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in: Transcendental Youth songs, Video, The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 1 and 2 songs

Lakeside View Apartments Suite

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Lakeside View Apartments Suite
TranscendentalYouth

Album

Transcendental Youth

Released

2012

Artist

the Mountain Goats

Length

3:58

Previous track

"Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1"

Next track

"Cry for Judas"

Lakeside View Apartments Suite is the second song on the album Transcendental Youth. It also appears as the 24th song on the 2020 live album The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 1 and 2.

Lyrics[]

Downtown north past the airport
A dream in switchgrass and concrete
Three gray floors of smoky windows
Facing the street

Michael pulls the blinds back up
Stares blankly down at the intersection
Watching for the guy who's got the angel dust
Crystal clear connection

Days like dominoes
All in a line
We cheer for the home team every time
lakeside view, lakeside view
lakeside view for my whole crew

Most nights now sleep in the kitchen
Keep my face cool on the floor
And John, John comes by to drop off his envelopes
Still playing postman after all these years 

Pull down my army surplus jacket
Dig through some drawers to find the keys
Emerge transformed in a million years
From days like these

Under each eye little greasepaint smudge
You can't judge us - you're not the judge
lakeside view, lakeside view
lakeside view for my whole crew

And just before I leave
I throw up in the sink
One whole life recorded
In disappearing ink

And Ray left a message thumbtacked to the door
I don't even bother trying to read them anymore
lakeside view,
lakeside view,
lakeside view for my whole crew

Comments by John Darnielle About this Song[]

  • "This is, in its own sad way, is a true story." -- 2012-10-13 - Music Hall of Williamsburg - Brooklyn, NY
  • "This song takes place in the Lakeside View Apartments. It's called 'Lakeside View Apartments Suite.'" -- 2016-04-17 - City Winery - New York, NY
  • "This song, uh, I don’t make explicit sort of connections in the ones that are about the same things from personal areas of my life because I feel that would be tedious. For you, not me. But this, uh, if you actually come to a live show, I assume you’re signing on for a tiny bit of that tedium. So the people — the song I just played is called Steal Smoked Fish, and it’s about some friends of mine who were living once, and most of whom are gone now. And, uh, this is about people from the exact same crowd, who I couldn’t exactly call friends. But they were living then, and who knows where they are now.” -- 2016-07-22 - Subterranean - Chicago, IL
  • "This is a song that takes place on the north side of Portland, Oregon, in a neighborhood that looks much as it did in the '80s, still. They haven't gotten to it yet. God bless everybody there." -- 2017-11-11 - Union Transfer - Philadelphia, PA
  • "This is a Portland song -- thank you -- almost died in Portland, of a phenomenon that I know my fellow drug addicts can relate to of having three days that I can't account for. I know they happened, but I was not there consciously for them, I remember, I had a, I'll tell you this whole story, not the whole story, that would take a long time, but I will tell you that I emerged as from a very deep but unrestful sleep, and woke up with a hole in my jeans and a scab on my knee, I mean it wasn't a scab yet but it was forming, and unable to remember what day it was and I became convinced in the way you do when you're not healthy that if I could only remember the date everything else would sort of collect itself and come clearly into focus and I went out to the -- this was 1986 -- I went out to the newspaper machine in front of my apartment building and I looked at the date and I tried to hold it in my head from the newspaper machine up the stairs to the door to the elevator back down to the basement where I lived and back down to room number 10 but I could not do it, by the time I would get back it would be gone, and sometime within the next couple hours I'd go back up, and this behavior persisted for how long I don't know. This is called Lakeside View Apartment Suites." -- 2018-05-27 - Old Town School of Folk Music - Chicago, IL
  • "This song was inspired by the nights I used to spend getting into cars and not knowing where they were gonna go." -- 2021-09-25 - Levon Helm Studios - Woodstock, NY

Things Referenced in this Song[]

  • The lines "And just before I leave / I throw up in the sink / One whole life recorded / In disappearing ink" are similar to the lines "Veins full of disappearing ink / Vomiting in the kitchen sink" from Elliott Smith's song "A Fond Farewell".

Live Shows this Song Was Played at[]

Videos of this Song[]



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