Making My Intentions Plain

There's an idea for a thing-I-want-to-do that I've been sitting on for quite a while. I've felt obliged - nay, compelled - to finish other things that I'm dragging my heels on first and set out with clear decks, to figure out what kind of angle I'm going to take on everything, to come up with the perfect name for the project, to wait until I'm in better health and have more energy to devote to it ... the list never ends. Despite being kicked in the pants over a month ago by Merlin Mann's excellent post about just getting started, I've continued to dither and spin my wheels.

However, all is not lost! Tonight I have been goaded into action (more on that later), and so this post has jumped the (towering) queue.¹

Most of this blog's regular readers will be aware of my deep and abiding love for the Mountain Goats. I have tried once or twice to write explicitly about just what their music means to me, and why I hold John Darnielle in such high esteem, but it all becomes a bit frightening and superlative and I tend to delete everything and put something idiotic on Twitter instead. This new endeavour of mine should cast some light on the subject, because I am setting out to write something about every Mountain Goats song.

This is, of course, madness. John Darnielle can probably write and release songs faster than I can write about them, and he has an 18-year head start on me, so even if I stick at it for a silly length of time there is really no chance that I will ever "finish". This is strangely liberating, though. By beginning without ever aiming to finish I can simply, as they say, do the thing.

Two of my major inspirations, Emotional Karaoke and Pop Songs 07-08, have been linked over in the sidebar ever since I became determined to try this. Emotional Karaoke used the song as jumping-off point and its length as a constraint, and ended abruptly when the author no longer needed it. Pop Songs, on the other hand, took a more intellectual, critical approach (to the music of a different band, I should point out, but that hardly matters).

I don't expect to be like either of them. Semi-random selection will choose which songs I write about, and sometimes that will lead to historical research, sometimes metaphor hunting, sometimes a story about what happened to me one day and how I felt about it. I think by letting the songs choose what direction to send me in I will end up in unexpected places, and I hope that some of those places will be of interest to at least a few people other than myself.²

In the end I like writing, I like music, I like writing about music, and I really like the Mountain Goats. I mention this because of a recent comic by John Campbell of Pictures for Sad Children:

Oh, and what was it that finally pushed me into action? One of my Google Alerts led me to a post on a blog called Notes from the Flipside in which the author states his intention of doing a very similar thing! A part of me was embarrassed ("I still haven't done anything about my idea that was kind of like this, how embarrassing"), but another part was excited about not being the only person mad obsessed mad enough to embark on such a project, and about the prospect of reading along.

So between embarrassment, excitement, John Campbell, Merlin Mann, Pop Songs, Emotional Karaoke, and a whole lot of simmering adoration, I think I'm ready to get started.³

1. Can a queue tower? I think it can. [↩]
2. If it all becomes too alienating, perhaps I will move the project to a separate location, but I would prefer not to do that. [↩]
3. Of course, I still haven't actually started, but can you begrudge me a self-indulgent preamble? Of course you can't. [↩]