The Mountain Goats

I am NOT The Mountain Goats, nor do I take ANY credit for these songs, they are property of John Darnielle and 4AD Records.

Lyrics:

Tile floor of the bathroom

Scrubbed clean and bright

Checkerboard white and grey

Towels from the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Kingston Jamaica

I can still see the rust colored stains today

The stage is set

Someone's going to do something someone else will regret

I speak in smoke signals and you answer in code

The fuse will have to run out sometime

Something here will eventually have to explode

Have to explode

You and me lying on the tile floor

Trying to keep cool

Restless all night

Sweating out the poison

As the temperature climbs

Staring up up at the hundred-watt light that burns above

Name one thing about us two anyone could love

We roll out the red carpet

When rotten luck comes down the road

Five four three two one

Watch for the flash

Something here will eventually have to explode

Have to explode

Comentarios

9 years ago

Gordon Stearns

Something about this song really evokes Florida for me, in a way most of this album doesn't. I'm not sure what it is, but this somehow captures the oppressive heat really well.

9 years ago

Gj23jk2

Sadder than even No Children, saddest in the entire Alpha series.No Children is the Alphas at their lowest point. Have to Explode is them on their honeymoon, with perfect knowledge that, in the name of (and fruitless search for) "love", they have started a terrible runaway voyage that will end in pain and hate and disaster before too long.Knowing that's where they're going, and yet already unable to alter their paths in life. Tragic.

9 years ago

Gordon Stearns

This song is so quiet! I always have to turn up my volume when it comes on, or I can't hear it.

9 years ago

Arshin Carnifex

From "The Annotated Mountain Goats":"The Alpha Couple are a Catholic man and a woman from Southern California whose relationship survives solely on the love they want to have for each other, the hatred they actually share, and the alcohol they imbibe to quash their feelings. John has indicated that the couple was originally intended to get a divorce, but as he wrote the songs, this didn't wind up happening. After initially honeymooning in Jamaica, thinking everything will improve if they move, they leave California, drink for a year in a motel in Nevada, and settle in Tallahassee, Florida. The specific trajectory of Southern California, then Nevada, and finally Florida was chosen as it depicts them "crawl[ing] along the bottom of the country" until there's nowhere farther to reach, symbolically living off the lowest scraps of the country. The impoverished part of Tallahassee that they ultimately settle in was chosen for the availability of cheap alcohol, cheap land, sense of decay and rot, and because their alcoholism and unemployment would prevent them living anywhere else."

9 years ago

Gordon Stearns

I honestly find this even sadder than No Children. Just the huge anticipation of how badly things are going to go, and how much the narrator wants to avoid it... it's pretty heartbreaking.

11 years ago