The Mountain Goats album All Hail West Texas is, for my money, the purest distillation of what America actually is ever put on wax. The record turned fifteen years old on Sunday, February 19, four weeks into a presidential term marked by rhetoric anchored to the phrase “Make American Great Again.” Of course, this country has already been great — and awful — and Darnielle’s old record speaks to both of those things. It’s right there in the title — “All Hail” puts our inexhaustible desire to big up ourselves in all things, along with the implication that everyone else should follow suit right out in front, and West Texas is the most American setting that Goats mastermind John Darnielle could have conjured up.
You see, most of our beloved American symbols don’t actually represent the United States as it is. Most towns don’t have their own copper lady in the harbor holding up a light of liberty, and they’re nowhere near a mountain range, purple or otherwise. Most towns don’t even have an H&M. If you ran all American landscapes through a computer and asked it to find the average, West Texas may well be the answer.
It’s vast, isolated and largely empty. The sort of place that’s as removed from the rest of the current world as the Puritans must have found the Eastern Seaboard, a place where they could let their anti-freakum freak flags fly. It’s an entire region of towns that are about a stoplight wide, the sort of highway off-ramps and pit-stops masquerading as towns that Mulder and Scully always found themselves in. Because “nothing goes on out there” and “anything could be going on out there” are awful close in the minds of people from denser locales.
But when Darnielle embedded himself in the stories of “seven people, two houses, a motorcycle and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys”, he didn’t find extra-terrestrials. He didn’t find some grand treatise on the state of political discourse in our nation, either. In a series of scruffy lo-fi tunes bashed out into a tape recorder, Darnielle found everyday people, trying their best to get along, be happy, have babies and maybe a few stiff drinks.
The songs on West Texas are by no means idyllic or saccharine, but they are completely, blissfully removed from politics. The characters at the heart of tracks “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton” and “Fall Of The Star High School Running Back” are unconcerned with global affairs, not because their own lives are peachy, but because they have their own problems to deal with. The latter track turns one of the most American images imaginable — the promising standout of a rural high school football team — into a cautionary tale. The brief mention of an idealized immigrant narrative (“your grandfather rode the boat over from Ireland”) is only uttered to bring William Donahue’s bad decisions — namely, selling acid to a cop — into focus.
Everywhere you look on Texas, there’s signs of rampant consumerism, a feeling that’s familiar to any American who has ever ventured outside. The celebratory tracks and the sounds of lives falling apart are both littered with the things the characters have bought. “Jenny” is a tale of feeling free while riding on the back of a motorcycle driven by her lover, but Darnielle doesn’t neglect to mention the Kawasaki brand name or the “southwestern ranch-style house” they’ll park it in front of. The couple at the center of “Fault Lines” are “masters in the art of frivolous spending” whose rapid consumption and endless bragging do nothing to stop their love from degrading.
That’s not to give the idea that the album is all bummers. It’s best to leave the idea that “more sadness = more real” to the folks who make Batman movies, and Darnielle is a gifted-enough songwriter to know this. He perfectly captures the overly boisterous and friendly nature of Americans, that loud and open way of existing that so frequently puts non-Americans on edge with their first encounter, in just four lines on the chorus of “Color In Your Cheeks.”
“Come on in, we haven’t slept for weeks,” he sings. “Drink some of this, it’ll put color in your cheeks.”
But even outside of this intentionally chummy track, in the newborn confusion of “Pink And Blue” and the messy, lost strum of “Jeff Davis County Blues,” there’s a sense that everything is going to be okay, that the narrators of all going to get through this in our own way. The characters of West Texas believe that the world can go to hell and they’ll still hold on to their optimism, especially out here in the big empty where no one is bothering to look for them.
That big, dumb puppy attitude, nursed by the lack of a catastrophic war at home with a non-American agitator and allowed to flourish in the isolation of non-coastal America, is everywhere you look on Texas. It’s even on the back cover via a T. Lobsang Rampa quote. “A so-called ‘ghost’ which has its molecules widely spaced can easily pass through a brick wall,” it reads. It’s the same spread-out ideology that fueled the creation of the internet. America is a country without a center and that has allowed its citizens to think that they can move through anything. All Hail West Texas preaches this message in a flurry of tape hiss and acoustic strumming. The characters throughout the album are spread thin and constantly moving, getting better via the most American of activities, long-distance driving.
“I wish the West Texas Highway was a mobius strip,” Darnielle sings from the point of view of a lovesick man who makes the trip to Austin to keep up correspondence with an ex. “I could ride it out forever.”
“Absolute Lithops Effect” — the closer of the album — finds Darnielle “pink and raw” but thanks to the highways and openness of the uber-American West Texas landscape. Scattered and different as these people are, they are taking “tiny steps forward.” Even 15 years on, listening to that ceaseless optimism, banged out by Darnielle as quickly as possible, is a wonderful reminder of what’s so great about the country All Hail West Texas so fully represents — all the flaws that help make it that way. Stream the album below and get it here.
