The Mountain Goats have a lot of songs about dying relationships and dying people (it’s quite possibly their schtick). Tallahassee, All Hail West Texas, and Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan are just a few of their albums with these as a predominant theme. Some of these songs can get quite pessimistic, though actual straight-up suicide is remarkably rare in their songs, at least outside subtext.
The subtext is important, though. There are at least two songs by the Mountain Goats that I at least find interesting to interpret as being about suicide: You or Your Memory, from the 2005 album The Sunset Tree, and An Antidote for Strychnine, from the 2019 album In League with Dragons.
Now, when trying to interpret a song, it’s important to first at least try to understand what the author was literally thinking when writing it. This is easy for (many) Mountain Goats songs: John Darnielle has published a book containing the lyrics and his notes on 365 songs (This Year: a Book of Days). What does he have to say?
The lyrics first.
I checked into a bargain-priced room on La Cienega
gazed out through the curtains at the parking lot
went down to the corner store just before nightfall in my bare feet
black tarry asphalt, soft and hot
and when I came back, I spread out my supplies
on the counter by the sink
looked myself right in the eyes:
St. Joseph’s baby aspirin
Bartles & Jaymes
and you, or your memory
I ducked behind the drapes when I saw the moon begin to rise
and I gathered in my loose ends, and I switched off the light
and down there in the dark I could see the real truth about me
as clear as day; Lord, if I make it through tonight,
I will mend my ways,
and walk the straight path to the end of my days.
St. Joseph’s baby aspirin
Bartles & Jaymes
and you, or your memory
Now, John’s notes (both from this song specifically and from his notes on Design Your Own Container Garden):
This is the first song on The Sunset Tree, our best-known album and the first one that will be mentioned in my obituary. Here in the month of June we’ll be devoting ourselves almost exclusively to it, and to some songs ancillary to it - written during the same period, or connected otherwise to it. The song is written from the point of view of a guy who, just three years before, lived in the house where most of the rest of the album takes place. That guy is me, for better and worse.
I wrote (Design Your Own Container Garden) sometime in the Tallahassee span of time, and my home recording of it served as a B-side for the first single on our new label, 4AD. It is not part of the Tallahassee cycle. It’s a study for “You or Your Memory”; the bargain-priced room on La Cienega was actually in the Pico-Crenshaw district (and was not, truth be told, on La Cienega at all). I was working weekends in Pico-Crenshaw and staying at a motel overnight so as not to tax my car’s engine. Time alone in a motel, as we’ll see in July, can take you some places when the elements align.
This admittedly does not tell us much. I will note that the rest of The Sunset Tree is largely about Darnielle’s experience growing up with an abusive stepfather (or a fictionalization thereof); the liner note for the album reads (approximately, you’ll forgive me as I don’t have the record on hand) “for my stepfather: may you have the peace in death you never had in life”. I can’t speak to the setting of the song (either Pico-Crenshaw or La Cienega), as while I have attempted suicide in Los Angeles, it was in fact in West Hollywood (I was living in Inglewood at the time).
My interpretation of You or Your Memory as being about suicide is fairly straightforward: it’s a straightforward reason for the narrator to have bought baby aspirin and wine coolers (see https://emcrit.org/ibcc/salicylates/; one of the “typical clinical presentations” is a suicide attempt), and it meshes with the rest of the song; the narrator is delirious and attempting to make terms with his death or unlikely survival.
I should note that I do not think this is the only valid interpretation or maybe even really the intended one; I just find it interesting in the context of the rest of the album. This also goes for An Antidote for Strychnine.
Once more, the lyrics:
Dig around in the garbage
save up some halibut bones in a jar
scrape a winter’s worth of salt deposits
from the rusty frame of my car
ask the experts, maybe they’ll know
Call up my teacher in Cambridge
see what he remembers
throw white phosphorus in the fireplace
look for clues in the embers
call the hotline, give them a phony last name