went off.

I was like, music, dream, you're dreaming.

And so I woke up and I went and I sang it into my cassette recorder and then I think it wasn't until the next day that I was listening to it and I remembered it.

I remembered, you know, because it was really distinct.

It was crazy.

It was a crazy record

and like an old record.

And I suddenly listened to the melody, and I was like, oh my God, it's John's song.

It's that song.

And

I, yeah, and so I just, the cover was done basically.

Like, I knew that was, it was like, okay, that's what I have to do is just recreate that.

But it was already done.

Can I say, if there was a podcast called Julian's Dreams, I would listen to it.

I would listen to it every week.

I would be a subscriber and I would support your Patreon.

Oh, thank you.

I have good news.

There's a podcast called Orbiting Human Circus.

You should give it a listen.

It's, I think, as close to that as it can.

It's probably for you to.

We better hit a Patreon then.

There's something about that, you know, about looking at a thing and going, let my mind approach this

before my conscious mind gets at it, you know, and

something about when your cover resolves into the melody, which is so,

you know, it's a way of hearing.

Because I think, you know, if you ever listen to music while you're going to sleep, the the last thing you hear before you drift off is kind of the truest encounter with the music in some ways I think yeah yeah

thinking about stories or music at that moment when you're almost asleep that's yeah that's that's really really

really magical I love

I have you ever

begun to realize that you're beginning to see to hallucinate or that you're beginning to dream I mean in a funny dreaming and hallucination are essentially the same thing and it's so wonderful It's so wonderful to be conscious that it's happening and it's okay and

you're just falling into it.

And that's exactly what you want to do.

It's such a nice moment.

Yeah, it's very intense when that happens with dreams where you go, oh, oh,

I'm getting to be present for a little of this before conscious me slips away.

It's really incredible.

If you liked the cover by Julian, you can buy it wherever digital music is sold.

The money from that track goes directly to both the artist and this show, and we really appreciate it.

The full album of every cover from this season is available for digital and vinyl pre-order in the Merge Record Store.

The special release will be two LPs, one pink and one blue.

Link in the show notes.

Head over to IOnlyListenTothemountaingoats.com to see the logo shirt, plus the logo tote, and of course the I Only Listen to podcasts about the Mountain Goat shirt, available nowhere else.

Check out the newest album from the Mountain Goats, Goths, which is out now.

John Darnell also writes novels like Universal Harvester, a book that the LA Times called nearly impossible to stop reading.

Over on the Welcome to Nightvale podcast, we just started a new three-part story that is one of my favorite things I've written.

It's basically a standalone, so go ahead and check it out.

It starts at episode 121.

I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats is a production of Nightvale Presents with Merge Records.

It is produced by Christy Gressman.

Editing by Grant Stewart.

Mixing by Vincent Cashion.

All music courtesy of the Mountain Goats and Merge Records.

Thank you to Christina Rentz, Ryan Madison, the Dartneal family for letting me intrude on their lives, Julian Coster, the staff of Nightvale Presents, and Christy Gressman.

Hello from the complete other side of the world, Christy.

Check out Nightfale Presents for more information about this show and all of our other shows, like Welcome to Night Vale, a scripted fiction podcast about a small desert town where every conspiracy theory is true.

We've been telling stories about this little community for almost six years now.

We just bopped over the 200 million download mark last year, and I invite you to jump in and meet the citizens of our town.

We have a helpful starter's guide on our website with some suggestions of episodes to try.

Come find out why people love these weird stories.

And remember, the bottom is not a place that has to hold you.

Thanks for listening and hail Satan.

Hey, Jeffrey Kraner here to tell you about another show from me and my Night Vale co-creator, Joseph Fink.

It's called Unlicensed, and it's an LA Noir-style mystery set in the outskirts of present-day Los Angeles.

Unlicensed follows two unlicensed private investigators whose small jobs looking into insurance claims and missing property are only the tip of a conspiracy iceberg.

There are already two seasons of Unlicensed for you to listen to now, with season three dropping on May 15th.

Unlicensed is available exclusively through Audible, free if you already have that subscription.

And if you don't, Audible has a trial membership.

And if I know you, and I do, you can binge all that mystery goodness in a short window.

And if you like it, if you liked Unlicensed, please, please rate and review each season.

Our ability to keep making this show is predicated on audience engagement.

So go check out Unlicensed, available now only at Audible.com.