TRAGIC LOVE MONTH #1: Tallahassee, by The Mountain Goats (2002)

Type of Media: Music Album

A relationship can be a great and terrible thing. That special someone can be both the love of your life and your perfect enabler, the one who gets you better than anyone else and brings out the worst in you. You can't imagine life without that person, but maybe at some point you realize that you're just bad for each other. It's too late though. You've given up too much of yourself to go it alone. You're resigned to your fate, and your one goal as you fall is to embrace your partner and make sure they come down with you.

John Darnielle is a singer-songwriter who's been making music under the name the Mountain Goats since the early 90s. He's developed a rabid cult following for his extremely literate, lyric-driven songs that mostly center on people who are outcast, trying to find happiness, and/or making really bad decisions. For the first ten years of his career he released a series of songs about the Alpha couple, a man and woman who briefly find love before their relationship begins to collapse and slowly circle the drain. 

After releasing an Alpha song here and there over the years, the Mountain Goats decided to end the couple's journey with a full album devoted entirely to them. That album is Tallahassee, and it chronicles the Alpha's move to an old, decaying house in Florida as they try to save their dying marriage. 

The titular opening track begins the story with one Alpha making it clear how desperate this move is, saying "there is no deadline/there is no schedule/there is no plan we can fall back on," over a backing of slow acoustic guitar. It's sung softly, almost like a lullaby to soothe yourself. On the third song, Southwood Plantation Road, the couple is sure they can make things work. The song projects a feeling of defiance, that they've put too much into their relationship for them to fail. They're going to resurrect their love, blend back into society, and prove all of the friends that they've driven away wrong.

But it doesn't work. They slip into apathy, falling into a routine of getting drunk, watching TV, and going to bed. They can't seem to find a way out of their rut, and track The House That Dripped Blood draws a comparison between their relationship and the crumbling house they inhabit as they search desperately for something nice that they can salvage, but come up with nothing. Things finally come to a head on mid-point track No Children, possibly the most popular Mountain Goats song ever released. John Darnielle has mentioned that he gets countless requests to play this song at weddings, which gives you a sense of how twisted a sense of humor most Mountain Goats fans have. It's a recital of terrible things the Alphas want to happen, both to each other and themselves.

After that things quickly spiral downward for the couple, best summed up in the song International Small Arms Traffic Blues with the line "Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania". Finally on Old College Try they admit that they should've broken up a long time ago, but vow to stick together until the bitter end. It isn't an abstract end they're referring to, though, but an encroaching and definite finale, as the last track Alpha Rats Nest has them putting a period on their cursed coexistence. Together they set their house on fire, stay inside to burn up along with it, and reduce all traces of their lives to ash.

Even with a prolific career spanning 25 years and over a dozen albums, I still think about half of the songs on Tallahassee are some of the best Mountain Goats songs around. John Darnielle's ability to add dimension to his characters by describing their environment is on full exhibition here, as is his talent for communicating bitterness so intense it comes off as glorious. Instrumentally this was the first Mountain Goats album with a full band, and though it isn't sonically sublime and doesn't take many risks the added diversity of sounds really helps some songs stand out against Darnielle's previous acoustic work.

Overall, Tallahassee is just a great album from one of the most distinctive voices in modern music. It opens incredibly strong, closes incredibly strong, and though the middle meanders a bit No Children and See America Right are so forceful they will grab your attention by its throat and leave you hesitant to look away again. If a concept album about the last gasps of a doomed relationship sounds appealing to you, Tallahassee executes on that premise wonderfully.