"Horseradish Road" is an unsettling song. The album version1 is all subdued acoustic guitar and cold, pizzicato violin. Even Darnielle's vocals sound detached and a little distant - a far cry from the snarling, swooning, effervescent narrator-character who, in all his incarnations, dominates just about every Mountain Goats record. The only clue to the fragility of his composure is the way his voice cracks and quavers, just once, a minute and seven seconds in.
But there must be more to it than that. The Mountain Goats catalogue does have its emotionally distant (or distanced) narrators, with their songs of "I" and sometimes "you" but never any trace of a "we". These songs are invariably discomfiting, but their stories usually give the listener something on which to hang the uneasiness.
At just under two and a half minutes in length, "Horseradish Road" is an impressive convergence of recurring Mountain Goats themes: a couple held together by nothing any outsider will be able to fathom;2 a long drive from one unspecified destination to another;3 tiny concrete details married to broad presentiments of doom; diegetic music; tacit invitations to the listener to seek out oblique meanings and connections;4 terrible crimes, both legal and interpersonal, and the resultant guilt (or lack thereof).
And yet the song is not really about any of those things - except, perhaps, the very last.
The concept of karma gets bandied about by all sorts of people, to all sorts of ends. Popular usage in mainstream Western culture seems to suggest that it is a magical force that swoops about the place rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. A crudely-fashioned god for the modern atheist, perhaps, to relieve the pressure of personal responsibility.5 The raw material for said god is a variation on the idea of cause and effect that, depending on who you ask, applies to intentional actions or all actions or everything up to and including thoughtcrime.
The narrator of "Horseradish Road" doesn't care what it means. He has probably never even considered the word. All he has is his fatalism and a paralysing fear of his own just deserts. Not for him self-deceiving promises to reform; not for him hopes of salvation. He knows the score. The score is: I am a bad person, and you are a bad person too, and boy are there ever going to be consequences.
- From The Coroner's Gambit, which was finally revealed to me in all its glory as I struggled to write about this song. [↩]
- Not the fabled Alpha Couple, though, this time. We have not yet met the Alpha Couple in this series, but you can be certain that we will. [↩]
- This might be metaphorical rather than literal in "Horseradish Road", but then again it might not. [↩]
- The song mentions Elgar's Enigma Variations and Maria Callas; the musical project Enigma released a song called "Callas Went Away" featuring vocal samples from her. I don't for a moment suspect that this has anything to do with anything. [↩]
- Whoops, let's not start me harping on that tune. [↩]
I had to look up diegetic; I am pleased about that. ^_^
Normally I find YouTube clips of music to be distancing due to the (lack of) quality. John's lo-fi history makes him charmingly — and conveniently — immune.
I have nothing substantive to say, but this was really interesting!
Realm: I agree! I could pretty much watch YouTube videos of John all day long.
Sylvanus Urban: Oh, thank you! It is always lovely to hear that I am not just droning on to myself, especially from someone I had no idea was reading. :)