It was a difficult proposition the 4AD brass had to make in getting John Darnielle down to Austin, Texas, a few months ago. He’s got nothing to say about the SXSW music festival. He said he would be there for 24 hours and no more. There was a birthday party in his honor waiting for him back home in North Carolina. Darnielle came in on Wednesday, March 14 th as the first session of the day. He wanted none of the indie rock crowding and clowning going on near him and he almost got it had the SOUND Team guys not practiced a little longer than they’d intended for the final time that week. He performed most of the set sitting cross-legged on the cement floor of the Big Orange studio. The roosters outside the place were making a racket that you should be able to hear, but somehow don’t. They were some loud SOBs. Fitting right in, Darnielle pissed right onto the outside wall of the building on account of there not being a working toilet in the room. – Sean Moeller

First song
Pinklon (Mountain Goats) [3.64MB] [10414 downloads]


— unreleased
Pinklon Thomas is my hero. He was one of the best heavyweights of the 80s and his jab was described by many as the best since Sonny Liston’s. The line on him has always been that he was addicted to heroin at ten years old, and that he did time for armed robbery when he was young. My own research suggests that the former is certainly true but the latter might have been an embellishment on the part of boxing commentators looking for an angle. Still, embellishments make for better mythologies, so that’s what I went with here.

Second song
Ethiopians (Mountain Goats) [2.80MB] [9911 downloads]


— unreleased
This one’s interesting to me because it’s in the style I was writing in for Tallahassee — super-exaggerated images, plenty of melodrama, everybody always five minutes away from going off the deep end. Title refers to one of the bands whose songs the narrators claim to be playing, though I don’t believe them.

Third song
Red River Valley (Mountain Goats) [2.77MB] [10434 downloads]


— unreleased
An old cowboy song probably nicked from an old Manitoban song. In the very early days of the Mountain Goats, I used to play this one live in the old holler-and-stamp-my-feet style. Once per verse there’s a chord change from A major to A minor that used to seem to me like the most transgressive, incredible, thrilling thing in the world. It’s a pretty standard move, but when I was just starting to write songs it was like some huge revelation from on high. It still punches pretty much all of my buttons.

Fourth song
Babylon Burning (No Longer Available) — unreleased
A doubtless ill-advised attempt to sing a song I’d been listening to a lot on the tour that led up to this session. I’ve I.D.‘d it as a Peter Tosh song, but it could be a Bob Marley song: there’s a version available by the Wailers, but it was from when Tosh was in the band, and the melody sounds more Tosh than Marley to me. Either way, white dudes with acoustic guitars are probably better off not attempting to cover reggae songs, and if further evidence of that were needed, well, here you are. Still, the walkdown on the third line of each verse is kinda awesome, however hard it is to hear over that guy who keeps yelling. (Downloads were originally capped at 1000 but a generous benefactor has agreed to cover the licensing fees so that we can offer 1000 more copies.)