Wizard Buys a Hat

Wizard Buys a Hat
Album	Satanic Messiah EP
Released	2008
Artist	the Mountain Goats
Length	2:37
Previous Track	"Sarcofago Live"
Next Track	"Satanic Messiah"

Wizard Buys a Hat is the second track from the Satanic Messiah EP.

Lyrics

Shuffled up Sixth Street in the rain
Kept my head down as I looked past the people
And in the department store 
I found what I was looking for
This is the church
This is the crucible

They come out to Broadway and they look for me
I'm on the red steps smoking a cigarette
Easy to recognize 
Black bandages on my eyes
This is the church
These are the congregants

Sun sets on the broad square and lights come up
Feel like this town's gonna put a quick end to me
But if I came here to drown
I'm gonna take a few people down
This is the church
Occupied by the enemy

Comments by John Darnielle About this Song

• "All these people, these teachers, they will tell you when you are a young aspiring writer, they say, and they say it with the most horrible tone of voice, they mean well, but they say it, they say, 'you know, what a lot of writers have done is kept a notebook.' Yeah, I never fucking thought of that, dude! Yeah, no, I'm going to be a writer, it's all I've ever dreamed of since I was four years old and I never thought of writing anything down. And if you're me, and a heretic, you develop a resentment against this idea of keeping a notebook, so every English teacher that ever tells you to keep a notebook, you go, 'You know what I'm not going to do, is keep a notebook. I'm just going to remember it or carve it into my arm with a razor blade. As for notebooks, no, that's for the failures.' But then you grow older and you realize that that was an immature and childish attitude to have about the advice that people who are only trying to help you are giving you. It's a painful moment when you have that realization, but you go through it. Then what do you do, oh, it's so simple, you buy a notebook. And you write down the thoughts as they occur to you. For a while you think you should write them letters confessing that they were right, but then you think better. Sometimes the things you write down are actually terrible ideas, just terrible, which sort of -- it tells you why you didn't want to do this in the first place, is you didn't want evidence of your own failure right there in front of you. One day, cutting this extremely long, probably endless story short, one day I wrote a title down in my little tiny notebook of song titles that I keep. And as soon as I'd written it, I went, 'That's gotta be the stupidest song title you've ever come up with in your life. There's no way you can ever live up to that song title. It's the end. It is the end.' And it sat there in my notebook for two years. Then one day, about a month ago, I said, 'It's time, it's time to write the song "Wizard Buys a Hat"'. I do not feel the song lives up to its song title, nor do I feel that any songwriter, no matter how good, can live up to this song title, for which i take no credit whatsoever. Anyway, it's a song about when I lived in Portland and it's called -- let me just take a moment to savor this -- 'Wizard Buys a Hat'." -- 2008-05-16 - Masonic Temple - Brooklyn, New York, NY
• "I have done some recurring throughline stuff but the wizard in “Wizard Buys a Hat” is no real wizard at all, but me myself." -- Twitter, 2020-10-26

Things Referenced in this Song

• During 2023-08-09 - Pioneer Courthouse Square - Portland, OR, John Darnielle said that the department store referenced in the song was Meier & Frank, formerly located on Southwest Sixth Street in downtown Portland; and that the red steps were "the ones you're sitting on", referring to the red brick steps of Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Live Shows this Song Was Played at

• 2008-05-16 - Masonic Temple - Brooklyn, New York, NY
• 2008-06-06 - Natural History Museum - Los Angeles, CA
• 2008-09-15 - ULU - London, England
• 2008-10-13 - Park West - Chicago, IL
• 2008-10-14 - Pabst Theater - Milwaukee, WI
• 2008-10-23 - The Independent - San Francisco, CA
• 2008-12-10 - Billboard - Melbourne, Australia
• 2023-08-09 - Pioneer Courthouse Square - Portland, OR