fix my eyes in the rearview when I cross the state line

I didn’t expect the last lingering memory I made on my vacation to be this:

Me, alone, in a rental car, doing 80mph down I-15 South, heading towards the Utah state line, crying softly to myself for no real discernible reason at all, with “Jeff Davis County Blues” blaring from the speakers.

But life’s like that sometimes.

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I’ve got a goal of getting to all 50 states; my criteria is essentially “must have done something there that I’ll remember.”

(I know for a fact that I’ve been to Connecticut, for example, but I could only tell you vaguely when, and couldn’t tell you a single thing I did there, or even what city I spent the night in. It doesn’t count. I’ve got to go back.)

When the Mountain Goats announced that part of their tour was going through several states I’ve never visited, right around Labor Day, well — that trip felt a little like destiny.

I did what any responsible adult would do: started booking travel arrangements.

This is a totally reasonable thing to do.

*

(I wasn’t supposed to go to Spokane. My tour was supposed to end in Missoula, and then I was going to have two days to tool about somewhere between Missoula and Salt Lake City. Roughly somewhere between the Jackson show and the end of the Billings show, I pretty much made up my mind to push the tour one more night. It meant that I had an enormous amount of driving to do in one day, to make sure I could get back to Utah for my flight, but I was having too much fun to end things.)

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I’ve got a habit of going on wild trips to see artists that I like, and also of seeing them as many times as actually possible. When I love something, I want to consume it until I burst with love for the thing.

A walk through my old music blog reveals the remnants of this. A spur of the moment trip to New Jersey to see Rufus Wainwright — in a time before smartphones and Google Maps, when I had to handwrite all my navigation and print out street maps to make sure I didn’t get lost. Andrew Bird shows all across the midwest… and east coast… and south… and Los Angeles… plus a fortunately timed gig in Amsterdam when I was there at the tail end of a river cruise. Things like that.

There’s always a part of me that wants to discover new things — the music blogger ethic never quite goes away, even when your site’s been dormant for years — but the comfort and even intimacy of seeing an artist who you know you will love is important, too.

Sometimes, you just want something that makes you feel seen.

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The first time I saw The Mountain Goats was in 2009 at the Metro. I’d met a girl at an Andrew Bird show that we were both at solo and we struck up a conversation. We were talking about other artists we liked and The Mountain Goats came up. She said she was going to see them when they came through town soon, and asked if I wanted to go, so I gave her money to buy me a ticket, so I would have the excuse to hang out with her again.

It was a fantastic show. I was hooked.

*

Nothing about The Mountain Goats would work, would inspire me to want to drive up and down mountains and across plains and a handful of unimproved roads (don’t tell my car rental company), if not for the complete earnesty of the entire band. You can’t sing the songs they sing without complete commitment, or else the songs could come off as schlocky at best, insincere at worse.

But the band commits, and they deliver songs about drug addiction and childhood abuse and people on the brink of destruction with the same sincerity as they deliver songs about possums, or Ozzy Osbourne, or the sounds farm animals make.

And that’s what tipped them over from a band I would catch in town when schedules aligned, to a band that I would move heaven and earth to see when they’re near.

Frontman John Darnielle is a masterful songwriter and storyteller, and his works are all so vivid. I would read a whole novel about the characters or situations from any of his songs, any of his albums. The dysfunctional couple behind the songs on Tallahassee? Please! Just give it to me.

That sense of honesty in his songwriting and in his delivery, that’s what keeps me coming back. That feeling of — hey, this is weird or silly or sad or tough, but we’re in this together.

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One of the most remarkable things about a Mountain Goats show is the group of people you meet waiting around for it.

I’m almost always a solo concert go-er, so standing alone in a line waiting for doors to open is nothing new to me. I love people-watching and, well, eavesdropping, even if it does just kill me to not interject myself into other conversations. I’m more than content to keep to myself — but at each show I went to on my five-night stint “with” the band, I found myself striking up conversation with the people around in me in line or by the stage.

And you meet all sorts of people there. From the under-21 kids in front of me in Billings, to the woman closer to my mom’s age in Jackson, and every age and background in between and beyond. People who were grizzled Goats veterans like myself, people who I’d met before at shows back home in Chicago, people who were experiencing the Mountain Goats for the very first time. I saw fans making sure others in the crowd were comfortable, were positioned well (thanks to the person in Jackson who offered me the empty spot at center stage!), didn’t lose their spots if they had to leave for a moment. A woman in Missoula gave her extra ticket to a complete stranger for free.

People shared travel tips, restaurant recommendations, ideas of things to see and do in my travels. No one, not a single person, thought my road trip was weird or strange or pointless. Everyone got it.

For as much as I’m a loner at these sorts of things, it felt like I’d stepped into a new family gathering each night, welcomed with open arms. Not once did I ever find myself worrying — about safety, about getting home at the end of the night, about any of the other number of things an average woman finds herself worrying about when out, in public, alone, in the year 2019.

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The Mountain Goats always attract a certain kind of crowd. In Missoula, a group of young people passing by the line realized they were in the right place solely because of the — let’s call them visual identifiers. (“I knew we were in the right place,” one of them said. “Look at all those jean jackets.”)

I’d wondered, going on this trip through the sparsely populated west, away from my urban bubble, what I was going to find. I’m no stranger to long road trips. I’m familiar with the feeling of having all eyes on me as I pull into a gas station in rural wherever, the only woman around, a stranger in a car with plates from far away. My jeans and my boots and my ballcap and my plaid shirt usually insulate me from the looks for too long. I might not live that life anymore, but I came from there, and I know how to pass.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, and yet — each stop. Each city. All of the disaffected youth and quirky adults and misfits, the teens who like to wear three piece suits and slick their hair back, the kids with rad tattoos and hair colors not found in nature, all of the plaid and the Doc Martens and the ripped jeans and the jackets covered in patches and pins. Salt Lake City, Jackson, Billings, Missoula, Spokane.

If everything else about this trip wasn’t destined to bring me to tears, then this would have. Seeing all the weird kids, the queer kids, the people not sure where they fit in in this bullshit world, they all came out.

They’re all out there. Existing. Living. Making their homes in places people try to tell you aren’t worth saving: there are people there and they are alive and vibrant and full of hope and they are going to change the world.

*

On the last day of what I came to think of as “my leg” of the tour, I threw caution to the wind and tweeted a song request at John Darnielle. I’m always wary of inserting myself into the narrative of an event like that, but I figured after 1,100+ miles on the road in the band’s footsteps, that just this once, I could step outside my box and make an ask.

Anyway, I asked very nicely and they played “See America Right”, one of my favorite songs, partially about a drive gone awry, mostly about more doomed people trying and mostly failing to put their lives together. I’ve never been happier, I don’t think.

(This is from a show last year. None of the versions on Youtube right now adequately capture the Chaotic Peter Hughes energy for the scream at the end of the verses, so you’ll just have to trust me.)

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John Darnielle frequently introduces “No Children”, a song about a doomed couple wishing death and destruction on each other, by sharing anecdotes about people who have asked him to play this song at their wedding. “I will not play this song at your wedding,” he says, “but I will play it at your divorce.”

Days after my divorce was finalized in 2012, I played “No Children” on my radio show.

Close enough.

I play the band with some degree of frequency on my show, but I promised myself that was the only time I’d play it. It felt right then. Still does, now.

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Peter Hughes, Metro Music Club, Salt Lake City, UT

John Darnielle, The Pub Station, Billings, MT

John Darnielle and Matt Douglas, Top Hat, Missoula, MT

Full band, Bing Crosby Theatre, Spokane, WA

*

That spot on the highway where I started getting a little weepy — right before it, I was thinking about a handful of events from the trip, and also thinking about the couple of times I’ve met John Darnielle after shows in Chicago.

I thanked him, once, for being a powerful, outspoken ally for women, for social justice, for reproductive rights, for making the world a better place. He said he didn’t deserve any thanks, that he was just doing what any good person should do. But at the time — that was maybe back in 2011? 2012? — I didn’t hear many men saying these things, I didn’t hear many men lifting up the voices of the women and the queers and the people of color who are out there doing the hard work. I didn’t exactly see many good allies, and I don’t know that I realized previously how very much I needed to hear someone with more power and a louder voice than me say: you are a person.

A few years later, I was at a show — or maybe a reading/signing for one of Darnielle’s novels? I know he doesn’t love taking photos, and I didn’t feel the need to word vomit a bunch of feelings onto him this time, so I moved swiftly through the autograph line, just saying hi, getting something signed. And as I turned to go, he reached out, gently rested his hand on my coat sleeve, and told me he loved my glasses. (At the time they were a pretty bold blue, right when chunkier plastic frames were starting to be “in” again.)

And like — that’s so simple, right? A little silly, maybe. So simple and easy and innocuous, and yet all these years later, I still remember it, this one moment of human connection, this one moment being seen in a very real, physical, tangible way, rather than just another faceless person in a crowd, by someone who I respect and admire and would love to sit down over drinks or pie or the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook to have a talk about life.

Years after the fact and that still means something to me.

*

And, see, the thing about Mountain Goats shows is the powerful feeling of being seen.

It’s the crowd of people who in that moment are just like you — people looking for reason, for a purpose, for someone to accept them and see them and love them exactly as they are. It’s the expression on Darnielle’s face as his eyes scan the crowd, the look of a man who came through some of the worst of what life could offer up to you and used that fear and trauma to create art.

He looks out at the crowd, he looks at his bandmates, and he smiles, and it is glorious.

It is in raising your voice up with fifty or two hundred or a thousand others, who have maybe been exactly where you are in life or maybe they’re careening straight towards it, and they’re wondering, just like you were or are now or will be tomorrow, whether or not this is all worth it, and you’re all singing —

— and you needed to hear it, this screaming choir, you needed to have this catharsis, and every night, you sing it and you mean it. You mean every last damn word of it.

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