Appropriately turns up on a Google image search for “difficult new feelings”

Normally, I’d feel like a total goofball-ass to be blogging more than once about unreleased records for the benefit of nearly nobody, but in honor of J.T.’s message the other day—“hey, update PBW when you get the chance; it’s good, informal writing”—I’m gonna. And it’s gonna be about the Mountain Goats, because damn it, K-Punk and Simon get their Scritti joneses for the benefit of us all; granted, that album is already out, but PBW is both bush league and passionate. Consider me carving teeth on the evergrowing totem to John Darnielle’s status as a national treasure.

Plus, Carl Wilson seems to have already gone in the direction of Get Lonely, and he’s pro. Double-plus, he’s a patron saint of PBW and seems to have read the post below this one; (this is what anthropologists will someday cite as the sick, delightfully productive breakdown of conversation)—

“It’s not so much a breakup album as an in-the-void-of-separation album, threaded with an image of monstrousness, of having been rendered radically alien by loneliness - but, in the manner of The Sunset Tree, with a tone of calm remembrance, perhaps years after the fact, rather than reeking of trapped-in-the-moment panic or claustrophobia.”

Well, I think my “after the quake” characterization is synonymous with Carl’s “void-of-separation” one, but really, isn’t that definitively breakup material—what life feels like in the wake? There’s nothing particularly rich about losing someone; the meat is in coping.

(Here lies, muted, a long digression about love and loss and time—things you already understand.)

Most of the songs on Get Lonely take place in the early morning or late night. In the wake of my own heart-quake, I can vouch that those are basically the two most dangerous times of the day—waking up alone and being in bed at night with your own thoughts (I’ve found a way to circumvent the latter, but it’s not working and I’ll try to keep stories you don’t need to hear to a minimum). Of course, there are weird mid-sleep spells that PBW has come to know as “nightmares” or the elusive, forceful “11 AM Breakdown.” But mostly, it’s morning and night; they’re sharp.

John Darnielle has always performed through his characters and not as them—ironic distance, the bitter humor of his best stuff. I was listening to Tallahassee the other day and was struck by the realization that Darnielle’s characters are the kind of people that never experience the acuity that they’re leant in his narratives; his songs work because the most desperate, intense losers are given the gift of true perception. We get a taste of their hopelessness, their hilarious melodrama, etc.; a clarity that is basically antithetical to all the fascinating failures they constantly act out.

So it’s a gamble for him to have lines as close, bald, and warm as “On the morning that I woke up without you for the first time, I felt free and I felt lonely and I felt scared.” Other mornings aren’t as promising.

And they’re not funny, either, which is why I have a hard time swallowing Carl’s “calm remembrance” tack. The present feels alternately blank, possible, and crushing—you don’t have the power to be bittersweet or wise about it yet. Only literal. (And it’s telling that “Wild Sage” is directly in the present tense and “Get Lonely” in the future.) So in that sense, I completely understand Carl’s abstract but palpable feeling that to take it in, you sort of have to live right next to it (my joke about being contractually forbidden to listen to it during office hours seemingly not entirely in vain, yeah). Anyway, I’m not going to lock myself away with it and I’m not going to keep it at a distance; it only seems appropriate that I’d take such a bundle of nerves at face value: in my stride, stumble, or soar; however all this shit turns out.