Song Exploder - The Mountain Goats - Cadaver Sniffing Dog

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

John Darnielle has been writing and recording songs as the Mountain Goats since 1991. He’s released 17 studio albums, and also written two books of fiction. In April 2019, the Mountain Goats released the album In League with Dragons, and in this episode, John Darnielle breaks down a song from it, called Cadaver-Sniffing Dog. We’ll hear his original demo, and then, hear how the song evolved at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, with the help of John’s band, some incredible session musicians, and producer Owen Pallett. songexploder.net/the-mountain-goats

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. My name is Tau Wyn. John Darniel has been writing and recording songs as the Mountain Goats since 1991. He's released 17 studio albums and also written two books of fiction. In April 2019, the Mountain Goats release the album in League with Dragons, and in this episode, John Darniel breaks down a song from it called Cadaver Sniffing Dog. We'll hear his original demo and then hear how the song evolved at Blackbird Studios in Nashville

with the help of John's band some incredible session musicians and producer Owen Pallet. Also, stick around after the song to hear more from John in our new segment Instrumental. My name is John Darniel. I am the singer from the Mountain Goats.

I keep little notebooks. They're not that much bigger than a credit card and I've been carrying those around for over 10 years. The notebook has grocery lists and it has notes I take if I'm watching a movie, but there's one page that just has song titles. I just write them when I get an idea. And cadaver sniffing dog had been around for a while. I think it probably came at an airport. I mean, airports rather a lot, and they have drug sniffer dogs, and you're not allowed to pet them, and it sucks because you want to give

the dog a little pet, let them know, you know, it's doing a good job. They have to wear little yellow jackets that say like drug sniffing dog or something like that. And I had crime stuff in my brain, you know. So I had the title, and I am reasonably certain that it was Christmas day, and I just started riffing with a guitar. Two, three, and... The way that I write, usually, is I'll be playing a riff, and I will just sort of ad lib a line and go from there. And if this song is going to have that title, I was like, you know, a crime scene will be the obvious place. See if anyone's left up there. So I had the riff, I had the couplet, and then I put down the guitar,

and I sit there with my pen and notebook asking myself what happens next that makes narrative sense. So I asked myself, whose voice is this, who's speaking? So, well, okay, it's a crime scene investigator of some kind, or, you know, a detective, detective, it's detective, right? What's he describing? Then I write a couple of the same meter. Teams on the scene from several stations Everybody adjust your expectations And I went back and forth like that

Between the notebook and the guitar Asking myself questions That allow the rhyme to further explicate The line just before it Straight clumps of hair and blood and brain Fragments of bone in the drain The speaker is looking at a scene of utter devastation He's inviting the investigation to continue

And insisting there must be dead bodies in here That's how bad things are. There can be no question that if there's anyone in here, they're dead. And I am interested in what it's like to be that speaker, what it feels like to inhabit that speaker's skin for three minutes. It's a theatrical experience, essentially. Rook is trying to keep the airway clear, but the damage is too severe. Sometimes the chorus takes a long time, but I knew I like the phrase too much

not to absolutely put it to work in the chorus. What a great thing to say. It's like I wanted to sing it a bunch of times. Bring in the cadaver. And I had the idea for the vocal harmony also. And I really enjoy getting elaborate with the backing vocals and garage band. Bring in the cadether the cadaver. And I remember it was nearing dinner time and both kids are swarming me.

But I kind of like the way that the tempo and the pace of the song reflects that I'm trying to get the idea finished as quickly as I can. So this is one of those songs where unless I tell you what it's about you're not going to know, right? We're looking at erect room, bodies that are hardly recognizable, where you have to bring in a dog to determine where the body is in the first place. There's nothing in that that can telegraph to you that what I'm thinking about is a relationship where there's nothing left to save. It's a collapsing relationship song, but it's a thing that. It's also in the guise of a noir of a detective crime scene moment. That's the metaphor.

And you could take the story at face value. But my assumption is that there will be some listeners who will intuit that, who will go, ah, this song is actually about a relationship in which none of the motivating quality that brought these people together survives. This is a person checking for signs of life in something that is visibly dead. And that's always been one of the saddest things to think of for me. is like when relationships collapse, a thing that used to seem worth preserving

no longer seems worth saving to one or both parties. And if that's true for one party, it's necessarily true for both parties. It's just that one has the wrong idea about it, right? And that to me is a scene of great pathos. My parents divorced when I was five, and my world cracked open when that happened. It was very, you know,

I remember the moment they told me. The first time I became aware that people separate romantically, it was a catastrophic moment for me personally. It was just horrifying to me because I had never thought of it before that. It was like, when you're five, you don't think, well, maybe one day you won't live with one of these people. It's like you don't. That wasn't on the table for me.

And so I think, you know, I always returned to that. And so me and my band, Matt Douglas, John Worcester and Peter Hughes and Owen Pallet Producing met at Blackbird. And we tracked this one first in the session because I wanted to make sure we got it right. So the setup is John and Peter, a drummer and bassist, are out in the big room with a baffle between them. The rhythm section is very deeply in the pocket on this track. You know, it is locked in. Owen was really encouraging us to underplay a lot. So we went with something like crowd rock where it's the drums and the bass play exactly what they play,

and they play it in a line. And me and Matt are playing the exact same acoustic guitar part. You know, often when you write something, you play, you sort of. to try and dress it up a little bit, play it as well as you could. But it sounded so nice to just have Owen go, no, play less. Let the song be itself. We can add more stuff later. And so you get much more motoric-style basics,

which actually give you the freedom to turn the next layer into whatever you want. We tracked by ourselves for the first two or maybe three days, and that's when the other musicians came in and did other stuff. There was Thomas Gill, who's such a great musician. I do not remember which electric he would. was playing. But I have this pedal. It's by a company called Farm, and it's a distortion pedal. It's an overdrive. And the reason it's called Farm is the guy who makes him as a farmer, and he sells these

pedals to help pay for, like, grain and stuff to keep the farm going. And he advertised one as Jerry Garcia 78 tones. I am the target market for this pedal. I saw that. I was like, really, you have a specific dead tour whose tones you're trying to emulate. And it's pre-81. Then I am with you. So I said, Thomas, try this pedal. And he did, and he liked it as well as I did. The sound of it is real nice. And then I said, well, you know, I've always thought we'd have a guitar solo here. And I want to play guitar solos desperately, but I am not a good enough musician to actually properly solo.

And so we handed a guitar to Thomas and let him loose. With a guitar solo, you can be basically playing scales over the changes. But another thing you can do is have something to express the aggression of the song or to elaborate on the lyric, or to take the sentiment of the lyric to a place that language can't take it to by itself, which is what I think Thomas does in this one, that he just takes the violence inherent in the scene

and takes it to this sort of no wave, downtown New York, early 80s kind of place. He's rhythmic, but it's kind of choppy. We were all going nuts. The thing is fun about having people play solos in the studio is everybody else gets to sit back and be in awe of the other musician, right? And that is so fun.

This is our second album we made at Blackbird in Nashville, and one of the big reasons to record there is if you want to hire session musicians to play on your record, you will have them in any degree you want, and you can have them in half an hour. And I knew that I was going to want to hire Robert Bailey. He and his dudes are the guys doing the actual backing vocals. And session musicians are the true stars of this industry, in my view. They can do anything. Every last one of those four guys are better singers than me by incomprehensible orders of magnitude. And it's very hard to learn how to go, you know, that's good. But if you did something a little different, because they're so good that you want to just say yes to everything they do. But I had already written the part on this one. And so we sat around, listen to the demo.

And he said, so do you want, is that what you want us to do? Yes, that's what I want, but I want you guys to sing it in four-part. I think mine was in three-part harmony on the demo. And so he stands there in the tracking room with his guys, and he goes, okay, so bring in the cada... Who wants that way? I'll take that one. How about you? Try this.

Bring in the cadaver. No, no, there's a unison there. He looks at me, and he goes, do you mind a unison, or do you want all harmony? And I say, well, I want what you think sounds good. I'll try unison. So they get an idea together, then they all go and stand in front of the mics,

and what they did is they took what I wrote and made it 3D. Bring in the cadet. Bring in the cadet. You should see what it's like in the tracking room when Robert and his guys show up to sing. It's like everybody just sits back and just revels in the pure pleasure of music. These guys, they sing on Garth Brooks records, right? And to have them singing my somewhat strange lyrics is really fun. It's so great to be taking something that is strange and occupies a sort of strange space musically

and then treat it the same way that you would treat something that had more commercial potential. Bring in the cadaver. Sniffing dog. With my vocals, my instructions were to not emote, and younger me would be, no, no, I must express my feelings, right? But no, if you trade that desire to be expressive in the service of the song, you get it back doubled. If you actually serve the song instead of asking the song to serve you emotionally. Hustle up the spiral stare, see if anyone's left up there. It's probably my purest metaphor song ever in that I never offer any indication that it's a metaphor.

I'm the last guy to find the metaphor in somebody else's song, because I'm too taken in by details. But that's also my strength as a writer is like I have so much interest in the details that if I have a governing metaphor, I can make it pretty real because I can populate it with all these little things happening at the edges. Wait till you come up on the smoking rack And even then you check I don't need to emote about it I can just tell you what I saw The physical details seem to me sufficient

To communicate anything else that the scene might need to communicate And I can assume that if I give you a good enough description of what I saw That the emotional reality or the spiritual reality underneath it Will become manifest Veterans on their hands and knees Nobody's ready for days like this.

I think the speaker here is an egotist. This is the funny thing. When I start analyzing my own lyrics, I'm generally fairly critical of the narrator. It's like, to me, the solution to this narrator's problem is right in front of his face. He should start thinking about things

other than his own reactions. This song, it was one of the ones I had flagged for strings because Owen Pallet writes string arrangements in place. We did pre-production on a fair bit of this And he did guide tracks on a mini-mogue in the control room just to indicate what the string parts were going to be. And then I think he liked them. And so he kept the mini-mogue in.

That's one thing you would never have gotten away with with me earlier, is like, oh, let's see if this sounds cool and maybe keep it later. I've always been very much about think about your decision first, then play it. And with this record, I let Owen actually produce and make decisions like, I'm going to lay down this thing and then later say, you know, it sounds kind of cool. Let's keep it. It was so awesome that I want to do it this way from here on out. It's like writing the songs, relinquishing control,

handing them to a friend I know well to Owen and saying, now tell me what you hear in these songs, you tell us how to play them. It was really liberating for me. The strings were on like day six or seven, and I wanted to get a tattoo. So I booked a tattoo because I thought, you know, it'll be better if I'm not around to give input.

If I let Owen do his whole thing, he has some people he works with in Macedonia, a full symphony orchestra. and he wrote charts by himself up in Canada where he lives, and then he had sent them to them, and they learned them and rehearse them, and then they hook up via Skype, and it's a fully conducted live orchestra.

So I went, and I got a tattoo of a crab holding a pair of glasses in tribute to the time I was holding my two-year-old in the ocean, and then a wave came and knocked my glasses off, and we joked that a crab had taken my glasses. I did that during the string tracking, right? So when I got back, Peter was like, oh, my God, dude, It was the greatest. Oh, and I cried.

It just I cried. My first ideas about music were about symphony orchestras. When I was five, I wanted to be a conductor. It's such a high form of music to be able to hear an ensemble all at once in your head and do an arrangement like Owen has done. And then it's such an accomplishment to even play in an orchestra like that, to be able to subsume your own talents into the service of a broader vision. And it's what makes orchestral music so beautiful,

is that it's an expression of human cooperation. As a lead singer type, as a guy who both benefits from and is burdened by his sort of native egotentrism, people generally do you just want to talk about my feelings about stuff? And that to me is no longer interesting. I'm much more interested in the other musicians' work. You know, there's some songwriters who insist

that they told every musician, every note, what to play on the record. And I believe none of them. I don't believe any of that. Music is the story of people making something together that outgrows all of them and is bigger than them and of which they should all be in awe. And now, here's cadaver sniffing dog by the mountain goats in its entirety. And after the song, we'll hear more from John. Hustle of the spot seen from several stations.

Adjust your expectations. Stray clumps of hair and blood and brain. Rookies trying to keep the air away, but the damage is too severe. Bring in the Cadile. Visit SongExploter.net for more information on the Mountain Goats. You'll also find a link to buy or stream this song. Coming up, more John Darniel for our new segment called Instrumental. In our segment, Instrumental, we ask artists about the tools that shape how they write, play, and think about music.

Here's more with John Darniel. Is there an instrument you have that's been really important to you? There's this Hawaiian guitar, and this is the most important. instrument in the mountain goats development. So it has a place of honor for me. So I was working at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk. I was paying off a court bill that I owed the state of California a lot of money. But I was also living in employee housing, right? And employee housing was already very cheap. And then periodically, like once a year, the union wouldn't see eye to eye with the state and we'd be out of contract. And then my rent would have to go back to,

whatever the rent had been prior to the first contract. I don't know how that worked. But so for several months a year, my rent would be like $31 on the studio apartment in a very old building that was on the grounds of the hospital where I worked. So I was paying down this court bill, but living on fairly cheap rent,

and I didn't really have any expenses. I wasn't married. So when I would get a paycheck, I would go shopping and my needs are modest. I would buy tapes. And at the shopping center, there was an instrument store. And there was not a lot of foot traffic in this store

that had probably been, been in the strip mall for as long as it had been there, which probably would have been in the early 70s, and this is the mid-90s in California. So, and he was just crammed, ceiling to floor with instruments, like new Kima guitar from Korea, $71. I bought one of those, and those were actually the, that's the guitar you hear on the first tape. But the other guitar you hear in the first tape is this Hawaiian guitar that was up on a shelf, and I asked if I could see it, and they didn't trust anybody. You'd say, can I say a guitar? You think about buying it?

Well, yeah, yes. And so, okay, well, here, you know, that's a nice one. And I bought it. I didn't know anything about it. I wondered what makes it Hawaiian. It's basically a slide guitar, but an acoustic slide, right? So the strings are raised high enough that you can use a bottleneck or a proper slide to play chords. You tune it to a chord and you move the slide up and down, right?

But it was a whole new magic world of sound for me. And I was writing poetry at the time. I wasn't doing the mountain goats. But I had extra money, you know, and I thought I bought this $50 guitar. And then I figured out there was tuned to a chord so I could play one four or five, right, standard blues progression and do something. And I didn't have any lyrics. So I grabbed a poem that I had been working on called Going to Alaska and just sang it over a very simple progression. And that became the first de facto mountain goat song.

You can hear in that track how I don't have the four and five memorized. There's little dots to tell you where to go, but I don't know what I'm doing. This one only ever saw play on the first two tapes And then I had sort of moved on But it is the origin story guitar It's the one I bought I mean, no, I just buy this Hawaiian guitar What do I care?

And I wouldn't be sitting here today If I hadn't sort of made that rash decision Song Explorer was created And is executive produced by Rishi Keishie Sheerway This episode was produced and edited by Christian Coons Carlos Laramah made the artwork Which you can see on the Song Exploder website Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia

from PRX, a collective of fiercely independent podcasts. You can learn about all of our shows at radiotopia.fm. You can also find Song Explorer on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder, and you can find me at Tao Get Stay Down. My name is Tao Wyn. Thanks for listening.