Goats go to heaven?

There's now a tracklist for the new Mountain Goats album, the title of which will be The Life of the World to Come. The song titles are scripture references. According the website, it's songs about “twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of.” As a public service, here's the verses (KJV) to go along with the references:

1. 1 Samuel 15:23 — “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.”
2. Psalms 40:2 — “He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”
3. Genesis 3:23 — “Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”
4. Philippians 3:20-21 — “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”
5. Hebrews 11:40 — “God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.”
6. Genesis 30:3 — “And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.”
7. Romans 10:9 — “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”
8. 1 John 4:16 — “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”
9. Matthew 25:21 — “His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”
10. Deuteronomy 2:10 — “The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims…”
11. Isaiah 45:23 — “I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.”
12. Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace — I'm not going to copy the whole chapter here, but Ezekiel 7 is a judgment scene.

I could hardly be more eager to hear this album. John Darnielle wields scriptural allusions with more dexterity than just about any other songwriter I can think of, and especially more than Christian songwriters. His chorus for “Against Pollution” (“When the last days come, we will see visions more vivid than sunsets and brighter than stars. We will recognize each other, and see ourselves for the first time the way we really are.”) is basically my own heart's eschatological hope. His characters can be desperate believers or proud heretics.

And will he do something with the Anakim on track 10? I've wanted to hear a song about the Anakim ever since I read Frank Peretti's The Tombs of Anak in elementary school…

Maybe, come October, I'll do a post for each song on the album.

Bill Kauffman is on to Charlotte's trickery.

Bill Kauffman recently traveled through my hometown's airport and saw some kind of ad campaign for “Charlotte, USA.” In The American Conservative, he muses on why they left out the “NC”:

“So N.C. is gone, ostensibly because Charlotte is no mere city but is instead a 16-county two-state blob that absorbs all the little communities within devouring distance, chewing them up into one masticated bolus flavorless enough to be swallowed by savvy global investors put off by states with directional adjectives in their names.”

He calls for impromptu citizen repair of these posters; if I were in Charlotte now, I'd be tempted to take him up on it.

But, yes, this is an ongoing problem with Charlotte, whose lurching efforts to become a World Class City provided the backdrop to my childhood. He's kind of got it pegged: Charlotte's explosive growth during my lifetime — at least 275,000 people since 1990, if the census is to be believed, which is approaching a 70 percent increase over a period of 17 years — has a lot to do with people who came for Charlotte, USA, rather than Charlotte, NC. It's Charlotte, USA gets the yuppies and the corporations. It's banks, not basketball or barbecue, though I should admit now that Charlotte wasn't particularly known for its barbecue, and, in my opinion, the Davidson / UNCC rivalry isn't much compared to what we've got going on in the Triangle. Anyway, banks: could it be a coincidence that Charlotte's business leader, Hugh McColl, changed his bank's name from North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) to NationsBank, and later Bank of America?

Much of the city feels soulless to me, although there's a strange comfort in that our efforts to become World Class are paying off in the form of a NASCAR hall of fame right next to the convention center. I suppose that this keeps Charlotte somehow tied to the North Carolina tradition of running moonshine — Wilkes County, Junior Johnson, and all that. (The apparently complicated issues of localism and corporatism in the world of NASCAR I will leave to the side, not being a racing fan myself.) Another bit of history that we try to keep in mind is that James K. Polk was born in Mecklenburg County — but do we really want to celebrate that? I'm going to have to think on how to find history in Charlotte, NC.

Chapel Hill, on the other hand, drips history, as old university towns tend to do. Might I again remind you that UNC was the first public university in the nation to open its doors?

My mind is filled with radio cures.

“There is something wrong with me…”

The way Jeff Tweedy sings that line. How does he do it.

(I have been listening to a whole bunch of Wilco because their new album just came out, and suffice to say it brings back many memories and feelings and little nostalgias and such. It is interesting which songs keep their force, which ones seem to lose it for a time, and which ones gain force, perhaps when a line or harmony or something hits you in a different way, perhaps because you're listening on a different set of headphones or speakers. You know one argument for record players is that the needle physically wears down the vinyl very slowly so that what you hear is something different every time you play it, whereas with CDs if the equipment stays the same then the sound should stay the same too. So maybe switching out headphones or buying a new stereo or putting the CD away for a while until you live in a room with totally different acoustic properties is the best way to carry that through to the digital age, though I bet everybody else figured this out in the 80s or 90s when people listened to a lot of CDs. With mp3s — I doubt it matters because you've compressed so much of the interesting stuff out of the recording already.)