i felt young and alive

The Mountain Goats - There Will Be No Divorce

There’s a problem in this one. The way there’s usually a problem. It’s after a fight, maybe, and it all went terribly and there was no Versailles, so this character Darnielle gives us in this particular song is restless and frustrated and just can’t take it any more because it never ends — the whole relationship is like Verdun and it has made him insane. His boots won’t dry and the ringing in his head remains the way it does in seashells. The whole scene plays out like he’s experiencing a migraine.

As the title suggests, though, it’s-all-going-to-be-okay; migraines go away — resolutions come, eventually. The couple is suddenly “rising from the grave,” building ladders out of their abysmal trenches. Okay, great.

But it won’t be okay — the half-rhyme of alive/grave says it all. It’s a twisting rhyme that’s so unsatisfying. It’s overwhelmingly dissonant. It breaks the song in half.

Like so many of Darnielle’s characters, there’s going to be no conclusive rest; the migraines, Verdun, the arguments about god-knows-what are returning shortly. You can see them outside, accumulating like storm clouds. We do however find the character thankful for this one moment of clarity — this flash where all the nonsense and the static and the breathing and the howl and patter of the elements retreats so he can just be free to be in love again (young love too, the kind where pony tails and pop songs mean everything) and forget about all those distractions that tear people apart.