Palmcorder Yajna

Palmcorder Yajna
	; On "Palmcorder Yajna"
Album	We Shall All Be Healed
Released	2003
Artist	the Mountain Goats
Length	4:09
Previous track	"Slow West Vultures"
Next Track	"Linda Blair Was Born Innocent"
Next Track (single)	"Butter Teeth"

Palmcorder Yajna (originally titled Sacrifice) is the second song on the album We Shall All Be Healed. It was first released as an EP, along with the B-sides "Butter Teeth" and "Snakeheads."

Lyrics[]

Holt Boulevard
Between Garey and White
Hooked up with some friends at the Travelodge
Set ourselves up for the night

Carpenter ants in the dresser
Flies in the screen
It will be too late by the time we learn
What these cryptic symbols mean

And I dreamt of a house
Haunted by all you tweakers with your hands out
And the headstones climbed up the hills
And the headstones climbed up the hills

Send somebody out for soda
Comb through the carpet for clues
Reflective tape on our sweatpants
Big holes in our shoes
Every couple minutes someone says he can't stand it any more
Laugh lines on our faces
Scale maps of the ocean floor

And I dreamt of a camera
Pointing out from inside the television
And the aperture yawning and blinking
And the headstones climbed up the hills 

If anybody comes to see me
Tell 'em they just missed me by a minute
If anybody comes in to our room while we're asleep
I hope they incinerate everybody in it 

And I dreamt of a factory
Where they manufactured what I needed
Using shiny new machines
And the headstones climbed up the hills

Comments by John Darnielle About this Song[]

"Those of you who have had the same love/hate/but mostly love relationship with methamphetamine, God love ya." -- 2003-06-06 - Triple Rock Social Club - Minneapolis, MN
"This is a song about how, when sometimes, sometimes you find it necessary to rob the safe in the restaurant where you work. And they, and it's funny, because your friends who, like, have good jobs, say: 'What good can come of that?' And here I quote your friends: 'They only have about two thousand dollars in there." If you were honest with your friends, you'd say "Look, two thousand dollars will buy me a quarter pound of peanut butter crank, and I'll be going for a good ten days off that, unless I meet up with some friends.' Then you may stop to think to yourself, that you're likely to meet up with some friends. New friends! People you didn't really know, until word began to spread in the neighbourhood. 'John robbed the safe! And he took all 2k, and he bought a quarter pound! He's in room ten, 253 North Broadway, you can't miss it. Faces Broadway at an angle across from the coliseum.' And so there you are with your new friends, listening to King Diamond as you do, high for three days and beginning to talk nonsense, and you may think to yourself 'I wish I had a song to sing.' You may only hold this thought for a second or so, but I heard you, when you thought that, and that's why I wrote you this song." -- 2008-03-01 - The Independent - San Francisco, CA
"This is a song about the inside of a motel. In particular, it's both a single motel that I could point out to you where the building stood before God in his infinite mercy wiped it from the face of the earth, replacing it with, I would guess a CVS, just you know, just playing the odds there, rolling seven, it was probably a CVS. But before the CVS that we all know today, there were beds that smelled funky, stale in a particular type of stale that's yet ever new, and cigarette burns that miraculously reappear if you replace the sheets with fresh ones and yet the burn returns, because the burn is a metaphor and you can't, you can't just change a metaphor out. You replace the sheet and the metaphor persists. That's in the nature of these guys, right. I went to this motel in Los Angeles and I went to it in Pomona and I went to it in Portland and it wasn't a chain. They were all independently owned. And yet miraculously, they were all the same motel. Not hotel. That's for the people with money." -- 2015-04-11 - City Winery - New York, NY

Things Referenced in this Song[]

The Travelodge referenced in this song is the Pomona Travelodge, located on Holt Ave. (not Blvd.) in Pomona, CA.
"Yajna" refers to a Hindu ritual sacrifice, "Palmcorder" is a type of handheld video recording device.

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"

Palmcorder Yajna
Track list: "Palmcorder Yajna" • "Butter Teeth" • "Snakeheads"