The Mountain Goats at The Wilbur, 9/2/22

Forty minutes into the Mountain Goats’ set at the Wilbur, John Darnielle forgets the words to his own song. It’s not that he doesn’t know the song: he starts by playing its chords and he briefly chatters about what it means to him. Then he starts to sing, hushering: “Toward the end of our first year in Las Vegas”. That’s the first line of “Star Dusting”, released in 1993 on the Mountain Goats’ third ever cassette tape. That cassette isn’t on Spotify. That cassette isn't even on Bandcamp. This isn’t a very popular Mountain Goats song. So when John plays the next chord of the song but doesn't sing anything, most people in the audience don’t even realize that John’s forgotten the line. 

But he has, and he doesn't know what's next. No one blames him, and everyone understands: the Mountain Goats have over 500 songs, almost 600 of them. So if John Darnielle forgets the words to “Star Dusting”, then no one can complain, and everyone is happy to move on. But remarkably; out from the audience, someone knows the next line, even where John doesn't. They shout out from the third row of the theater; “You looked up from your little corner”. John smiles and tries to play it, but shakes his head and says that if he tries to play it, everything will fall apart. Of course, no one is mad: not only is there sympathy and devotion to the shaggy, energetic, inward-outward man on stage, but conveniently, it’s also John’s policy that if he forgets the words to a song, the audience gets not only a new song to replace the one he forgot, but an extra song on top of that. 

But this story is here not to show the quality of John’s memory but the extent of the fanbase’s passion. In the understanding of cult American bands, the focus is on jam bands like the Grateful Dead or Phish or pop acts like Harry Styles or Taylor Swift. But there are many smaller acts that hold onto a substantial and hyper-devoted fanbase, and one of those bands is the Mountain Goats. Mountain Goats fans might not have an established image, but they have that same established enthusiasm that goes beyond enjoyment, goes beyond fandom, and goes into obsession. Consider the Mountain Goats podcast where John discusses a song each episode. The title? “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats.” Slightly a joke, slightly not a joke. There is a sense when listening to the Mountain Goats that there is an inexhaustible well of music and lyrics to reach into, where every mood and every situation has its proper and exact song choice. The Mountain Goats’s discography is like a walled garden of absolute splendor, where one could very well presumably spend their entire lives. Of course, fans leave that garden of splendor, but the walls covered with vines are always visible from anywhere else. 

So for those in the cult obsession of the Mountain Goats, walking into The Wilbur on September 2nd was a familiar act of re-entering those gardens. It was an act of walking into a unknown monumental, ornamented theater and sitting down with expectation and excitement. Even if the songs were to be unknown, the meaning of the show was established. This was an evening of stepping back into that garden and sitting down on one of its wildflowered fields.  

I am one of those Mountain Goats obsessors. The Mountain Goats are my third most listened to artist of all time and make up 3.6% of all the music I’ve ever listened to, totalling in at well over 219 hours. Those are rookie numbers for the Mountain Goats: I haven't even listened to all their albums, let alone all their songs. I might be a fan, but I’m no superfan: I only have intense pockets of knowledge, not absolute knowledge. After all, my love for the Mountain Goats lies the most in their early material, back when it was just John, his guitar, and a creaky Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox. His early recordings are casual, grim, noisy, and but over time he began to add more and more instrumentation until the band stabilized as a four piece outfit: John on guitar, Peter Hughes on bass, John Wurster on drums, and Matt Douglas on keyboards, guitars, and sometimes the saxophone. Modern Mountain Goats are good, great but early Mountain Goats are where my heart lies. So while Hughes, Wurster, and Douglas are each incredible musicians who add a cavalcade of instrumentation to every song, it's the heart of the show that captures my heart. Those are the four songs where it's just John on his guitar, all by himself.

The third of those four songs is “Star Dusting”, which of course, John forgets the words to. But of course, because of the mistake, John is to play another song. The fifth song of the set comes up and I immediately recognize it as one of the songs that I don't just know, I know with all of myself. I look around excitedly, but no one else next to me in the soft glow of the stage seems to pick up on it more than any other. But the song is “Song for an Old Friend”, and I’ve been playing it repeatedly for the past three months. I never expected to hear it live, but here I am listening to it live, with its perfect words of cool water and snakes in sourgrass. Here, if John forgot the words, I would be the one to call out the next line immediately. But John remembers it all, and John plays the last chord with the band returning back onto stage to play the modern songs. 

The next song he plays is “Tallahassee”. It's a great song, but it's not one of my absolute favorites. But I look behind me, and someone is dancing in their seat so much that it seems they're about to jump out of it. And after that, a different seat to a different song. For every song, it seems there is always someone who is so excited they cannot contain themselves in the slightest. All of this until John approaches the end of the set and the encore, where his most popular songs lie, the ones that everyone places in their favorite fifteens, songs like “No Children”. By the time John reaches “This Year”, it's no longer pockets of people cheering at the first chords of a song; the entire audience is on their feet with their smiles sailing and singing, with their feet in the garden of the Mountain Goats.