Damn These Vampires

Damn These Vampires
	;
Album	All Eternals Deck
Released	2011
Artist	the Mountain Goats
Length	3:24
Next track	"Birth of Serpents"

Damn These Vampires is the first song on All Eternals Deck. It also appears as the 30th song on the 2020 live album The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 1 and 2. It appears as the seventeenth song on the 2022 live album The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volume 5.

Lyrics[]

Brave young cowboys
Of the near north side
Mount those bridge rails
Ride all night

Scream when captured
Arch your back
Let this whole town hear 
your knuckles crack

Sapphire Trans-Am
High beams in vain
Drive wild broncos 
Down the plain

Push up to the corner
Where the turbines hiss
Someday we won't remember this

Crawl 'til dawn
On my hands and knees
God damn these vampires
For what they've done to me

Tie those horses 
To the post outside
And let those glass doors
Open wide

And in their surface
See two young, savage things
Barely worth remembering

Feast like pagans 
Never get enough
Sleep like dead men
Wake up like dead men

And when the sun comes
Try not to hate the light
Someday we'll try to walk upright

Crawl 'til dawn
On my hands and knees
God damn these bite marks
Deep in my arteries

Crawl 'til dawn
On my hands and knees
God damn these vampires
For what they've done to me

Comments by John Darnielle About this Song[]

"This is a song, um... this is a song about mirrors." -- 2011-03-25 - 9:30 Club - Washington, D.C.
"Like so many other things, this song takes place in Portland, Oregon." -- 2011-04-05 - The Vic Theatre - Chicago, IL
"This is a song, also, about being in the middle of something that you know you are going to have to finish walking through, like one of those people in the movies walking through a fire, only it's not a movie, it's your actual life, and it really feels like real fire." -- 2011-06-26 - Rhino's Youth Media Center & All-Ages Club - Plan-It-X Fest - Bloomington, IN
"You have friends and you think that they're the greatest people in the world, but there comes a time when you realize, all at once or it can come upon you gradually, that your friends aren't the greatest people in the world but they're actually parasites sucking the blood from you - not because they need the blood but just for their own entertainment. And then you have like one friend on your shoulder saying you're just being neurotic, your friends are great, and yourself in the middle saying 'no they're not, look at the facts'." -- 2011-05-28 - Brudenell Social Club - Leeds, England
"This is a song about your friends who seek to drain you of your life force. They're still your friends, but they need your life force. It can be hard navigating - I say navigating, but I mean even establishing the boundaries of friendships like these. Because certain things in these friendships are not not navigable: one, you have life force, two, your friends need it to survive. So that sort of eliminates most of the other useful boundaries. After that, boundaries are sort of like a quaint conceit you might occasionally deploy in the service of getting your needs met. It's called 'Damn These Vampires'." -- 2016-04-06 - Asbury Hall - Buffalo, NY