Virtually Home

Driving south through Iowa at dusk I went to Lincoln for a job interview of sorts. I reveled in the driving. It turns out that solo slogs across the lonely plains states, singing along to my car stereo, are my idea of a good time. It was the kind of interview that seems only to exist in my field: the one where someone already knows they want to hire you but the job may or may not exist. I gave a talk, met a bunch of really cool people, and spent a nice afternoon in a town I have only visited in songs. I left Lincoln for Omaha, crushed under the weight of not getting my hopes up.  I planned to get to the venue at some point after doors opened, which is not my usual modus operandi. I was going to play it cool. I should preface this by saying that there is no such thing as a casual Mountain Goats fan, in my experience. Mountain Goats shows are a deeply and unsettlingly communal experience. The unsettling part comes because, in spite of having lived a life I cannot identify with ...

 Last Wednesday night, the Mountain Goats played a show in Oklahoma City at the UCO Performance Lab on their way down to Austin. I anticipated getting to see them at the festival -- this was destined to end in heartbreak. However, I had the good sense to buy a ticket for the OKC show anyway, and I was rewarded with a brilliant set of my old favorites. John Darnielle puts on an amazing show. I was worried that it would be a low-energy set, since most of his songs are written for the acoustic guitar. I was pleased to be wrong. He's accompanied by a bassist and a drummer, neither of whom do any talking, but appear to be into it. John's stage banter is pretty fabulous -- stories about inadvertently inviting a troop of tweakers into one's small apartment and having them destroy your antique maple-top desk by imprinting it with their tweaker poetry, for example. You can tell he loves his work -- he smiles while he plays, in that uncontainable way, and he plays barefoot. At...