Throwback Thursday: It was 5 years ago when we were celebrating award season for The Shape Of Water, and I got to live my dream of being in an old musical dance number (dressed as an Amphibian Man, of course) with the amazing Sally Hawkins.
can tell im about to start listening to the mountain goats again which is how you know im experiencing a real low point
i read an article about tmg probably over a decade ago now but i truly always think about it because the author said that tmg’s real strength lies in their ability to take nuclear reactor feelings and encase them in containers so strange and meandering that you get tricked into communing with said feelings before you realize what’s happening; that their songs reconnect you to parts of yourself so caustic and corrosive you wouldn’t otherwise be able to approach them or sit with them at all. and so all of their songs are functionally rube goldberg machines or little labyrinths, constructed with the understanding that the long way round is sometimes the only viable path to getting where you need to go; that sometimes you have to go all the way to a wrestler from the 80s or inhabit the pov of a mushroom or a weed on the highway to get enough distance from your own feelings to be able to face them head on without collapsing. tmg songs not only understand that but also want to provide the structure to facilitate that kind of unlikely but necessary encounter.
ALT
update went to look up the article and i had the spirit of the point but the way they put it is much nicer to read. he literally IS in the business of reattaching limbs 🫡
[image text transcription copied from alt text:
He has a poet’s gift for injecting universal feelings into specific and alien narrative contexts, which allows you to catch your own emotional bogeymen by surprise. If you discover that his song about moon-colony organ harvesting is actually about how criminally lonely you felt the first time you made yourself throw up, the obliqueness of this association makes it possible to look almost directly, even almost compassionately, at something that three minutes ago you’d have given anything to disown. Darnielle is in the business of reattaching limbs, gently steering us towards the things we need to feel about the parts of ourselves we need to hold onto.
ALT
