Sax Rohmer Number 1

Sax Rohmer #1
	;
Album	Heretic Pride
Released	2008
Artist	the Mountain Goats
Length	3:41
Next Track	"San Bernardino"

Sax Rohmer #1 is the first song on the album Heretic Pride. It also appears as the 16th song on the 2021 live album The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 3 and 4. The song has an official music video directed by Ace Norton, which can be viewed here.

Press Kit notes[]

Sax Romher #1

Written in my cave-like office in Durham.

Sax Rohmer wrote pulp spy novels, and there's lots about them that's pretty objectionable; The character Fu Manchu is his best known invention.

But there's a feeling of menace and threat in his stories that's kind of addictive, and the tight-frame atmosphere he crafts has a real appeal to it, especially if you're working in a room with concrete floors and without any natural light. Second guitars here, the electric ones, are by Annie Clark of St. Vincent.

Lyrics[]

Fog lifts from the harbor, dawn goes down to day
An agent crests the shadows of the nearby alleyway
Piles of broken bricks, sign posts on the path
Every moment points towards the aftermath
Yeah ah ah

Sailors straggle back from their nights out on the town
Hopeless urchins from the city gather around
Spies from imperial China wash in with the tide
Every battle heads toward surrender on both sides

And I am coming home to you
With my own blood in my mouth
And I am coming home to you
If it’s the last thing that I do

Bells ring in the tower, wolves howl in the hills
Chalk marks show up on a few high windowsills
And a rabbit gives up somewhere, and a dozen hawks descend
Every moment leads toward its own sad end
Yeah ah ah

Ships loosed from their moorings capsize and then they’re gone
Sailors with no captains watch awhile and then move on
And an agent crests the shadows and I head in her direction
All roads lead toward the same blocked intersection

I am coming home to you
With my own blood in my mouth
And I am coming home to you
If it’s the last thing that I do

Comments by John Darnielle About this Song[]

"[Rohmer]'s kind of a problematic guy to be a fan of - him and Lovecraft both are 'products of their time' if you're being polite or 'total racist assholes' if you're being realistic. So, you know, any fanhood I have of his stuff is mitigated by the way he describes Asian characters ('cunning', 'inscrutable', etc, but that's just the tip of the iceberg) - my wife's from Thailand, I can't be down with tired Orientalisms. At the same time, though, the cartoonish danger-lurking-around-every-corner Fu-Manchu-about-to-invade-England-by-sea world he's imagining has this druggy bizarre filmic quality to it - as landscapes go, Rohmer's have got real depth, and texture, and grain. So a lot of the images in that song are stock stuff of the sort that Rohmer could do blindfolded - agents in the shadows, that sort of thing. In that sense, it's a tribute to his skills. But you always want to keep your distance from a dude like Rohmer. I almost changed the title but thought I should not front, I like to go with my first impulses in writing." -- hipstereo interview

Things Referenced in this Song[]

The line "dawn goes down to day" is from Robert Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay".

Live Shows this Song Was Played at[]

Videos of this Song[]

Heretic Pride
Track list: "Sax Rohmer #1" • "San Bernardino" • "Heretic Pride" • "Autoclave" • "New Zion" • "So Desperate" • "In the Craters on the Moon" • "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" • "Tianchi Lake" • "How to Embrace a Swamp Creature" • "Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident" • "Sept. 15 1983" • "Michael Myers Resplendent" Bonus tracks: "Toolshed" • "Last Man on Earth"

The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 3 and 4

Track list: "In the Craters on the Moon" • "Letter from Belgium" • "Woke Up New" • "Pez Dorado" • "Picture of My Dress" • "Whole Wide World" • "Dark in Here" • "Korean Bird Paintings" • "Snow Owl" • "Against Pollution" • "The Last Place I Saw You Alive" • "In Memory of Satan" • "Bell Swamp Connection" • "Rat Queen" • "Shelved" • "Sax Rohmer #1" • "This Year" • "Have to Explode" • "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" • "Until Olympius Returns" • "The Young Thousands" • "Corsican Mastiff Stride" • "Blood Capsules" • "Hair Match" • "Solidarity Forever" • "Soft Targets" • "Black Pear Tree" • "Wolf Count" • "Never Quite Free" • "Wild Sage" • "Jazz No Children" • "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod" • "Exegetic Chains" • "Going Invisible 2"