The Mountain Goats, The Life of the World to Come (4AD, 2009)

There is a distinct part of me that quails at the idea of breaking down the lyrics of one of the greatest living singer-songwriters.  John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats is known for lyrics that are a sublime mix of metaphoric, literal, third-person omniscient, and first-person autobiographical, and while most of the music listening world might be unfamiliar with his name or his work, he holds a great deal of prestige within the “indie music” community. So, when I learned that each track from his new record, entitled The Life Of The World To Come, would be based upon and draw its name from a different verse from the Christian Bible, I was instantly intrigued and very excited, mostly because Darnielle’s lyrics typically sound like they’re straight out of one of David’s darker Psalms, the book of Job, or one of the creepier minor Old Testament prophets.

Thus, I decided to investigate the album track-by-track using the classic tools of the armchair theologian (or Monday-morning preacher): the primary source materials (the songs themselves), the contextual sources used to create the primary material (the Bible verses Darnielle references – I’ll be using the New Revised Standard Version), and current bit of commentary available on said primary material (the recent interview Darnielle conducted with Tom Breihan of Pitchfork Media).  I realize that some people might consider this approach to be highly questionable at best or highly offensive to the actual songs and the songwriter himself at worst.  Yet, when it comes down to it, I was so personally moved by and connected with the deep and dark (yet somehow hopeful) ruminations on death, dying, and the afterlife conveyed on this record that I couldn’t help but present my thoughts on these songs on an individual basis.

I Samuel 15:23 – The verse itself refers to the instance where Saul disobeys the instructions God gave to him through Samuel. God wanted Saul to destroy all of Amalek; Saul responded by destroying most of Amalek, except for the best stuff.  When confronted by Samuel, Saul responds by declaring that he was saving the best stuff to offer up to God as a sacrifice.    Samuel declares that, despite his good intentions for sacrifice, Saul still disobeyed God, which was an act of open rebellion; since Saul rejected God’s instructions, God rejected Saul.

The song itself is from the perspective of a crystal healer who has sold many self-help books and is becoming quite popular, as he seeks to help everyone who has no place to go in life.  The tag line/chorus declares, “Go down to the netherworld. Plant grapes,” which I interpret to mean, “Go to where people are dead and dying. Bring them life where there was none before.” To me, this is a not-so-veiled allusion to when Saul, later in I Samuel when his kingdom was falling apart, sought the help of a medium to help him speak with the now-deceased Samuel in order to receive forgiveness for his sin and direction for what he should do next.  Not only did Samuel remind Saul of his sin and admonish him for talking to a medium in the first place, he told Saul that he and his house are about to die, and his kingdom along with him.

Psalm 40:2 – David here talks openly about how he knows that God will save him from his troubles, if only he calls out to God in his time of need.  And like U2 in “40” (from War), Darnielle quotes directly from the psalm when his tired traveler, weary from the road, “drunk on the spirit and high on fumes,” seems to know where his help will come from, even though his life is very broken.

Genesis 3:23 – When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil, directly disobeying the only “don’t” commandment God gave them, God banished them from the Garden Of Eden, with humans now forced to toil with the earth in order to survive.  Innocence has been lost forever. In The Mountain Goats track, we hear about the time Darnielle returned to an old house in which he lived in Oregon.  As opposed to Adam and Eve leaving their innocence for reality, this house represented a dark time in his life, a time from which he has since emerged into a better life.  Yet, just like Adam and Eve, it’s impossible for him to forget what happened back in the place, as the events that transpired there were so very formative to his life.

Philippians 3:20-21 – According to the verse, those who believe in Christ should be ultimately loyal to the Kingdom of Heaven, not to the things of this world.  By trusting in Christ as Savior, Jesus will transform those people into His image.  The song has us look at a man getting ready to pass onto the next life and the people who are wondering where he will go in the afterlife.  Most people are sure that he’ll be in heaven soon, but there is a small minority that just isn’t sure what happens after death, regardless of the standard platitudes people offer up about the dead, Heaven, and the afterlife.  It seems to me that Darnielle is telling us that worrying about the dead is a very normal part of human existence, but since there have been many wise people and mystics who have gone crazy with those worries, maybe we shouldn’t worry about it and just let God be God.

Hebrews 11:40 – This verse finds the writer comparing and contrasting those believers who came before Jesus (i.e. the faithful Jews in the Old Testament) and those who came afterward.  The former group of people was made perfect because of their belief that The Messiah might someday arrive, while the latter group is made perfect because of their belief in the actual personage of Jesus.  In the song, we hear of a group of witches in a coven cowering in fear that their leader has died and they too will soon be persecuted and killed for their belief in their leader.  Sound familiar at all?  In both the song and in the case of Jesus’ Twelve Disciples, each group’s respective leader returns to show the true believers that they have been restored just like they knew they would be and that death really isn’t the final end of life that many declare it to be.

Genesis 30:3 – Jacob (the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham) might have been a prodigious sower of seed, but the love of his life, a woman named Rachel, stayed barren for most of her life.  Pissed that her elder sister Leah, also one of Jacob’s wives, was stealing all of the family-raising glory, complains to Jacob that she wants to bear him a son. He counters that it’s not his fault she can’t bear kids (Jacob wasn’t a very tactful guy) and that God has obviously closed up her womb.  She counters back by giving Jacob her maid, a woman named Bilhah, so that she could have a kid by a surrogate, a somewhat common practice in those times, mostly because your power and worth in the household and community was predicated upon your child-bearing skills.  Jacob complies with her wishes because he loves her (and because his virility is at stake), while they both try not to blame God for their lack of kids together.  Darnielle echoes this sentiment in the chorus of the song when one lover tells the other, both aware that hard times are on their way, “I will do what you ask me to do because of how I feel about you.” You’d be hard pressed to convince me that you couldn’t or wouldn’t do something if someone you deeply loved asked it of you, no matter how difficult or confusing the request might be.

Romans 10:9 – Both the verse and the song declare that if you, “Believe in your heart and confess with your lips, surely you will be saved one day.”  In the biblical sense, this is the declaration that any one who believes that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior and that God raised Jesus from the dead to achieve salvation for everyone will be saved.  More importantly, everyone is equal in God’s eyes, so God will save everyone who calls and believes on Him.  In the lyrical sense, Darnielle recounts the story of a conflicted man who’s troubled by his own life – he knows what to do, yet has trouble doing so. And even though he tries to do the right things on his own and still constantly fails, he knows that “a kind and loving God won’t let his small ship run aground.”

I John 4:16 – The verse basically states that, not only do we have faith that God loves us unconditionally, God is the ultimate incarnation of love.  Anyone who lives and acts out of love is living in God and God is living in him or her.  Darnielle sings about a gentleman bemoaning the caged life he’s seemingly built for himself, but he realizes that there is always someone out there looking after him and thinking of him. Because of this, he won’t be afraid ever again, despite the beast that someone else has unleashed upon him.

Matthew 25:21 – This verse comes from the passage known as The Parable of the Talents, in which a hard master gives one servant five talents, the second one two talents, and the last servant one talent, commissioning them to do what they each want to do. The first two servants invest their talents and they double quickly, but the last one lives in fear of the master and simply buries his lone talent.  When the master returns, he is pleased with the first two declaring that since they have been faithful with the little things, he will give them bigger responsibilities. The third one is pronounced as lazy, his talent is given to the first servant, and is promptly banished.

This is undoubtedly the toughest song for me to discuss because it talks about one guy’s difficulty talking with his mother dying of cancer, much less the actual thought of her dying.  He is simply unable to cope with her dying and eventual passing, comparing himself to a careening 18-wheeler and a floundering airplane, taking others down with him as he crashes into a heap.  Having lost both of my maternal grandparents in the space of 10 months when I was 13 years old, I know what it’s like to become so unbelievably numb to the idea that my dear loved ones are now dead, while freaking out and crumbling into a hysterical crying mess of a person.  The Bible verse speaks of a servant who wasted his talent and was hence cast out to where there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For the guy in the song and me, we weep and gnash our teeth when we think of the lives and talents wasted by taking a loved one away from us when it’s not time for them to go.

Deuteronomy 2:10 – Moses here is retelling the story of the Jewish Exodus to the children and grandchildren of the original Israelites who fled Egypt. The twist is that the reason they’re being told this story is that their parents and grandparents aren’t alive because they disobeyed and lost faith in God quite often during their forty-year sojourn in the desert.  Specifically, the verse talks about the large and once-numerous Emim people who used to live in Moab and are now extinct.  Darnielle flips the script here by speaking from the perspective of the Emim in the guise of a flightless bird.  The forebears of this creature once ruled the roost of the island where he lives; now, he is lonely, sad, and left to ponder what it’s like to be the last of one’s kind.

Isaiah 45:23 – Here, God speaks through the prophet, proclaiming that all He has spoken is righteous and that, eventually, every knee will bow and every tongue will declare Him as Lord.  He speaks openly to all who listen that there is none beside Him, but if people say there is another god, let those wooden idols speak out themselves against Him.  The dying man in Darnielle’s song talks to God, asking for humbleness in his prayers, and strength for the last days ahead of him.  He knows that he isn’t bound to his body, nor is he defined by it.  He is resolute and realistic about the course of events facing him, expressing thankfulness for the good times that God has granted him, even as he dies.

Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy Of Grace – This craziest and kookiest of major prophets is declaring that destruction and judgment has finally come to Israel because of its collective sin.  God will deliver disaster, doom, wrath, anger, and punishment, doing so without pity, solely because this is how Israel had been conducting itself.  The money, trapping, savings, and things of this world in which Israel has trusted will be of no help for them; in fact, those who are coming to conquer them will gladly scoop them up and then profane all of the things and places that Israel is supposed to have been keeping holy.  The violence and bloodshed coming to the land are only arriving because of Israel’s arrogance and pride, and there is no peace on its way to help or save them.  God will be dealing with and judging Israel just like they have been dealing with and judging others, having allegedly been doing so as the chosen people of God.

Darnielle’s foreboding conclusion to The Life Of The World To Come resounds as a stern, pre-apocalyptic warning, akin to a premonition that’s coming before the rather dark future approaching the man in the song.  In it, he talks plainly about his need to “drive ‘til the rain comes; keep driving,” and whether he’s running from his troubles or attempting to escape the consequences of his actions (my money’s on the latter option), he knows what’s chasing him down, and he’s doing everything he can think of to stay just one step ahead of it.  He is desperate to avoid the reality of the swift-coming future, even though he knows it’s quite inevitable.

Honestly, having sat through scores of sermons in a fundamentalist Pentecostal church about avoiding sin in this life so I can avoid fire and brimstone in the next, The Life Of The World To Come trumps all of those preachers and their beloved scare tactics.  It’s mostly because John Darnielle acknowledges that life can be quite shitty at times and often of our own making, but there is plenty of hope out there, if we just know where to turn.  And much like the new David Bazan record, Curse Your Branches, this album does more to increase and build up my faith than all of the many hokey (though admittedly well-meaning) contemporary Christian and gospel albums I’ve listened to in my years as a broken, doubt-ridden, yet faith-filled believer in Jesus Christ.  So, maybe I have tipped my hand here at the wrong time, but hopefully, this little verse-and-song exegesis of mine hasn’t been totally in vain.