Transcendental Youth

The fourteenth studio album by the Mountain Goats, inspired by lead singer John Darnielle’s time living as a methamphetamine addict and dedicated to several people he knew in Portland, Oregon who have since died of AIDs or suicide.

I’m losing my virginity to the Hamilton soundtrack. We’re in a college dorm room in North Carolina and he accidentally hits my head on the headboard in his rush to undress me. We don’t yet know that I’m not going to leave the dorm room for nearly three months after he leaves; what we do know is that the music is awful to fuck to. He gets up and reaches for his phone, one hand still on my chest, and scrolls Spotify until he finds a certain playlist. “This is better,” he tells me with a grin as the warm buzz of a Panasonic boombox floods the room. The rhythm is better, for sure, but I find the lyrics interesting enough that I get distracted and ask him to turn it up. “I thought you’d like it,” he says. He knows how important music is to me, and he tells me the name of the singer as the man and his guitar continue to wail: John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. This is the first time I’ve listened to the singer-songwriter for more than a few passing seconds. I can’t guess my relationship with John and his music will far outlast my relationship with this boy.

When I’m walking him back to the bus station the next day, he says he’ll send me a link to the playlist he’d chosen: it’s straight to the point, called SEX PLAYLIST (2). I ask what happened to the first one. Bad vibes, he says, from a previous lover; he can’t listen to any of those old songs after what she put him through. He made this playlist specifically for me, knowing what I like: a snappy tempo, moody lyrics, an intense key change. Next year when he cheats on me with his childhood best friend, I’ll wonder if he used the same playlist for him, or if I gave those songs bad vibes too.

The Sunset Tree

The band’s ninth studio album, an autobiographical, confessional collection focusing on Darnielle’s childhood in Claremont, California and his abuse at the hands of his stepfather. The album is dedicated to “any young men and women anywhere who live with people who abuse them, with the following good news: you are going to make it out of there alive.”

It’s been two months since I tried to kill myself. The taste of bleach lingering in the back of my throat has been replaced by the dust of a friend’s couch where I’m sleeping. This is what an escape plan looks like, I tell myself: fifty-five dollars in ones, a suitcase full of sweaters, and a Tracfone my parents never knew about until I was already gone. I’m in Greenville, South Carolina; I promise my boyfriend I’ll find a way to New Orleans somehow. We both know it’s impossible. I say it, nevertheless.

The friend who has been my gracious host for the last few weeks has begun stealing tins of soup and individual packs of crackers from the gas station where they work; they can’t afford to feed an additional mouth on a part-time paycheck. I feel guilty they’re putting themself at risk for me, but it’s not like I can do anything about it, not when I’m homeless and no shelter this deep in the Bible belt will take a trans girl who isn’t even on hormones. (My friend says they’ll help me with that part, too; I try to tell them I have larger concerns than that, but there are only so many things they know how to help with. This is one of them.)

Today my friend doesn’t come home at the end of their shift. I start to worry, but they answer my text almost immediately; they’re covering a shift for someone who called out. It’s their ninth day in a row working, and the effort is taking a toll on them. Their boyfriend comes home and passes out on the couch almost immediately. He works at a diner, like my own boyfriend, and tips are spare on weekdays when residents at the nearby nursing home visit for lunch; lots of work for very little pay. I really should start looking for jobs, but it feels like a betrayal of my promise to make it to Louisiana: if I start working here, that’s one more reason not to go.

Two hours later my friend comes through the apartment door carrying a big black bag. They were not covering for a coworker, they tell me, but getting a gift for me. They walk over to the antique record player that sits in the corner of the living room, and put on the record they just bought. A Mountain Goats song starts playing—the same song I heard six months ago in my dorm room. Their boyfriend wakes up from his nap and laughs as he watches my friend take my hand, and we dance in the middle of their living room until their downstairs neighbor hits the ceiling with a broom. For the first time in a long time, it feels like there’s a way forward.

In League with Dragons

The seventeenth studio album and first rock opera by the Mountain Goats, cobbled together from songs about aging and growing old, the tragedy of missed connections, the catharsis of violence, and tabletop fantasy role-playing games.

The Mountain Goats are still playing through the speakers of my mom’s car when I wake up in the driver’s seat. I panic when I realize I can’t see: I find my glasses under the front passenger seat. Only as I’m putting them on do I remember the crash.

It wasn’t my fault. Roadwork had stalled traffic to a standstill, and I was sitting in the mouth of a sharp turn; the guy just didn’t read the caution signs. I’ve lived in this neighborhood just shy of two years and I’m already the third person I know to get in an accident on this exact road. Sometimes you know exactly what dangers are coming your direction, and you wait for them anyways.

Three cars ahead, a woman steps out of her sedan. She’s carrying a thick woolen blanket that she brings over to me and wraps it around my shoulders. I’m wearing my blue work polo; I had been driving home from a nine-hour cashiering shift. I had helped this woman sign up for the grocery store’s rewards program earlier in the day, and she recognized me in her rear view mirror when I pried my way out of the crumpled car; I don’t recognize her.

She sits with me until the EMTs arrive. They, too, know me from the grocery store. It’s a small community where everyone knows everyone. I don’t recognize them.

The young man who rear-ended me doesn’t speak much English, but he keeps pointing at his car and shouting, “Radio! Radio!” Hours later, when his father arrives, he’ll explain that the young man was distracted by a song on the radio, and that’s why he didn’t see my stopped car; but for now, not knowing what he means, I go back to my car and fish out my phone from the center console. I unplug it from the car’s aux system and the speakers shut to silence, just the sound of idling cars and broken glass and, in the distance, sirens.

Heretic Pride

The Mountain Goats’ eleventh studio album and the first to feature the staple lineup of John Darnielle, Jon Wurster, and Peter Hughes. The album is about love, and loneliness, and fear, and being yourself despite it all.

It’s just my mom and I living in our Virginia home right now: my dad’s in an apartment in Syracuse for his new job, and my sister’s moved to DC with her boyfriend. She wants to work at the Smithsonian, and she has an opportunity to get her foot in the door; in eight months there’s going to be a pandemic that shuts down the museums long enough that she changes career tracks entirely.

But tonight we don’t know what the future will look like. The whole family’s on untrod ground. It’s only been a month since I came out, and talking to any of them feels like juggling a handful of knives. No one knows how to talk to me without getting frustrated yet, and I’m too scared of judgment to talk to them; so my mom and I silently dance around each other, hoping to avoid colliding.

She’s on the phone when I walk downstairs wearing the one dress I own. Her face darkens when I round the corner and she tells my grandmother, “I need to go.” Her lips tighten as she looks me up and down; her eyes linger on my chest and I feel the blood rush to my face. I don’t have any shoes but sneakers, and when I look down at them I am distressingly aware that they ruin the outfit.

“I thought you weren’t going to do that until we moved.” She phrases it like a statement, not a question. “Until no one we knew would see you.”

The thing is, that was the plan. My grandmother, her mom, has already excommunicated one of my cousins for transitioning. The Gates-Conder family has roots all up and down the East Cosat, from Virginia to the Carolinas and into Tennessee, and my mom is extremely close with her five siblings and her mother. When one of my older cousins got her first tattoo, the family was outraged; my mom told my sister and I all the gory details about the drama and the fallout. When another decided to have a secular wedding, the gossip continued for months. When one of the few cousins younger than myself came out—well, that no one wants to talk about. All I know is he isn’t invited to Christmases anymore.

I’m trying not to think about that.

Instead, I’m thinking about tonight, which is my mom’s birthday. I know she’s struggling; she never quite acclimated to living here the way I did, and with only me in the house she’s feeling lonely. This is an olive branch of sorts: even though things are different, I want to be there for her and spend time with her as myself.

But maybe I overthought it. She stands up and says she’s feeling queasy, and doesn’t look at me as she walks to her bedroom. She slams the door and I walk over to it, knock, ask, “Are we still going to dinner?”

Her faint voice responds, “I don’t feel like it anymore. Just fend for yourself for dinner.”

The fridge is well-stocked. I find a box of penne pasta and heat up a jar of marinara on the stove; pasta is essentially my mom’s comfort food. While I wait for the water to boil, I pull up my favorite playlist. The pasta takes five songs to cook, and all five are Mountain Goats songs. I check my phone and realize there’s barely anything else on the playlist. Am I limiting myself or keeping myself going? Sometimes I don’t think there’s a difference; all plants need pruning to stay alive.

I bring my mom a bowl of pasta, leave it on her bedside table. She has her own music playing, quiet piano playing in the dark bedroom. I take my own bowl to the kitchen and eat alone, and John Darnielle sits with me in the kitchen.

Jenny from Thebes

The twenty-first and most recent studio album, as well as the band’s second rock opera. In it, a woman named Jenny runs a halfway house and offers shelter to all who need it. When the mayor evicts her under false pretense, she murders him and flees the scene, and her final tenant fantasizes about the many lives Jenny could have led had she not given so much of herself to helping people who were never able to repay her.

Autumn arrives. I’m living in dorms again; my second chance takes place in New York, a two-day drive north from that sunny North Carolina campus. My friend, the one I stayed with all those years ago, calls me after midnight. In a month the Mountain Goats are releasing a new, experimental kind of album, a full band sequel to their last lo-fi album from twenty-one years ago: it’s a revival of the past as well as a celebration of the progress they’ve made since. My friend knows how excited I am; they want to listen to it with me, hear it from my perspective, share this moment with me. I put them on video call and we go through the album song by song, telling each other what it reminds us of, how it makes us feel, things we appreciate in the music. We aren’t dancing, of course, but the conversation comes easy; my bones remember what it’s like to be afraid of being myself, but the instinctual fear never comes. Instead, there’s only joy: I’ve become the kind of person I wanted to be, and found someone who wants that for me too.

My friend says something that catches me off guard. “Sorry, could you repeat that?” I ask, only briefly glancing at my appearance in the small square in the corner of my phone’s screen.

“Oh, I was just saying, um, that last song has a really fun rhythm. It’s a sad song, but it’s super uptempo and driving. It’s a dance-y song.”

I nod, even though I know they can’t see me. “It would be a fun song to dance to,” I agree.

-Skye Sisk

Skye Sisk grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina and has been writing for as long as she can remember. Her other ambitions include theatre, music, visual art, and game development. When she isn't creating art, Skye can likely be found trying a new recipe or thinking about dragons.