All Hail West Texas

All Hail West Texas
Released	February 19, 2002
Length	42:02
Personnel	John Darnielle

All Hail West Texas is the Mountain Goats' sixth studio album. It was released in 2002, under the label Emperor Jones. It is the last album on which all songs were recorded on John's boombox until 2020, and the only studio album to not originally be released on vinyl. However, it was reissued in 2013 on vinyl and CD with seven songs that did not originally make the final cut, but the bonus tracks are only available on the CD.

Tracks

1. "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton"
2. "Fall of the Star High School Running Back"
3. "Color in Your Cheeks"
4. "Jenny"
5. "Fault Lines"
6. "Balance"
7. "Pink and Blue"
8. "Riches and Wonders"
9. "The Mess Inside"
10. "Jeff Davis County Blues"
11. "Distant Stations"
12. "Blues in Dallas"
13. "Source Decay"
14. "Absolute Lithops Effect"

Liner notes

Transcription from "The Annotated Mountain Goats: All Hail West Texas"

(front):

fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.

(booklet):

I AM NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANY MORE. I AM GOING TO TAKE THIS A LITTLE WHILE LONGER. I'LL TAKE AS MUCH OF THIS AS I CAN POSSIBLY BEAR. OUR HOUSE IS A LOVELY SOUTHWESTERN RANCH. OUR HOUSE WOULD BE A LOVELY SOUTHWESTERN RANCH IF IT HAD A ROOF. WE HAVE NO HOUSE. YOU ARE LOVELY BEYOND COMPARE. YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU USED TO BE. YOU HAVE REALLY LET YOURSELF GO, LET YOURSELF GO, LET YOURSELF GO. IT'S EASY TO GET OUT IF YOU JUST BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. YOU CAN GET OUT IF YOU'RE COMMITTED TO THE EFFORT. THERE ARE NO WINDOWS OR DOORS AND THE WALLS ARE ON FIRE. I LOVE YOU. I LOVED YOU. YOU CAN'T MAKE ME LEAVE. DRIVE OUT TO THE AIRPORT. TAKE THE TRAIN DOWN HERE IF YOU GET A CHANCE. STAY WHEREVER THE HELL YOU ARE. STAY WHEREVER THE HELL YOU ARE. TAKE THE TRAIN DOWN HERE IF YOU GET A CHANCE. DRIVE OUT TO THE AIRPORT. YOU CAN'T MAKE ME LEAVE. I LOVED YOU. I LOVE YOU. THERE ARE NO WINDOWS OR DOORS AND THE WALLS ARE ON FIRE. YOU CAN GET OUT IF YOU'RE COMMITTED TO THE EFFORT. IT'S EASY TO GET OUT IF YOU JUST BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. YOU HAVE REALLY LET YOURSELF GO. YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU USED TO BE. YOU ARE LOVELY BEYOND COMPARE, BEYOND COMPARE, BEYOND COMPARE. WE HAVE NO HOUSE. OUR HOUSE WOULD BE A LOVELY SOUTHWESTERN RANCH IF IT HAD A ROOF. OUR HOUSE IS A LOVELY SOUTHWESTERN RANCH. I AM GOING TO TAKE THIS A LITTLE WHILE LONGER. I'LL TAKE AS MUCH OF THIS AS I CAN POSSIBLY BEAR. I AM NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANY MORE.

"All Hail West Texas" was recorded in central Iowa using the trusty Panasonic RX-FT500 and the occasional Marantz PMD 222. While there is seldom much to say about the deliberately primitive nature of the recordings we make, the strange case of the Panasonic RX-FT500 is worth considering for a moment or two. Bought at a Circuit City in Montclair, California in 1989 or thereabouts, its functioning used to suggest a combination of two technologies, one brutishly sophisticated and the other magnificently cheap. Its built-in condenser microphone didn't condense (that is, it didn't react to changes in volume by automatically contracting its diaphragm) unless the levels with which it found itself confronted were truly overwhelming, which never happened; meanwhile, oblivious to this tic of mass production, the machine's designers hasn't thought to situate the actual moving parts (that is, the gears) as far as cosmetically possible from this unusually sensitive microphone. The results were uncannily accurate representations of sound complemented and complicated by some pretty ferocious wheel-grind. Sometime around 1998, the Panasonic appeared to have breathed its last. When you'd punch "Record," a large triangular piece of plastic just to the left of the spindles would begin jutting in and out of the view frame, bringing with it a clicking noise whose arrhythmic clatter could in no way be incorporated into any songs one might be trying to record on such a low-tech piece of equipment. In the summer of 2000 having written a few new songs that took place in Texas and being frustrated with the uniform sound of the Marantz, we hauled the Panasonic out of its corner and gave it a shot, just in case it might have repaired itself during the long time it had spent standing all alone near the window.

The results are what you have with you now: the sound of a long-broken machine deciding, on its own and without the interference of repairmen or excessive prayer vigils, to function again. It is a painfully raw sound that can legitimately be thought of as a second performer on these otherwise unaccompanied recordings. Its inexplicable self-originating will to go on echoes some of the boneheaded ideas that motivate the people who populate these little songs. Some of us, when we're really sleepy or facing an unacceptable loss, imagine the hand of a person behind all this: an ornery little fellow who will have no sound without a second sound to obscure and pollute it, who is deeply mistrusting of singers in general, and who believes that whatever "signal-to-noise ratio" might mean, it can't be any good unless more value is placed on the latter of the two hyphenated terms. Of course the original signal is never actually anywhere near any recordings anywhere, but you all already knew that. You have been sure of it for quite some time now. You see the proof everywhere. It is the reason you started reading these lines in the first place.

Our love of west Texas and its rich musical heritage in no way mitigates the universally held maxim that you shouldn't have a hockey team in a place where no one will ever under any circumstances be able to play hockey outdoors... Special thanks to young men and women in bedrooms with electric guitars and Morbid Angel T-shirts around the country. The future is yours.

(back):

It came to him very clearly: If I ever set foot in that place I am done for.

— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, chapter 38

(CD label):

every knee shall bow and every tongue confess:

West Texas! West Texas! West Texas!

Comments by John Darnielle About this Album

• "(Joseph Fink:) Speaking of the motorcycle, so, on the cover of the album, you have the line, fourteen songs --

(John Darnielle:) Here it comes.

(JF:)--about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.

(JD:) Yes.

(JF:) Is that the complete cast of the album? Because if you start doing the math of, like, okay if there's fourteen songs and seven people, then there's definitely some repeat songs about the same people.

(JD:) I mean, yes, it's true insofar as the characters of Fault Lines feel like the characters in Tallahassee, right. And that's because these characters are not characters in books, they're characters in songs, so to some extent, they're more types than full people. They don't have names, I don't give them names except for Jenny. You probably think some of them are called John.

(JF:) And William Staniforth Donahue.

(JD:) Sure. There's -- Jeff and Cyrus. Okay, so there's four names [laughs]. But, you know what I mean, for the most part, the narrator never has a name, you assume he's John, but he's not, and I sort of observed this, that when you have a narrator who the same things always seem to be happening to him, then he's the same guy, even if he's not, right. And so it was just sort of a very quick summing up of how it seems like there's about, there's about seven. But I enjoyed, fans want to pin down exactly who they are and where they are, and that's kind of a fun game to play, you know, but I gotta be real with you, I could have easily said nine. But seven sounds better." -- I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, episode 4

• "All Hail West Texas was not a giant success at the time. It did get a good review from Pitchfork but Pitchfork wasn’t that big a deal at the time, right, it was a very small thing run out of a guy’s bedroom in Minneapolis. But for the most part, it disappeared without a trace. Like, we sent out these promos. Craig, who ran Emperor Jones, got these maps of west Texas from an old, like from an antique store or something like that, and he said, “I was gonna send you the book but I thought, what if we tore out the pages and then wrapped the promos in the maps and you know, it’d be, its only like fifty pages.” And I was like, “This sounds great!” So like fifty people got them, right. Nobody, these were critics who got them. So most everybody threw them away or sold them to thrift stores, I think only one has ever been seen in the wild." -- 2022-02-02 - TrueAnon Presents: Keep the Dream Alive podcast

Trivia

• Two outtakes from this album ("Song for God" and "Warm Lonely Planet") are available for free download at themountaingoats.net. They were not included among the re-release's bonus tracks.

All Hail West Texas

Track list: "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" • "Fall of the Star High School Running Back" • "Color in Your Cheeks" • "Jenny" • "Fault Lines" • "Balance" • "Pink and Blue" • "Riches and Wonders" • "The Mess Inside" • "Jeff Davis County Blues" • "Distant Stations" • "Blues in Dallas" • "Source Decay" • "Absolute Lithops Effect" Reissue bonus tracks: "Hardpan Song" • "Answering the Phone" • "Indonesia" • "Midland" • "Jenny" (alt. take) • "Tape Travel Is Lonely" • "Waco"