Cotton

Cotton
	;
Album	We Shall All Be Healed
Released	2004
Artist	the Mountain Goats
Length	3:25
Previous track	"Quito"
Next Track	"Against Pollution"

Cotton is the 11th song on the album We Shall All Be Healed. It also appears as the 20th song on the 2020 live album The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 1 and 2. It was featured in an episode of the television series Weeds.

Lyrics[]

This song is for the rats
Who hurled themselves into the ocean
When they saw that the explosives in the cargo hold
Were just about to blow

This song is for the soil
That's toxic clear down to the bedrock
Where no thing of consequence can grow
Drop your seeds there
Let them go

Let them all go
Let 'em all go 

This song is for the people
Who tell their families that they're sorry
For things they can't and won't feel sorry for

And once there was a desk
And now it's in a storage locker somewhere
And this song is for the stick pins and the cottons
I left in the top drawer

Let 'em all go
Let 'em all go

I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving
And something has got to give

I saw you waiting by the roadside
You didn't know that I was watching
Now you know
Let it all go 

Let 'em all go
Let it all go

Comments by John Darnielle About this Song[]

"This is a song about, um, a bunch -- well, an infinite number of people, uh, that's the nature of these people, is they have a replacement rate, usually about one to one. Somebody either gets better or vanishes into, uh, the system, or the Earth, and is replaced by somebody who looks exactly like him. It's sort of a, sort of a Body Snatchers kind of situation, but nobody's body actually gets snatched, they just sort of go places. Uh, jail. Rehab. Mom's house, for a while. Ever since Mom took sick leave, she's got access to all kinds of good pills." -- 2009-11-28 - Theater of Living Arts - Philadelphia, PA
"This is a song about things that you infuse too much of yourself into so that when you have to see them destroyed, or forget where they went, it gets to count as a greater loss than it otherwise might have. If you suffer from a certain type of neurosis-slash-mental-illness, this is a very appealing process to you, i.e. me." -- 2010-09-09 - Koko - London, England
[Referring to the previous song in the set, Letter from Belgium, which he said was about "some friends...who liked methamphetamine too much"] "This song is about those same friends, about two days later." -- 2017-12-04 - Harvester Performance Center - Rocky Mount, VA
"This is a song called 'Cotton,' cause I already told you that. You know, I’m feeling disclosive. So, if you don’t use intravenous drugs, or haven’t -- and I recommend that you not do so and you don’t pursue this -- but one thing you do, you have to filter the stuff that you buy on the street through cotton, because it could otherwise make you very sick. I mean it’s gonna make you sick anyway, because it’s hard bad drugs. But what junkies do and what I did in those days is, you take your cigarette -- because we all smoke -- and you take a little bit of the cotton out of the filter and you put it in your spoon, and you draw whatever is in the spoon up through that in order to, theoretically, [kind of pure thing]. And it’s probably more of a ritual than anything else but junkies believe in it, and the things that junkies believe in are very important to them. And the desk in question was mine, and I don’t know what happened to it. This is called 'Cotton.'" -- 2021-10-22 - College Street Music Hall - New Haven, CT

Things Referenced in this Song[]

[CW: drug use] "Cottons" are filters used by people who inject drugs:
- "Most injectors draw their drug solution from a cooker or spoon into a syringe through some type of filter—most often a piece of cotton or other absorbent material. The filter acts to keep out particulate matter and other foreign objects you don’t want in your shot, and enables you to get just about every drop of the drug solution into your syringe so that none of it is wasted." -- Getting Off Right: A Safety Manual for Injection Drug Users (National Harm Reduction Coalition, 2020).

Live Shows this Song Was Played at[]

Videos of this Song[]

We Shall All Be Healed
Track list: "Slow West Vultures" • "Palmcorder Yajna" • "Linda Blair Was Born Innocent" • "Letter from Belgium" • "The Young Thousands" • "Your Belgian Things" • "Mole" • "Home Again Garden Grove" • "All Up the Seething Coast" • "Quito" • "Cotton" • "Against Pollution" • "Pigs That Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of"

The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 1 and 2

Track list: "The Plague" • "Aulon Raid" • "Cry for Judas" • "Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1" • "Until I Am Whole" • "Younger" • "Heel Turn 2" • "Southwestern Territory" • "The Diaz Brothers" • "Genesis 30:3" • "1 Samuel 15:23" • "Heretic Pride" • "Estate Sale Sign • "Getting Into Knives" • "Lion's Teeth" • "This Year" • "No Children" • "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" • "Tollund Man" • "Cotton" • "Pigs That Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of" • "In League with Dragons" • "Southwood Plantation Road" • "Lakeside View Apartments Suite" • "Tallahassee" • "My Little Panda" • "Love Cuts the Strings" • "International Small Arms Traffic Blues" • "Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan" • "Damn These Vampires" • "Foreign Object" • "Golden Boy" • "See America Right" • "Up the Wolves" • "This Year" • "Spent Gladiator 2"