SO THIS TAPE STARTED while the entire band was decamped at an
undisclosed location working on the next Mountain Goats album, and I
had brought books with me to read, and one of them was Pierre Chuvin’s
A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, which I was reading as research material for another thing I’m working on; and it’s been a long time
since I sat around playing music and thinking about antiquity, but I
used to do it all the time, and several of you know that because the
old tapes are all littered with stories about Ajax and Agamemnon and
the cult of Cybele, stories which, when I was learning them, got me so
fired up that as soon as I got out of class I’d drive home in my
yellow 1969 Superbeetle and write songs about them.
At our undisclosed location, one morning, immersed day and night in
our work but also beginning to get the feeling that the increasingly
febrile pitch of the newsfeed would continue to rise until it reached
registers not seen in a while, I had a thought—what if the next
Mountain Goats album was just songs about these pagans? And I wrote
down the title “Aulon Raid.”
I GOT HOME about seven days later and the world was a very different
place by then, and I took my old boombox down from the shelf where it
sits flanked by brass deities from a former period of my life, and I
got a wild idea to stand it on its end to reduce the unpleasant
clicking that made it unusable—the hum & grind are one thing,
basically ambient noise that adds to the pleasure of the sound if
you’re into it, but the clicking I’m talking about developed sometime
in the early 2000s and is not a conscriptable effect, it renders the
Panasonic unusable.
Unless you stand it on its end, I learned, by accident, one day during
the early weeks of the new days.
AS THESE DAYS WERE DEVELOPING, I realized, as I’d feared a week
before, that the work schedule my band and I had planned for spring
probably wouldn’t be panning out. The four members of the band split
up our touring income equally, nightly pay & sales of merchandise;
before we split up that income, we pay several people from gross
receipts: Brandon, our soundman and tour manager of over a decade;
Trudy, who works the merch table with style and flair; and Avel, who
manages the stage no matter how unmanageable I become. I can’t do what
I do without these people and I take great pleasure in trying to make
their job a fun place to work. All seven of us rely on the Mountain
Goats for our paycheck.
The boombox and I knew we had to do something. Back in the early
nineties, when I’d first met Peter Hughes, I wanted to make a tape to
be on his label, Sonic Enemy. It was Christmas break and I was on a
hot streak, so I decided to try to make a full tape over the course of
the break. That tape became Transmissions to Horace, which consisted
entirely of work done on a daily basis during that span. I haven’t
tried anything like that in a while.
I WROTE A SONG EVERY DAY for the next ten days while reading A
Chronicle of the Last Pagans, starting with “Aulon Raid” and working
in exactly the style I used to work in: read until something jumps out
at me; play guitar and ad-lib out loud until I get a phrase I like;
write the lyrics, get the song together, record immediately. Those
original lyrics, exactly as written on the cardstock I save from comic
books I buy, with corrections and everything, will be randomly
inserted into orders; each is one of a kind, an original first draft
of the lyrics to the first all-boombox Mountain Goats album since All
Hail West Texas. It seems unlikely that I will ever again offer
original drafts of lyrics for sale or otherwise, but pandemics call
for wild measures.
I dedicate this tape to everybody who’s waited a long time for the
wheels to sound their joyous grind: may they grind us into a safe
future where we gather once again in rooms to sing songs about pagan
priests & hidden shelters, and where we see each other face to face.
Hail the Panasonic! Hail the inscrutable engines of chance! Hail
Cybele!