I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats: Episode 1, The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton

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Hi, Joseph Fink here, creator of Welcome to Nightfail and Alice Isn't Dead.

And I've created a third podcast.

This is my first non-fiction podcast.

It's called I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, and it's for anyone interested in the constantly shifting line between fan and artist.

I wanted to play you the first episode now.

If you enjoy it, please do subscribe, and also please rate and review as that helps make it more visible to other folks.

Thanks.

They say you shouldn't meet your heroes.

Hi, I'm Joseph Fink.

I'm a novelist and the creator of the fiction podcast.

Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn't Dead.

And this is I Only Listen to The Mountain Ghosts, the show where I meet my hero, hang out with him in his basement, and have conversations about songwriting, art, and life.

I've loved the band The Mountain Goats for years.

The music of John Darnell, singer and songwriter of the group, has been with me through some of my toughest times and happiest moments.

And this is a show where I sit down with him to talk through his work song by song.

It's a show for fans of the Mountain Goats, or fans of Nightfall and my other work, but it's also for anyone interested in what it means to be an artist or a fan, or as many of us are, both at once.

This season we will be covering the 2002 album All Hail West Texas, certainly the only number one billboard charting album to ever be recorded entirely on the built-in microphone of a boombox.

For every episode, we will also have a cover of the song we are talking about, each one by a different artist and recorded just for this show.

Let's go now to my conversation with John, in which we will talk about the first song of the album, the best ever death metal band in Denton.

So it's really weird in a lot of ways to be finally doing this podcast, because I think I told you this before.

This is an idea I had years ago, and I'm honestly trying to remember how many years?

Probably at least...

three or four years ago.

But with Deep Purple.

But with Deep Purple, it was a completely different show in a lot of ways.

It was also just, it was just like a scripted comedy show.

It was called Smoke on on the Water.

It was called Smoke on the Water.

We sound both a little tired and a little relieved to be talking, don't we?

I had flown down to Durham, North Carolina, where John lives, late the night before.

We were supposed to record starting that morning in John's office, a professional situation, in chairs, but we had spent most of that day dealing with technical problems, and for a variety of reasons, we ended up talking on a mattress in the basement of his home, surrounded by old touring guitars and boxes of the master tapes of his albums, you'll occasionally hear basement noises, water rushing through pipes, his kids running around upstairs.

It's a basement, not a studio.

So I had this idea.

The original version of the show was that we would collect all of songs you'd ever officially released,

assign them all a number, and then use a random number generator to just assign one of them to you.

And they wouldn't be able to choose or know beforehand.

They would just be like, there's your song.

Artists would love that.

They're all very open to that kind of process.

People are very easygoing.

Especially musicians.

They never say, oh, I wasn't thinking about doing that one.

But instead, I decided to go through one album of yours in order because I think in a lot of ways it's an interesting album to start with for a show like this.

Yeah.

So we're going to be going through the album All Hail West Texas, which coincidentally means we get to start with, I would say, arguably your...

most popular or one of your most popular songs, would you say?

It's top five.

Certainly among the people who like what we do, Denton is a big one.

Before we go much further, let's listen to the original album version of the best ever death metal band in Denton.

The best ever death metal band out of Denton was a couple of guys who'd been friends since grade school.

One was named Cyrus, the other was Jeff, and they practiced twice a week in Jeff's bedroom.

The best ever death metal band out of Denton

never settled on a name.

But the top three contenders, after weeks of debate, were Satan's fingers

and the killers and the hospital bombers.

Jeff and Cyrus believed in their hearts they were headed for stage lights and lear jets and fortune and fame.

So in script that made prominent use of a pentagram, they stenciled their drum heads and guitars with their names.

And this was how Cyrus got sent to the school where they told him he'd never be famous.

And this was why Jeff, in the letters he'd write to his friend, helped develop a plan to get even.

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you.

The best ever death metal band out of denton will in time both outpace and outlive you.

Hail Satan.

hail Satan

tonight.

Hail Satan,

hail, hail.

The funny thing is, I don't think I played it hardly at all on the, and there wasn't really an official All Hail West Texas tour.

I didn't have album tours at that time.

I just went on tour when it was time to go on tour.

But I don't think I played it much for a long time because it was in an alternate tuning that I hadn't preserved.

So now I play it in Drop D, but I don't even think that's right.

There's several of those, and also a lot of iced coffee.

Thank you very much.

Lilitri has brought energy drinks and iced coffee.

You are the best.

Thank you so much.

We're going to just leave all of that in.

Yeah, we're not going to.

See, we don't believe in fixing it in post, even though I'm sitting right next to the reels onto which Ohio West Texas was transferred at Tiny Telephone by Alex Newport.

And there was, in fact, a lot of EQ work done.

It's not exactly what was on the cassettes.

On the cassettes, it needed EQing.

I was kind of trying to think about these songs on a musical level, which I know how to do to a certain extent.

My father was a musician and taught me music from a young age, but I was never great at music theory.

So what is alternate tunings is a thing.

You know, I played guitar.

I've played guitar for years.

I've never gotten to a point where I feel super knowledgeable about the instrument.

And alternate tunings is always like the line that feels like I don't know enough to understand even what is like the advantage.

Well, it's not about understanding.

It's actually about taking your understanding and skewing it a lot of the time it depends who you are david crosby is a profoundly accomplished guitarist whose ability to parse harmony and whose understanding of this stuff is at this extremely deep level right so when he does an alternate tuning he's got reasons like why he wants to be playing on a certain area on the fretboard or he thinks it is going to satisfy something he needs melodically but for a lot of us including me it means that I won't know what I'm doing then.

And that can be really good, right?

So you're facing this new challenge that you don't normally face of how do I make this make enough chords to make a song?

So, like, by retuning, you are just forcing yourself to not really know how to play the instrument again?

You're taking away some of your knowledge, which is,

I think, in writing and everything, there's always great advantages to knowing what you're doing.

But if I take a little of control away from you, I take a little something away and force you to think on your feet, right?

You may resent it, you may enjoy the process less, but you will probably find stuff you weren't going to find otherwise.

And when you find that, you'll be excited because you will know I wasn't going to get there by myself.

It's similar to kind of why I'm super into using random number generators for things because it forces you into directions and ideas that you wouldn't, yeah, you wouldn't have tackled otherwise.

I do a lot of my work by random number generation because it just forces you to make decisions you wouldn't have.

I can only offer one experience of the music of the Mountain Goats, my own.

So I wanted to also bring in other artists who love the band as much as I do.

Now, when it comes to famous fans of the Mountain Goats, they don't come much more famous than John Green.

He is the best-selling author of The Fault in Our Stars and The Upcoming Turtles All the Way Down.

He sold more books this past year than I will in my entire life, and he is an unabashed and absolute fan of the Mountain Goats.

He also is an incredibly nice person, and he and John Darnell both helped me significantly when my first podcast was just starting out.

We talked with John Green about the best ever death metal band in Denton, as well as the newest album from the Mountain Goats, called Goths, and the Bible passage to Corinthians, which I read so that I could give you some context for this narration, but frankly, I think maybe I'm just too Jewish to get it.

I should tell you that we were speaking on a day that Trump did something truly evil and destructive.

I know that doesn't narrow it down a great deal, but I just wanted to give you some sense of where we were all at when this recording begins.

Ah, yeah, I mean, I don't want to let Donald Trump control my every thought, but he kind of does.

Well, it's not, this is the thing.

It's like one of the virtues of this is that, like, you know, I was thinking about it, you know, why am I angry today?

Well, it's because I love Jesus Christ, and he tells me that, you know, I have to love people all the same, right?

Or, or I'm not.

answering the call, you know, and when you wake up to find somebody who's like done something that's like the exact opposite of everything I know about Jesus, right?

Yeah.

But who also is claiming the mantle of the very guy who tells me not to be as he is.

I mean, it's like, it's, it's, it's a burden.

You know, it's like it's really, you know, I know that we will all, well, I can't say all, but I mean, I know that we will fight.

But yeah, I mean, I have a lot of friends who have been suffering since November 5th, and today's got to be a hard day for them.

Yeah, I feel the same way.

And I also, I feel the same frustration of feeling like my, uh, like my faith has been hijacked, but also like it has been hijacked in the most theologically indefensible way.

Yeah.

I mean, it's being hijacked by the guy who read 2 Corinthians.

Yeah, good old 2.

2 Corinthians.

Everybody knows that.

It's the guy who literally has never cracked the book open.

And that's what, I mean, you can, you don't even, the other thing is you don't need the Bible to know that you're excluding a bunch of people because of who they are from the same opportunity everybody else has.

This is not a biblical question.

It's just what's frustrating is that, you know, for sure, if you believe the basic precepts of the guy who got nailed nailed to a tree, number one is you don't deny anybody a seat at the table.

It's like that's the central teaching of the whole deal is that everybody is invited.

Yeah.

So

welcome to I Only Listen to Mountain Goats where we talk about Jesus Christ.

Hi, John.

Hi.

It's so good to hear your voice.

It's been a long time.

Yeah, it's good to hear your voice too, although I have been listening to it constantly.

I've completely fallen for Goths.

Oh, thank you.

I fell for it initially, you know, know, in the usual way that I fall for a Mountain Goats album, but now I've fallen for it in a deep hard.

It takes me back to a place that I haven't been able to visit and need to go to

way.

It's just

real special.

Thanks.

We're very proud.

It's my favorite.

I mean, the new one's always my favorite, but

taking the guitars out.

Just when I was talking about formal limitations, how you take something away from a musician or a writer.

doors to new places open up.

And when I went, what if I just don't even take a guitar to the studio?

What if I just don't?

Right.

It's like so much much new stuff came in.

Yeah.

There's just so many little moments in those songs that because I was a goth kid in 1992 in Orlando, Florida, wearing a trench coat in 110-degree heat.

It's just, it's a really great, it's a really great gift to,

I don't know, to this me that I'd really lost touch with.

So it's

huge to hear.

Thanks.

So thank you so much for joining us, John.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here and to talk about the first mountain Goat song I ever heard.

Is this the first one?

Yeah.

Where did you hear it?

Tell us the story.

I was in a hotel room.

It was in New York City.

It was this period, weird period of my life after I dropped out of divinity school, but before I, you know, like had a book deal or anything.

And so I was an assistant at a magazine and blogging and stuff.

And I had a blogger friend who I went and visited in New York City.

And she said,

have you ever listened to the Mountain Goats?

And And I said, no.

And she said, you should really listen to this song.

And she played me the song like in a very kind of cliche romantic way with one earbud in my ear and the other earbud in her ear.

And

it was the first song that I listened to that just like made me cry.

It was sort of a romantic occasion with this person I was with.

And I really ruined it by

by bursting into tears.

I've been ruining people's romantic stuff for years.

I mean, to be fair,

she played you the best ever death metal band.

Like, it's not the most romantic of songs.

It's possible I was misreading the situation to begin with.

But yeah, so I remember she played me that song and I was like, who are these guys?

And then she told me that the band was called The Mountain Goats.

The album was All Hill West Texas.

Went back to Chicago, bought the album.

And that was the beginning of it for me.

I was trying to think if I remember the first song I heard.

I think it was probably,

what's the name of the first track on the Sunset Tree?

You are Your Memory.

Yes.

I think probably I was like, someone was like, you should listen to this album.

And so I did.

That's that the one that starts, I stepped into a bargain price reason.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's a great song.

It is a very good song.

This podcast is going to be weird for me because

I'm proud of what I do, but I always try to change the subject if people tell me that my stuff is good.

It's trying to talk about other people's stuff.

We're just going to be listing songs and then saying that's a very good song.

It is really awkward though to basically be the co-host of a Mountain Goats fan podcast when you are yourself a Mountain Goat.

It's weird as I've been wondering about it because I totally do.

You know, people say, well, hey, there's a good set.

I go, yeah, no, but did you, you saw Christine Fellows, right?

She was amazing.

Hey, it's a free podcast, and you know what that means.

That's right.

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And to find the kind of advertisers you're going to want to hear from and that will help us keep making the show, we just need to learn a little about who you are.

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So I went back to Chicago and I still had all these Divinity School friends, you know, and like, and I was always trying to explain why I had dropped out of Divinity School and why I wasn't going to pursue the ministry.

I'd been on kind of on the track to become an Episcopal minister.

And several times over the next few months, like a friend would be over at my apartment and I would be like, I want to play you a hymn that I heard recently that is like the best hymn I've ever heard.

And I would play that song and I would be like, I think that is like a properly good hymn, even though it ends with like, Hail Satan, Hail Satan.

And the theological difference that I had, I think, with my church ultimately was that I still think that that song is a great hymn, even though it ends, Hail Satan, Hail Satan.

You know, it's one of my first religious songs is the thing is like, I, because when I said that, I remember tracking this song, right?

I remember that was a very productive week for me.

My wife was at hockey camp in Canada and I was alone in the house.

And I feel like internet was 56K at that time.

So sitting on the computer for nine hours was not really something you did unless you were very hardcore.

So, which I wasn't.

I was like, I was working my day job and I was writing songs in my spare time.

I didn't have friends because I don't do IRL friends.

And I was writing all these songs while she was away for a week.

And I got this idea.

It was after work.

It would have been like around dinner time.

And I didn't have an ending for the song.

And I was sort of recording it to see how it sounded and see where it was going.

And the Hail Satan wasn't written down.

It was a spontaneous eruption.

But it felt like a religious confession.

I mean, not obviously, you know, the dark principle that people talk about, you know, the Satan, John Milton Satan.

That's not what that means.

It means, you know, it's a celebration of two people being true to themselves.

You know, it's like, it's a celebration of that later satanic principle of self-knowledge, which isn't really Satan at all, right?

It's actually godlike.

Yeah, I find the

Hail Satan really interesting because I think the song as a whole is in a lot of ways an angry one.

But to me, that Hail Satan always feels, and maybe this is the context that you experience it, but it feels very joyous to me.

Well, it's an eruption.

It's a transgression.

There's always a little joy in transgressing.

You know, there's always a good feeling to break free from something you're not supposed to do, especially if it's something...

It's a complex thing to say, hail Satan.

Because of course you don't...

If the Satan of the popular imagination is real, then no one really worships him because that would be a person who will torment you.

He will find the thing that makes you unhappy and make you unhappy.

But that's not what Satan means in that context, right?

Like it's different.

I could really...

Yeah,

I think it also means that community, you know, the community of people who love death metal and make it together and how that community can kind of hold you up.

And so some of it, to me at least, is a celebration of that,

which is very real and powerful and holy.

That's one of the things I always loved about that song.

Joseph, have you ever been at a concert where that song is played and then the crowd takes over and keeps like chanting Hail Satan, Hail Satan after the song is over.

I have not.

That sounds amazing though.

Does that happen that often?

So I tend to leave the stage after the little rave-up and then the band plays on for a while.

And so I don't, I haven't, I didn't hear it.

That's amazing to think about.

I'm trying to think of how to phrase this in a way that isn't.

loaded in terms of forcing you to answer a certain way because they there's a lot of ways that this could be true.

But I mean, do you feel like encountering music like this affected your writing?

Oh, yeah.

No, I mean, the mountain goats are a huge part of every book that I write because it's really the only music I listen to while I write.

Mountain Goats fans who read my books find little Easter eggs in them from the songs that I was listening to, little phrases that I'll use from the songs.

So yeah, it's a huge part of my

writing.

But I mean, honestly, and it's awkward because I know John's here, so like it's a little awkward to talk about this.

But to be honest with you, it's the most important art in my life for my whole adulthood.

It's guided the way I think about being a person, the way I think about being a person in community, how to imagine the lives of people who are distant from mine or feel distant from mine.

And also, you know,

there is a thing that music does really, really well, which is that when you are alone and you're scared and you feel

unheard or unhearable,

great music, the right music for you can make you feel less alone and can make you understand that

whatever you're going through is not unprecedented and is not without people who feel compassionately towards you, even if they're very far away and even if they maybe don't know you,

that their love for you is genuine and can reach across space.

And

that's something I always feel when I listen to the mountain goats.

I always feel like

heard, I guess.

It's a huge gift.

Thank you.

I mean, it's like, you know, I'm always saying when I was a child reading the authors that I loved and listening to the music that I loved, you know, the thing I got from that is what you're describing, that feeling of being understood somehow, you know, and by a stranger and that weird connection, you know, it's like, where it's not the person, it's not the stranger, it's the thing they've made that opens this space for self-reflection, for being able to see yourself through an outside eye or something like that.

A huge gift to hear that.

Thanks, man.

There's that line.

I don't want to misquote it.

I always misquote your lyrics.

Oh, that's okay.

I can totally, I didn't get to be a teacher, so I can 100% correct you.

Now I'm just going to look it up and quote it correctly.

Dah, you have the internet.

I bet you have the internet over there.

There's that heartbreaking line in Hast thou considered the tetrapod,

where

you write, hoping you don't break my stereo because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without.

So then I think about that and then I sort of black out.

Music really is that for a lot of people, you know?

And and I know I know it's an kind of awesome and overwhelming responsibility to be one of those bands for a lot of people, but you are.

It's a blessing, though.

And then it's a response.

Responsibilities are gifts.

If you have a responsibility, then you know, that's a, that for me is a hedge against the dark places.

You know, when I I have a responsibility, I can be outside of myself.

And I think

that's a lot of what making art is about, is like being able to make some connection where you have something bigger than you to take care of.

And that connection that I get, it's a huge blessing to me.

Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way with my work, like that it's this gift exchange, you know, that...

By them trusting me or trusting my work, it also makes me get up in the morning and want to do it, makes me understand that I have to do it.

And knowing that is really, really good for me because otherwise there would probably be months or years when I wouldn't probably get out of bed.

So I agree.

It is a blessing,

but it is also, you know,

it's a lot to hold.

It's a lot, but I have a therapist.

I'm happy to, I don't know.

It's like I can, when I've, I've had some depressed years, you know, where then it feels like a lot.

And those are the, but even now I know, if I'm in that space, then I don't leave the dressing room after I'm done playing.

I do what I do, but I try to limit my contact a little bit so that, you know, if you're in that headspace, but, but, but for me, you know, it's like that's one of the things that I have been constructed somehow to do is to be able to stand in that space.

You know, and it's a, right.

For me, it's just because it's giving back, because I can't, you know,

I can't even begin to list the musicians who were those people for me, you know, who, whose music, Amy Grant's the first one, got a seven-inch rivers over there.

I'll never get to tell her, you know, what her music meant to me in 2008 or 9, but I'll never forget it.

You know, it's, it's so to be able to,

you know, stand on the brink of the abyss for somebody, it's an honor for me.

Yeah, there's an interesting thing, I think, that.

Anyone who becomes an artist that has any following at all has to confront, which is that people feel about you the way you felt about others.

And it's weird suddenly being on the other side of

that equation.

And it's an interesting thing to process, I think, to try and understand.

Because it also, I think, maybe makes you think about the people making the art that was very important to you differently.

Because you suddenly realize, oh, they were just me.

They were just people.

Like the work was important, but there is this moment where you realize.

that there's not this untouchable barrier between you and the people making the things that meant a lot to you.

I think it's a a nice moment when you realize that those are also just human beings.

And also as a musician, you learn to listen also to the drummer and the bassist.

It's like when I listen to Amy Grant records, a lot of people listen to anybody who performs under a single name.

It goes, oh, David Bowie, David Bowie, or whoever.

But it's not just them.

It's not just me.

That's why we're the mountain goats, right?

It's like, it is not John Darnell reaching out and touching you, even if I'm the only guy on the record.

It's the sum total of a bunch of other stuff that I brought to the table when I sat down to write.

You know, it's not, it is not a wizard in a tower with his last copy of the book of spells, you know, doing a spell that only he can do.

It's a communal exercise, even if it takes place in solitude, which is why I think there's a lot of that in my music.

There's people who are by themselves reaching out to some place beyond.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's so true.

I think that's so powerfully true.

There's this quote about Shelley that someone said that I've never been able to track down since college, so I might have made it up.

And if I made it up, I apologize.

But somebody said

of Shelley, now there was a cracked vessel that shone a lot of light.

Oh, man.

And the idea that part of it is you, but part of it is just that if you can let through the cracks within you,

if the light can shine out and be helpful to people, that's the work.

And that's not really in the end, like, doesn't really have anything to do with individual genius.

It mostly has to do with the cracks.

Well, yeah, no, there's a, that's the, I went through moments of horror about that in therapy, you know, about thinking, you know,

whether if you could make yourself a perfect life, you know, or restore the gaps between the neurotransmitters that

cause you to to fall into.

Well, there's a Borges poem about this

that I'm always quoting, where he observes that the good thief, I'm going to try and do this without crying real hard,

the good thief, the one who was crucified to the right of Jesus, right?

Who

one guy says to Jesus, you know, what is wrong with you?

Curse this God who has obviously failed you, right?

You're sitting here dying and bleeding and all your bones are broken and your life is terrible right now.

So

admit that this God is a loser.

And

the other thief on the other cross says,

you know, you be quiet.

and says to Jesus,

I'm going to do this.

And says, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

And Jesus says, sure,

absolutely.

And Borges points out that the same thing that made this guy a thief, the same thing that dragged him into pits of iniquity, and that made him a bad person, right?

That made him a bad person in a lot of people's lives, right?

That made him a person to avoid, right?

But the same tendency is the one that allowed him to seek and gain paradise.

Right.

Yeah.

So his brokenness eventually leads him to freedom.

Yeah.

Sorry.

I was thinking, did you know that Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen does a version of that line, it's the ones who've cracked that the lights shine through.

Yeah.

I find that idea so powerful because one of the hard things for me is that I want to make it about me.

Right.

Especially like my books, you know, like I want to make them about me and I want to put myself in them and I have to fight against that and fight against that and fight against that.

And one of the ways I fight against that is to remember that like when it's at its best, it's not you.

It's inclusive of you, but it's not driven by you.

That's a hard thing to communicate to other people, especially if you're a musician standing on a stage that's elevated.

You know, it's like you're above everybody in this

Hera Fant stance, you know.

But it's not.

It's communal.

Music especially has always been communal.

Like recorded music is a very strange blip.

You know, prior to the invention of recording, nobody ever would have thought, I'm going to go home and listen to something by myself.

Listening was something you did together.

Yeah,

I don't know.

I have a very strong love and memory of a lot of live shows.

And to me, I kind of blend music and theater in that way.

And that it's less about what's happening on the stage and more that at a really good show, whether it's a play or at a concert, I don't know, there's this feeling that it's not so much about the work that was intended on the stage so much as the work has created this moment in which we are all people in this room experiencing something together.

I can really remember strongly the nights that did that for me.

And now when we do these Night Vale live shows, that's always my goal is I just want to create that moment for other people of I want to have a night where people feel like we were all in this room together and we experienced something.

That's such a great feeling.

That's such a great,

you know, I was there about something that maybe nobody else even hears about.

This was even cooler before everybody was taping everything, right?

That you could say, well, there's no evidence that that happened except in all of us.

Yeah, there's something very, I think, attractive to the idea of art that disappears the moment you create it, but then you wanna you wanna keep that art around.

Oh, you know, let me tell you a story about Ahill West Texas that's kind of great.

These reels that we're looking at, these two reel-to-reel tapes, the two half-inch reels to which the album was sequenced.

And when we went to remaster it for the merge release of it, I got the original tapes and I took them into the mastering guy, and he sequenced them all and did what he could.

And then we A-B'd it with the CD, the original, the Emperor Jones version, and the new one didn't sound as good.

And he said, you know, these tapes have gotten old and particles have dropped off and we can't really make it sound as good as it did.

And I went, well, you know, there's also these reels.

And he said, oh, you should have shown me those first.

And so, but it was almost if I hadn't remembered that I had these two reels, the actual original source would have been lost.

Like it would have been, you have the CD that was issued and and that's it.

Yeah.

Wow.

There's something about that.

Like when that happened, I was sort of momentarily pleased that like the tapes themselves, what was on them is gone.

The first cover of our season is by Laura Jane Grace of the band Against Me.

And it was a thrill to be able to work with her.

I think what's really interesting about her cover and why I like that it's the first one is that it is an absolutely faithful cover.

Almost every other cover we are going to hear through the course of this show really changes the nature of the song to fit the artist's vision.

And some of them end up places that are quite far from the original recordings in some really cool ways.

But Laura doesn't do that.

She plays it as she heard it, but with a feeling that comes entirely from her.

The best ever death metal band out of Denton were a couple guys who'd been friends since grade school.

One was named Cyrus and the other was Jeff.

And they practiced twice a week in Jeff's bedroom.

The best ever death metal band out of Denton

never settled on a name.

But the top three contenders after weeks of debate were Satan's fingers and the killers and the hospital bombers.

Jeff and Cyrus believed in their hearts they were headed for stage lights and leer jets, fortune and fame.

So in script they made prominent use of a pentagram.

Stenciled their drum heads and guitars with their names.

And this is how Cyrus got sent to a school where they told him he'd never be famous.

This was why Jeff and the letters he'd write to his friend helped develop a plan to get even.

When you punish a person for dreaming their dream, don't expect them to thank or forgive you.

The best ever death metal band that I've dented one time about pace and outlive you.

Hail Satan!

Hail Satan!

Tonight, Hail Satan!

Hail, hail!

Thank you for joining us for the first episode of I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats.

Let's quickly plug some stuff from the folks you heard today.

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

Links in the show notes.

Buying the track supports both the artist and this show and is a very cool thing to do indeed.

And you can pre-order I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats All Hail West Texas right now in the merge record store.

This is a special double vinyl release which will contain every cover from this season on two LPs, one pink and one blue.

All pre-orders will include an I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats patch.

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

You've been listening to instrumental versions of its songs in the background of this episode.

And the Mountain Goats are probably playing live in a theater near you because they are hardworking folks.

John Darnell's second novel, Universal Harvester, came out this year and is the horror slash mystery slash family drama slash slice of Iowa life that you have been looking for.

My own fiction podcasts, Welcome to Nightvale and Alice Isn't Dead, are running now, both absolutely free wherever you listen to podcasts.

And in just a few weeks, on October 17th, the new Welcome to Nightvale novel, It Devours, comes out.

You don't need to know anything about the podcast to to enjoy this thriller about romance and sand monsters.

Hey, let's do some credits.

I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats is a production of Nightfall 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 Darnell family for letting me intrude on their lives, John Green, Laura Jane Grace, the staff of Nightvale Presents, and Christy Gressman for taking a weird idea I had and turning it into a show.

Check out nightvalepresents.com for more information about this show and all of our other shows that are each incredible in their own way.

And remember, when you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you.

Thanks for listening and hail Satan.

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 Veep or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

We love movies, and we come at them from different perspectives.

Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.

He's too old.

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dune 2 is overrated.

It is.

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

We're talking Parasite the Home Alone, From Grease to the Dark Knight.

We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks.

We've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look.

And we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of, like Kanja and Hess.

So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.

Listen to Unschooled wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to hit the follow button.

Hi, I'm here to tell you about Good Morning Night Vale.

Welcome to Night Vale's official official recap show and unofficial best friend food podcast.

Join me, Meg Bashwiner, and fellow try-hosts, Hal Loveland and Symphony Sanders, as we dissect all of the cool, squishy, and slimy bits of every episode of Welcome to Night Vale.

Come for the insightful and hilarious commentary, and stay for all of the weird and wild behind-the-scenes stories.

Good morning, Nightvale, with new episodes every other Thursday.

Get it wherever you get your podcasts.

Yes, even there.