On Seeing The Mountain Goats Play Their No Children Encore Twice, Seven Years Apart

The first time I heard the No Children encore was in 2017. They rarely played Columbus, so when I found out tickets were going on sale I was there the minute the box office opened. I didn’t want an email with a QR code; I wanted a paper guarantee I could hold in my hand. I ended up standing in line for nearly an hour, shivering in my little Modcloth foxes-in-glasses peplum blouse and chugging a coffee to stay awake.  I purchased a single ticket, which I held safe on my dresser in a bowl with my gay pins and loose change. It became an altar to the one reliably good thing that might happen to me in 2017. A thing to look forward to, a thing to hold on to. 

I was seeking things to hold onto because my life was dripping through my fingers. I had learned several things about myself in the turmoil of 2017, acrid things that were melting the world I knew away. I was deeply unhappy as a wife and I also suspected I might not be a woman at all, two things that made being married to a straight man feel increasingly untenable. I also had the kind of respectable drinking problem that lets you keep a shitty job but eats away at everything else until you realize it’s too late. 

I was angry at myself for seeing these things, for being unable to let them go and feign happiness as usual. The work I was doing in trauma therapy made the seams in my rickety illusions too easy to pluck at. It’s easy to ignore your gender and sexuality when you are dissociated and continuously shithoused; healing brings clarity, even when it’s unwelcome.

I already suspected that our separation was inevitable. That’s why I wanted to go to the show on my own, without him. My life was about to fracture in a way that felt impossible to survive, and so I wanted to listen to my favorite band by myself and cry.

It’s difficult to explain how important a favorite band is to someone who came From Circumstances. The best I can do is to compare it to the kind of religious faith people find in the lion’s den. The more thoroughly your Circumstances wreck your life, the harder it is to find comfort in the usual sources of stability other people rely on. Home is a trauma flashback trigger, family are usually as broken and cruel as the circumstances that surround you, and middle-class comforts feel like Chicken Soup for the Idiot Soul. 

In the absence of cliched sources of succor, a favorite band is a touchstone. It's a source of familiar joy one can access with headphones and the click of a button, a fountain of empathy and emotion one can drink from whenever they need. It's even better if there's lore, a complicated back catalog, a hedge maze of Fandom to lose yourself in when you're trying not to think about anything else. A good weird band can provide the continuity a shattered life lacks. 

I found the band that would fill the god-shaped hole in my heart via a hissy skipping burnt CD of The Coroner’s Gambit I stole from somebody’s car; I can’t even remember who it was, but they said I should take it because I seemed like the kind of sad bastard who should listen to The Mountain Goats, and it just sounded correct. 

Much like Jesus Christ himself, The Mountain Goats have never been able to reward my faith with concrete assistance or demonstrated awareness that I exist. Nonetheless, they’ve consistently given me something to love and look forward to in difficult times. I've listened to Baboon after every fight I've ever had with my family, including the final blow-out that we’ve never really discussed; for years I listened to Up The Wolves on the anniversary of my mother’s death, smoking a Black and Mild and staring out over the reservoir at the end of town.

Eventually I even got a fucking Mountain Goats tattoo, the ultimate fan cliche. It’s a lyric from Song for Sasha Banks, and I got it as a promise to myself not to allow myself to die before I find my spot. If nothing else, the Mountain Goats have done more to keep me on this side of the ground than any prophet or priest. How many times did I fall asleep in 2017 counting their lyrics to myself like rosary beads, desperate to drown out the voice in my head that yearned for heavy rocks and the bottom of that end-of-town reservoir? Just stay alive, just stay alive.

That was how I found myself pressed up against a speaker in the Newport Music Hall, a place that felt more comfortable to me than anywhere else in my lousy hometown; how many times had I drunkenly studied the text of the show flyers pasted to the walls to see if anyone cool had passed through, or clambered up the marble stairs for a piss in the precariously placed bathrooms? 

We all knew what the encore was going to be; several people had shouted the title at various points during the show, only to be gently chided by JD. “Do you think that Jimmy Buffet plays Margaritaville first thing at his concerts? You need to wait.”

It remains funny to me that No Children is the Mountain Goats fan’s version of Margaritaville. Margaritaville is a song about having too much fun drinking margaritas, and it is primarily enjoyed by people on vacation. No Children is a song about an apocalyptic life-destroying breakup, and it is not really enjoyed as much as felt on a visceral level. It's about a person trapped in a toxic codependent cocoon of their own creation and an honest reckoning of every delusion that needs to be destroyed in order to allow them to emerge.

JD kicked it off with a quick piano trill and a final admonition: “If you’ve been waiting all night to sing along with this one, I’m sorry and I hope things get better for you.”

I had indeed been waiting for it, though I was unsure if things would get better. In November of 2017, all I could see was the work ahead of me. 2018 was the year I learned to live on my own, surviving off of microwave burritos and nesting with Ikea clearance items till I figured out how to actually make a home for myself.  2018 was the year of my first attempts at not drinking, a huge milestone even though sobriety was still a long way off. 2018 gave me my first real bylines and writing opportunities, even though it would again be years until those early efforts added up into a career that could actually get me somewhere. 

2018 was the year I started to emerge from a toxic codependent cocoon of my own, one I had mistaken for a life. Breaking it open took more from me than I could have imagined, but I smashed it all to bits with my own two hands, and I shined the scraps of what remained into something I could actually live with and love. It felt impossible, it still does even now, but I did it. 

Sometimes it feels like it all happened to someone else. Maybe it did. I doubt that the woman I was in 2017 would understand how I ended up happy as a fat stoner dude in Chicago who writes a goopy fuck blog for fun. She’d be horrified by my beard, that I walked away from trad publishing entirely, and what do you mean we don’t talk to [REDACTED] anymore?! 

It’s best for me to watch her dance from the safe reserve of the future, to let her ache and bellow into the ears of the nonplussed bearded gentlemen who attempted to shove her out of the extremely somber pit, to let her feel the crunch of beer cups under her boots as she wails about never getting sober. The good times are coming, but they’re a long way away, and she’ll need this catharsis until she gets there.

Besides, if she is to be rewarded for following her faith, faith needs to be demonstrated. It is gauche to expect a god to explain his works to you directly. If I could give her any sign, I would give her a miraculous Road to Damascus vision of the second time we heard the No Children encore:

It is 2024, seven years later in a civilized college venue in Evanston, no big amps to crawl over or slick pools of grime and slopped beer to slip in. I don’t go to a lot of shows post-pandemic, but it’s the Mountain Goats, so I am doing my best. I don’t know what to do without a beer in my hand at a show, even though there hasn’t been any kind of alcohol within my grasp for years. Testosterone makes my voice a squeaking crack when I try to sing along, so I stay silent. I wring my girlfriend’s fingers like a rag, breathe deeply, try to stay in my body.  Finally, the lights go down and up one last time. 

JD teases the number by saying it can be a happy song or a sad one, depending on whether or not you're on the other side of the tragedy he is singing about. As the melody plinks to life under his fingers, I am indeed struck by a strange and giddy happiness. 

It felt like the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where our blood soaked final girl hurls herself in the back of a pickup, gibbering with relief as she watches Leatherface shrink behind her. There’s healing to be done, years of hard work and therapy and scar tissue to heal. But at that moment, she only feels the joy of escaping her own annihilation.

In that instant, I realize that I actually am on the opposite side of the terrible thing JD is singing about. I made it out. I survived every moment and outran every monster. I’m not that final girl anymore.  I’m a gay dude, a writer from Chicago. Nothing ties me to my fractious past except what I choose to keep. 

And that's when I let myself sing, quiet enough that I can't quite hear it but loud enough that I can at least feel a new rumble in my throat. It feels brave, and satisfying.

No Children is a song about a couple, but a dyad can take many forms. In this particular moment in time, the song felt like a duet between the woman I was and the man I have become. 2017 Me didn’t know what she was getting into, and I am in no position to tell her. But maybe I could give her the feeling of release I experienced when I heard No Children again. She would not understand everything she saw, but prophecies are rarely narratively satisfying. I would let my 2017 self soak in that terrified giddy relief, and I would whisper in her ear as she shook with revelation:

Every time you cut face shaving, the blood feels like a sacrament to the thing you have become and the sight fills you with joy; every fence we ever mended collapsed the minute we stopped killing ourselves to hold them up, and thank God for it; you held on past the last exit and then you sold your car just so you may never see that town again (hallelujah!); i know you're so scared of getting sober but we’ve already made it five years, bitch, you need to get used to it!; and the day i found the strength to walk out you finally did get the hell out of my way, but i would have never had that strength at all if you hadn’t survived everything in the first place. 

We both sing a hymn to a schism. Her, in fear, from one side. Me, in joy, from the other.  What a miracle we can still reach towards each other. What a miracle she is coming out with me, hand in unlovable hand.  

(with gratitude to klara for bringing me along <3)