The Mountain Goats Release New Album 'JENNY FROM THEBES'

The Mountain Goats have released their 22nd full-length album Jenny from Thebes, a widescreen musical in scope, a melodrama of richly detailed characters and sweeping emotions as evidenced by the album's singles “Clean Slate,” “Fresh Tattoo,” and “Murder at the 18th St. Garage.”

A sequel to their beloved 2002 album All Hail West Texas, Jenny from Thebes is a lush collection of showtunes, pushing John Darnielle as a vocalist and the Mountain Goats as a band, broadening their sonic palette once again by leaning into influences like Godspell, Jim Steinman, and The Cars.

The album, named one of the most anticipated releases of the fall by The New York Times, Pitchfork, and The A.V. Club, was produced by Grammy-winning producer/engineer Trina Shoemaker and features guitar by Alicia Bognanno (Bully), horn and string arrangements by Matt Douglas, and backing vocals from Kathy Valentine of The Go-Go's and Matt Nathanson.

“Today we release Jenny from Thebes, recorded in Tulsa earlier this year with legendary producer Trina Shoemaker at the helm,” says John Darnielle. “This is the first album since Tallahassee to consist entirely of songs about a character or characters from previous songs. That character is Jenny, a woman who rides a motorcycle, was beloved of an unnamed narrator who thought of their life together as resembling that of the pirate—free, criminal, reckless, and joyful—and who, when we first meet her, is about to disappear. In these songs she hasn't yet escaped. As with every living human being, there are as many versions of Jenny's story as there are possible futures; this one's a little sad and a little sweet and a lot violent. The songs I wrote for the album that we didn't end up using were perhaps less sad and more chaotic, but still just as violent: what can I say? Some stories merit a little violence. This one's about somebody who gets an eviction notice she didn't deserve. Who is to blame when the cleaning crew comes through,I want to ask: the one who made the mess or the one who insisted somebody needed to clean it up? We are so proud of this record. Enjoy!”

The Mountain Goats are currently on tour in support of Jenny from Thebes. All dates below.

 

TOUR DATES:

10/27 - Lubbock, TX @ Cactus Theater 

10/28 - Dallas, TX @ Longhorn Ballroom 

10/29 - Houston, TX @ Heights Theater

11/24 - Raleigh, NC @ The Rialto *

11/25 - Raleigh, NC @ The Rialto *

12/1 - Greensboro, NC @ Hangar 1819

12/2 - Wilmington, DE @ The Queen

12/3 - Portland, ME @ Aura

12/5 - Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground

12/6 - Hartford, CT @ Infinity Hall

12/7 - Buffalo, NY @ Town Ballroom

12/8 - Homer, NY @ Center for the Arts of Homer

12/10 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Thunderbird Music Hall

12/12 - Athens, GA @ Georgia Theatre

12/13 - Pensacola, FL @ Vinyl Music Hall

12/14 - St. Petersburg, FL @ The Floridian

12/15 - Jacksonville, FL @ Intuition Ale Works

1/18 - Charlotte, NC @ Neighborhood Theatre ^

1/19 - Birmingham, AL @ Saturn ^

1/20 - Baton Rouge, LA @ Chelsea's ^

1/21 - Little Rock, AR @ Revolution! Music Room ^

1/23 - Columbia, MO @ The Blue Note ^

1/24 - Oklahoma City, OK @ Tower Theatre ^

1/26 - El Paso, TX @ Lowbrow Palace ^

1/27 - Roswell, NM @ The Liberty ^

1/28 - Albuquerque, NM @ El Rey ^

1/30 - Las Vegas, NV @ 24 Oxford ^

1/31 - Tucson, AZ @ Rialto Theatre ^

2/1 - Flagstaff, AZ @ Orpheum Theater ^

 

* John Darnielle solo show

^ John Darnielle/Matt Douglas duo show
 

ABOUT JENNY FROM THEBES:

Jenny from Thebes began its life as many albums by the Mountain Goats do, with John Darnielle playing the piano until a lyric emerged. That lyric, “Jenny was a warrior / Jenny was a thief / Jenny hit the corner clinic begging for relief,” became “Jenny III,” a song which laid down a challenge he'd never taken up before: writing a sequel to one of his most beloved albums.

The Mountain Goats' catalog is thick with recurring characters—Jenny, who originally appears in the All Hail West Texas track bearing her name, as well as in “Straight Six” from Jam Eater Blues and Transcendental Youth side two jam “Night Light,” is one of these, someone who enters a song unexpectedly, pricking up the ears of fans who are keen on continuing the various narrative threads running through the Mountain Goats' discography before vanishing into the mist. In these songs, Jenny is largely defined by her absence, and she is given that definition by other characters. She is running from something. These features are beguiling, both to the characters who've told her story so far and to the listener. They invite certain questions: Who is Jenny, really? What is she running from? Well, she's a warrior and a thief, and, this being an album by the Mountain Goats, it's a safe bet whatever she's fleeing is something bad. Something catastrophically bad.

Jenny from Thebes is the story of Jenny, her southwestern ranch style house, the people for whom that house is a place of safety, and the west Texas town that is uncomfortable with its existence. It is a story about the individual and society, about safety and shelter and those who choose to provide care when nobody else will.

This is what a follow-up to All Hail West Texas entails. But if you think about the Mountain Goats as they were in 2001, when Darnielle wrote and recorded that album on his own, mostly into his Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox, and how they are now as the recording and touring outfit of Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster, you may find yourself asking how. That occurred to Darnielle, too.

“If we're going to do a sequel to a record that was recorded almost entirely on a boombox,” he asks, “why not do the opposite and make it as big as possible?”

The west Texas the Mountain Goats conjure for Jenny is huge and already crumbling to the ground when we meet her in lead single “Clean Slate,” where a new arrival to the safehouse finds it nearly full, his host beyond exhaustion. Her burdens are heavy, and the measures they cause her to take have consequences that scale well beyond anything she could have anticipated when she decided to open her home to others. Such gestures are noble and doomed.

“You can't be the person everyone relies on to take care of them and keep them safe for too long,” Darnielle says of the reality of these spaces. “It eventually causes so much stress that it threatens to break you.”

Ironically, that same stress makes it impossible for Jenny to see that she's on the verge of being broken until it's too late. Explaining the title of the album, Darnielle notes that Jenny is not unlike a character from Greek literature, someone on the verge of an unimaginable tragedy whose signs and portents will not make themselves known to her until she finds herself amidst the wreckage. “These things never happen in isolation,” he says. “One bad event leads to and is the reason for another bad event. Jenny should know that you can't keep a safehouse in a west Texas town, but she's too wrapped up in the process and has to go through the loss to understand how it happened.”

Whether or not she comes to understand how it happened, the events of Jenny from Thebes set Jenny on the run. A woman and her custom yellow and black Kawasaki held in the memories of a vanishing few, someone who held the gate for as long as she could, as a warrior might, before disappearing into the night like a thief.

Tracklist

1. Clean Slate

2. Ground Level

3. Only One Way

4. Fresh Tattoo

5. Cleaning Crew

6. Murder at the 18th St. Garage

7. From the Nebraska Plant 

8. Same as Cash

9. Water Tower

10. Jenny III

11. Going to Dallas

12. Great Pirates

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