What does loneliness sound like? How do you sing it? How do you sing for it? After all, the loneliest people in the whole wide world - as John Darnielle sings on the 2012 Mountain Goats track ‘Harlem Roulette’ - are the ones you’re never going to see again. From context, it seems likely that Darnielle means the dead. The song explores the last night of the young singer Frankie Lymon, who found fame as a teenager and took a fatal heroin overdose at the age of 25 in 1968 - just after a New York studio session which was meant to restart his recording career. One of the songs from that night - ‘Seabreeze,’ the one Darnielle mentions - you can actually hear on YouTube, though not on Spotify. Links like this are unnervingly ephemeral - not hosted by any official source, they could easily disappear at any moment, which only adds to the sense that this is a fragile, ephemeral artefact, drifting away on its own sad tide. There’s a lot of great Mountain Goats songs - songs which have struck people to the core of their being and helped them find the strength to carry on - which only exist on links like this. Ostensibly, ‘Seabreeze’ is about ‘a little town / Where the stars shine bright,’ ‘where a man can find peace and get all he needs.’ It doesn’t sound like that to me. Lymon’s clear, yet wistful vocal has the quality of a siren song, beckoning you along its deceptive doo-wop current towards a place you couldn’t leave if you wanted to. As is often the case with music surrounded by a penumbra of tragedy - I’m thinking here about Nick Drake’s Pink Moon - it’s easy to foreground those emotional qualities after the fact, now the song is charged with what we know about its circumstances. But Darnielle’s invocation of Frankie Lymon - only three songs after the first time the album tells you to ‘Just stay alive’ - is about more than just that New York studio, and what happened after. It’s also about where this music, and the story attached to it, takes him in his own brain. That intersection isn’t made explicit until the bridge, midway through the song, but the connection between Lymon and one solitary listener forty years later is clearly at the heart of it all: ‘And four hours north of Portland, a radio flips on / And some no-one from the future remembers that you’re gone.’ A lot of what makes the Mountain Goats special - or at least, what makes me want to talk about them endlessly - is packed into this short song. That question of memory is a big part of it. What does it mean to remember, and so however briefly, to preserve, an artist who might otherwise be forgotten, through the tentative ‘little mark’ they made? And what about the fugitive fragments of our own lives - where do they go? If not to raise that question, why would ‘some no-one from the future’ - a self-deprecating avatar of Darnielle himself - be mentioning Portland here, when it’s already four hours behind him in the rear-view mirror? Long time listeners to the band would already be aware of the city’s significance to the singer’s art: the nine months Darnielle spent there in 1985-6, in his own words, ‘chasing death,’ and the mingled grief and elation of surviving addiction while losing many of the friends who sustained him through it. Long time listeners to this podcast have heard me talk about that period a fair bit already, though I managed to find out a little more when I travelled to Portland last summer to research this project, where I spent most of the month listening to the Mountain Goats’ 2006 album Get Lonely while trying to write my next episode. As it turned out - obviously - there was far too much there to fit into just one instalment, which accounts in part for the long hiatus I’ve taken. I’ll be talking more about my trip - and specifically about the City Nightclub - in my 2008 instalment on ‘Heretic Pride,’ in two episodes’ time. For today, it’s enough to say that - despite the life-saving experiences of community Darnielle associates with the City - Portland must have been a pretty lonely time. Something in the experience of hearing Frankie Lymon on the radio, as ‘Harlem Roulette’ presents it, put Darnielle in mind of the ‘sad, young, frightened men’ to whom hands reach out from the lonely shadows, and to the time when he himself was one of them. In 2006, I was one of them too, and the new Mountain Goats record - the first to be released since I’d come across the band - was there for me, inviting me to get lonely right along with them.Taken together as a unit, the band name and title promise an experience of committed absorption in one particular emotional state: the Mountain Goats get lonely. The formula echoes Elvis Costello and the Attractions Get Happy!! Franklin Bruno, a collaborator since Darnielle’s college days, who plays on Get Lonely and had recently written a 33 ⅓ guide to a different Costello album, would have recognised the nod. But Get Lonely feels far less arch and knowing than its forebear; there’s also an irony in more recent Mountain Goats imperatives to ‘Get famous’ or to ‘Wage wars, get rich’ and indeed ‘die handsome’ which is wholly missing here. The sincerity of the album’s engagement with its title state is never in doubt. The liner notes to the album's Japanese release feature an interview with Darnielle conducted by Akao Mika, which has been translated and shared online by Andrew Fazzari. For Akao, this was a document clear enough to serve as a primer: ‘a textbook’ on ‘keeping company with loneliness.’A textbook is a use-object: rarely a pacey read, but a publication designed to help you make sense of something complicated. And I’m drawn to that phrase, ‘keeping company.’ Speaking to Tom Lynch for Chicago outlet New City, Darnielle describes the internal states the record inhabits as ‘kind of where I lived after making’ The Sunset Tree, ‘spending a year playing and living with those songs,’ but also talking at shows to fans with whose experiences the album had resonated. The Sunset Tree’s energy had been predominantly fast and rousing, and the Mountain Goats could have doubled down on these appealing qualities. But on a podcast with Steven Hyden, Darnielle expressed his admiration for Bruce Springsteen’s choice to follow up the thunderous drive of Born in the USA, not by ‘cash[ing] in’ on its stadium-ready template, but by keeping ‘digging.’ When an earlier Springsteen had evoked ‘Roy Orbison singing for the lonely,’ it was in the context of a romantic longing which ‘Thunder Road’ implies will be consummated before too long. But by this point, Bruce was interested in capturing something ‘a little weirder and more intimate,’ and harder to dispel: the ‘lost, spectral, ghostly sound’ which characterised Tunnel of Love. Darnielle liked this album enough that he and Franklin, as the Extra Glenns, even covered ‘Brilliant Disguise’ in a 1995 live show. Now, similarly, Darnielle was starting to imagine a musical space which was ‘dark, but also soft,’ more suited to exploring interiority than the kinds of ‘physical action’ which had driven its predecessor: ‘a sort of dark cave we might all flee to in the wake of’ the turbulence brought into view on his breakout record.’ The place to which Get Lonely took its listeners was not unfamiliar in Darnielle's discography, but many of his songs which fulfil the need to ‘be connected to the crying part of yourself’ had tended to leaven this with humour. Get Lonely, uniquely, ‘kind of doesn’t have an exit,’ as its author told Vulture in an interview last year - which means you have to be along for the ride. One indication of where he was going came in a 2005 Portland show, when Darnielle played ‘Dinu Lipatti’s Bones.’ One of the quieter moments on The Sunset Tree, the song makes powerful use of a slow tempo and high, fragile vocals to convey a stunned and gasping response to a threatening world, from which the speaker turns away towards the all-consuming ‘dark dreams’ he shares with another person who is ‘staring at the void and seldom blinking.’ Not all of the audience seemed to be responding respectfully to this material, but a lot more like it was coming down the line on the album the Mountain Goats had just tracked. Perhaps mindful of this, the singer implored the people talking: ‘You all paid to get in and I didn’t, [but] do fermez la bouche ... talking during the quiet ones, it’s crass, it’s rude.’ As if to drive the point home, the recording of the elegiac ‘Shadow Song’ towards the end of the set sounds like it’s performed almost entirely
