Album of the Week | The Mountain Goats: Jenny from Thebes

Seven people, two houses, a motorcycle and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys. It’s the stuff of legends. The Mountain Goats’ 2002 album All Hail West Texas drew up these legends in a 14-song collection of their most enduring tracks—and Jenny from Thebes, that record’s sequel, returns to this home—both to double down on the myths and to bear witness to their fracturing. The people are leaving. The house is facing eviction. The motorcycle is destined, maybe, for a wreck yard. But it’s back. And it still looms just as large in the imaginations of these characters as in those of the Mountain Goats’ fans—and, as John Darnielle’s work so often proves, the imagination can be a terrifyingly powerful thing.

All Hail West Texas was an album marked for its small scale of production—recorded exclusively on Darnielle’s Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox—and the last album for almost 20 years to feature Darnielle alone. On Jenny from Thebes, he chooses to complement this low production by flipping it into something grander, rather than recreating it. The new album is a rock opera, punctuated by fanfare horns and galloping drums, where the soliloquy spaces opened around an electric guitar carry just as much weight as the private moments afforded to trombones and string arrangements.

The sounds are different, but fans loyal to All Hail West Texas will recognize plenty here: the house, not least of all, and Jenny’s custom yellow and black Kawasaki motorcycle. We first met Jenny in All Hail West Texas, but she’s shown up in other Mountain Goats songs, too, always carrying a narrative weight that the listener can’t quite pinpoint. Darnielle described her as “a presence known only by her absence,” and Jenny from Thebes constructs the context for that absence. Jenny keeps a safe house in West Texas, a southwestern ranch style house where anyone and everyone who needs it can have a place to crash. They take care of each other until they’re a little bit more alive again—until there’s color in their cheeks.

We get to know Jenny in detail here, and her relationship to one of her final guests and the character of her house—its occupants always shifting but its hospitality always steadfast. “Absence after absence / Keep the place secure,” Darnielle sings in “Clean Slate.” Darnielle has referenced how his hesitation can grow as he brings in more new musicians for a project—but while Jenny from Thebes feels big compared to the Mountain Goats’ stripped-down albums, there’s restraint on these songs, and the rock-opera approach never feels garish. The string section on “Jenny III” adds a thoughtful coda to a confessional moment between Jenny and her sometime companion. Prickly horns, confidential vocals and soft, anxious guitar refrains create an undercurrent of dread in “Ground Level,” a song sketching the exhaustion and the lingering recovery of Jenny’s guests at her safe house—eyes on all the exits, three hours of sleep a night.

One of the most energetic high points of the album is “Murder at the 18th St. Garage,” which enters the album with a breakneck-pace—literally!—deliverance of drums, and proceeds with a joyfulness that seems to encourage Jenny to feel sure in her actions. The town is threatening to evict her. On this track, the record’s halfway point, she murders the mayor. There are echoes—maybe especially in this scene—of Darnielle’s novel from last year, Devil House, a sweeping puzzle of a book which uses the character of a true crime writer to investigate true crime itself as a genre. The book asks—from many angles, and on many levels—what the responsibility is of the writer who chooses to focus on violence.

Devil House is a perfect example of why Darnielle is a writer so many trust to articulate violence; it also, like this album, tells the story of a sanctuary being defended. The title Jenny from Thebes references the play Seven Against Thebes, in which seven champions lead an Argive army in an attack on Thebes. The seventh and final attacker, Polynices, is the brother of the current king, Eteocles, and seeks to claim his own place as king of the city. The album art shows Polynices’ shield—the “seventh shield” Jenny gets tattooed on her arm—which features a woman, Justice, leading a man, with the inscription, “I will bring this man back and he will have his city and move freely in his father’s halls.” The play is a tragedy. Neither man emerges king; instead, Polynices and Eteocles kill each other in combat.

In the play, it’s Thebes; in Devil House, it’s the house of the murders, where once some teens took refuge; in Jenny from Thebes, it’s Jenny’s house. In all of these, there’s the sense that being able to consider a place home, and to be safe and free and empowered in that home, is crucial to humanity, and something worth fighting for. The welcome Jenny gives her guests is indiscriminate and unconditional. A clean slate is something we give each other through our decisions to provide care for one another. Sanctuary is something we have to offer each other, even when, of course, it might end this way.

After the murder—although sequencing can work in blurry ways in Mountain Goats albums—we get some blisteringly concrete moments of immediate fallout, and some visions of the future. The album credits describe the even-keeled “From the Nebraska Plant” as “the future, seen from a hard place,” a patient and downtempo track, matter-of-fact in its intimacy. This description lends the scene a context that feels psychic and lyrical. “Jenny III,” with its at times mournful guidance of a string section throughout, is “the future, seen with great clarity,” and the contemplative “Great Pirates”—a daydream of some kind, and one of the songs where the instrumentation most takes center stage—is “the future they both deserve.” The harmonies from standout “Fresh Tattoo,” which features a beautiful duet with Matt Nathanson, find a kind of echo in “Going to Dallas,” which sees Jenny trying to carve out some kind of concrete plan for what comes next.

These characters are aware of the clocks ticking— “The timer / Ticking in my chest” on “Cleaning Crew”—the sense that, with all these things, it might be the last time Jenny does them. But they insist upon the reality of their experiences. Jenny from Thebes knows that if you push your imagination hard enough, your imaginings can become your lived convictions. And if you act enough on your convictions, you yourself might be expelled into imagination.

One of this record’s biggest achievements might be building out the character of Jenny while managing to not sacrifice her central mystery. If every endpoint is fixed forever on the day its arc began, Jenny was always like this: a figure who commands the imagination, and whom we can still dream and wonder about, years and miles later. Jenny from Thebes is a fitting new record from the Mountain Goats—a band whose music, for so many, has been a house not unlike Jenny’s: a stronghold where anyone is welcome, and in fact not only welcome, but also worthy of being defended. This album reasserts that intention: in 20 years, it hasn’t gone anywhere, and it still won’t, not even in that murky future. “Usually it fades in the sun,” Darnielle sings on “Fresh Tattoo,” “but not this one.”

Laura Dzubay is a writer from Indiana. She has written about music for Consequence, The Michigan Daily and Electric Literature, and you can find her on Instagram @lauradzubay.