All Hail West Texas is a lonely album, a product of idle time and summer boredom recorded alone, quickly, in an empty house. John Darnielle wrote most of the lyrics in the margins of the stapled, mimeographed handouts given to him in the orientation sessions at his new health-care job in Ames, Iowa. It was 1999. Every day he’d come home at three to an empty house, dishes crowding the sink (his wife was away at hockey camp) and pass the solitary evenings leafing through his handouts and editing the day’s work. When a melody came to him, he’d grab his guitar, mute the TV and hit the red button on a dying, decade-old boombox that had documented hundreds of similarly fractured, bleating folk songs since he began recording as the Mountain Goats in 1991.
There were obstacles to recording this way-- sometimes the tape ran out mid-song, very occasionally the phone rang-- and once they were resolved, the composition in question had sometimes already fallen out of Darnielle’s favor. “In those days, a song got exactly one day in which to either resolve its issues or be cast forth from the company of its brethren,” he writes in the reissue’s liner notes. The lucky survivors, though, have a palpable immediacy. Most of the takes you hear on All Hail West Texas were recorded within hours (or, when the juices were really flowing, minutes) of being written.
There’s a common misconception that all Mountain Goats records were recorded this way, but that’s not exactly true. Up until All Hail West Texas’s release in 2002, they were more like compilations-- collage-like assortments of bedroom recordings, live shows, occasional duets, radio broadcasts and four-tracked one-offs. The subject matter was sometimes bleak (especially the many songs that charted in stinging detail the doomed relationship of the fictional Alpha couple) but these variedly textured means of recording lent the albums a feeling of motion: Darnielle seemed more like an eccentric, town-to-town troubadour than an elusive bedroom-folk hermit. But not so on All Hail West Texas. Recording in suburban solitary confinement and exclusively on the boombox gives All Hail West Texas a cohesion and an echoing sense of isolation-- the perfect atmosphere for 14 songs about crushed dreams (“The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”), long-distance longing (“Source Decay”), and occasional moments of piercing joy (“Jenny”).
While recording All Hail, Darnielle did have a companion of sorts: his Panasonic RX-FT500, a temperamental machine so crucial to the album’s overall vibe that he credits it as a “second performer” in the liner notes. It had been out of commission for about two years (listening to the RX-FT500’s contributions to the Mountain Goats’ discography chronologically is kind of like listening to an alt-folk Disintegration Loops: you can practically chart its slow, gradual decay), but that fateful summer, it came back from the brink of death for an encore performance. “What you have with you now,” Darnielle writes on the inside sleeve, “[Is] the sound of a long-broken machine deciding, on its own and without the interference of repairmen or excessive prayer vigils, to function again.” And perhaps more than any other Mountain Goats record, you get a sense of this feeling in his voice, too: urgency, finality, and a twinge of superstition-- as though he’s not sure the “record” button will still be working by the next take.
The first people we meet are Jeff and Cyrus, a pair of pentagram-doodling teenage metalheads with big dreams for their still-unnamed two-man band (though they’ve been arguing over a few possibilities: Satan’s Fingers, the Killers, the Hospital Bombers). They’re the stars of album opener “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” a song that, if not the definitive Mountain Goats song, at least deserves an undisputed mention in the top 5. This isn’t a statement you throw around lightly about a band this prolific, but “Denton” feels like a dizzyingly succinct crash course in everything that makes the Mountain Goats great. In just two-and-a-half minutes, Darnielle pulls off three whiplashing tonal shifts. It starts off seeming like a light, funny song about a couple of high school goofballs, but then-- with a simple, unexpected pivot in the chord progression—things turn suddenly poignant: the band and the boys’ friendship is abruptly interrupted when Cyrus gets sent to a boarding school-- or, as the now-ominous “Hospital Bombers” suggests, could it be a psychiatric facility?-- “where they told him he’d never be famous.” In its closing moments, though, it becomes defiant, triumphant battlecry: “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream/ Don’t expect him to thank or forgive you/ The best ever death metal band out of Denton/ Will in time both outpace and outlive you.” It’s brilliantly structured and smartly crafted, but it wouldn’t be half as stirring if it were recorded with more polish. “Denton” is an imperfectly sung ode to all the songs that don’t get sung because of the people who put into the singers’ heads that the only songs worth singing are the perfect ones.
As advertised on its otherwise blank cover, All Hail West Texas is comprised of “fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.” The specificity of the narrative here is something of a joke: this was Darnielle’s first attempt at a concept album and-- somewhat paradoxically-- it succeeds mostly because of how loose the concept is. None of the other recurring characters get the first-name introductions that Jeff and Cyrus do, and it’s hard to follow which songs are about which of the seven people, or where one person ends and the other begins.
But that’s the point-- and even the brilliance-- of All Hail West Texas. Darnielle finds the common humanity in the people he’s singing about, whether it’s the injured high school football star who accidentally sells acid to an undercover cop (“Fall of the High School Running Back”), the blissfully happy couple in “Jenny” or the thoroughly miserable one in “Fault Lines”. There’s no shortage of contenders for “most devastating moment on All Hail West Texas”, but my vote goes to the half-second beat between tracks 8 and 9, the tender “Riches and Wonders” (“We are strong, we are faithful, we are guardians of a rare thing…/ And we dance like drunken sailors, lost at sea, out of our minds”) and the searing pre-break-up travelogue “The Mess Inside” (“We went down to New Orleans one weekend in the spring/ Looked hard for what we’d lost/ It was painful to admit it, but we couldn’t find a thing”). Are these two songs about the same couple? The suggestion that they could be-- that the potent feeling captured in “Riches” is too often something fleeting-- stings worse than knowing for sure.
As the Panasonic RX-FT500’s swansong, All Hail West Texas (which finally came out, first on cassette, in 2002) does mark the end of something fleeting, too. Later in 2002, Darnielle released the excellent Tallahassee-- not only the first “hi-fi” Mountain Goats record, but also the first in a series of concept albums that stick to much clearer narratives. But in the retrospective ruminations prompted by Merge’s new CD/LP reissue of this album, it feels less like a turning point in Darnielle’s career than an undeniable sweet spot. Mountain Goats fans are generally divided between the lo-fi diehards who champion the unpolished virtues of the early stuff and the people who prefer the more finely crafted later records. But All Hail West Texas (as well as the highlights of the previously unreleased material included with the reissue, like “Answering the Phone” and the proto-Tallahassee sketch “Indonesia”) is the best of both worlds: a snapshot of the moment when Darnielle had honed his lyrical and melodic sensibilities well enough to write songs as good as “Jenny” and “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”, but also perhaps before he actually realized how good and enduring these songs actually were.
Revisiting All Hail West Texas over two decades into the Mountain Goats’ existence makes a central irony in their story all too clear: it’s not a lonely record anymore. A handful of these songs remain the most iconic in the Mountain Goats catalog, which-- thanks to Darnielle’s cult fanbase that seems to be steadily, improbably increasing with each year-- means that some of the lines that echoed off the empty walls that summer in Ames, Iowa have now been screamed by thousands and thousands of different people. When Darnielle put most of these songs to tape in 1999, even to his fans he seemed like someone who’d end up a committed but obscure lifer on the indie cassette circuit; it was hard to imagine there’d ever be a wide audience for the kind of eccentric, homespun music he was making. But remember: people underestimated Jeff and Cyrus, too.
