the Mountain Goats announced a new album yesterday called Jenny from Thebes.
There’s a song on their 2002 album, All Hail West Texas called Jenny. She also appears as a character in others.
For the past 20 years, there’s been great debate in the Mountain Goats fan community as to whether Jenny is a person or a motorcycle. When I lived in Brooklyn in the early aughts, one of my neighbors named their yellow & black Schwinn Cruiser Jenny, the deepest of inside jokes.
A whole album about Jenny is being called a sequel. But since releasing All Hail West Texas, the lead singer (and the band embodied) John Darnielle also wrote 3 novels. And All Hail West Texas has always felt like a collection of short stories. So to me it seems he’s doing what fiction writers often do: expanding a short story into a longer work.
I have reservations about hearing Jenny from Thebes because All Hail West Texas is my favorite Mountain Goats’ album. And the last couple albums didn’t speak to me precisely because they are so different from it. The lead single from the new album dropped yesterday and it sounds nothing like that All Hail West Texas trademark Panasonic RX-FT50 wheel grind.
I became a fan of the band when I heard John Darnielle play an absolutely absurd fundraiser show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in 2008. I was recovering from an ear infection, and came to the show reluctantly. John was recovering too: it was his first show back after a vocal cord issue threatened to end his singing career. Barely whispering over an acoustic guitar, occasionally off mic, he invaded my brain with those complex lyrics.
I suppose that’s what happens when you’re a fan from a certain era, but the band you love continues to write and evolve: the Mountain Goats are particularly prolific.
I see the brand new fans in online communities and at shows absolutely loving the new albums. This is the music they first heard from the band, it makes sense.
and I’m really glad that the Mountain Goats isn’t just touring on the nostalgia circuit for aging Gen Xers and Millennials (even if they pair up with the Hold Steady recently for a couple of shows to cater to that very crowd). I’m sure there are earlier Mountain Goats fans who didn’t like the studio albums I first fell in love with.
I do wish for new music with that acoustic guitar and wheel-grind. I’ve made peace with the fact that it’s probably never coming. But a new album based on those same characters I so desperately want to know more about that doesn’t sound like I want it to sound just picks open that scab.
