January 5 - Going To Alaska

I remember a quiet joy when I was first learning to play the guitar, of working out things that I considered to be "cheats". I was never a good guitarist, but one reason guitar is such a popular instrument is that the level of good you have to be before it sounds at least okay is really low. The first instrument I ever played was a violin. You have to be pretty good at playing the violin to sound okay at playing the violin. If you're okay at playing the violin you sound bad, and if you're bad, you sound like pure dogshit.

Anyway, one of the "cheats" I worked out early in playing the guitar was that as long as all you wanted to play was a majot chord you could just tune your guitar to play an open G or an open E, and then bar your finger on whatever fret you wanted and it would sound... not good, but also not dogshit. Add a slide to this and it sounded like you were doing something purposeful and cool, not just cheating.

And if you know what you're doing with a slide and the particular interesting things it does to how the guitar sounds, you end up with Going To Alaska. Of the early Mountain Goats songs I've experienced so far, this one has the largest hints of modernity. It's one of John's poems turned directly into a sing, but the cadence of poetry lends itself to how John expresses complicated thoughts, and thus it reminds me in its tone and effect of later songs like You Were Cool.

What I get from this is motion, someone noticing their journey as he heads through nature towards difference, and is taking in everything everything here because he won't be here again for some time. This is an old place filled with memories that resound and fill every space in your head and leave no room for thoughts. The songwriter is a young man who craves emptiness, even deadly emptiness, so he can work out who he is. I'm glad he did.

I've included two versions of this song: the initial hasty recording and a recent live one, in which John is no longer using the slide bottle "cheat". I will make no comment about which is better as that's an odd concept to invoke.