Going Back to Georgia

The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you.

Note: this particular newsletter discusses suicide and makes references to gun violence and domestic abuse. Please take care of yourselves.

I’m a lyrics person. It’s always shocking when someone tells me that they don’t or can’t focus on lyrics when listening to music. Obviously the sound matters to me, too, but it’s always been the lyrical content that determines whether I like a song. I realize that this is largely due to my own limitations when it comes to technical musical knowledge—but in a way, I like that the magic of music is preserved by my own ignorance of how it is made.

Despite this, being so fixated on lyrics does not always yield accurate interpretations, whether that’s due to a misheard line (I remain convinced that the lyrics of both R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon” and The Beatles’ “Let it Be” that I invented for myself as a child are superior to the originals) or a personal understanding of the song that runs counter to the songwriter’s intent. The latter applies in the case of The Mountain Goats’ “Going to Georgia,” off their debut album Zopilote Machine, from 1994. It is a song that, despite its popularity, songwriter John Darnielle has disavowed entirely.

What is perhaps most striking to me about this song so many years later is how short it is, how few words make up the vivid narrative of its two-minute runtime. It’s practically unfinished. JD once said, “A better song would be one from the perspective of the person whose former partner has shown up on the porch of his/her house with a damn gun, that’s the hero of the song whose story is more interesting from where I’m at now.” I guess in my head the song was always about both people involved. Listening to it as a young teenager and now as an adult, it’s easy for me to spin out a slightly broader story from its sparse lyrics.

They are as follows:

The most remarkable thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again
It's the most extraordinary thing in the world

I have two big hands and a heart pumping blood and a 1967 Colt .45 with a busted safety catch
The world shines as I cross the Macon county line
Going to Georgia

The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you
And that you're standing in the doorway
And you smile as you ease the gun from my hand 
And I’m frozen with joy right where I stand
The world throws its light underneath your hair
Forty miles from Atlanta, this is nowhere
Going to Georgia

I picture a house, old. Rickety. Subsumed by carpenter ants and the fleshy rot of cheap waterlogged building material in the sun. The property of the narrator’s distant family, perhaps, left as a footnote in a near-forgotten will. I think it’s a house neither the narrator nor the “you” have visited in many years. I think there are weeds in the yard. I think the two of them used to go there when they were younger to smoke or make love or just be away from everyone else, looking for peace and quiet. I think that was a long time ago. It’s far from the road, and any passing traffic is rendered as a low hum not unlike that of the mosquitoes that gather in full force come twilight. The narrator goes there with a faulty gun and two big hands because in their mind it is a kindness to die in a place that is already dead, away from everyone else.

But—and this is the magic of fiction—the erstwhile partner happens to also be thinking of this house that afternoon. Maybe they drove past the median on the highway choked with jimsonweed and thought of the plump toothy seedpods that would crop up around the house’s sagging porch and, midway through summer, yawn into long white flowers limned by purple. Maybe they were thinking that if they got the timing right on their way back from work, they could drive past the house and catch the flowers just as they unfurled their wide fragrant petals sometime after midnight.

So maybe they drive there, and the timing isn’t quite right because they have things to do the next day and realistically they can’t sit around waiting for these flowers to bloom in the middle of the night, and they’ve seen it happen before anyway, a long time ago. The sun droops towards the horizon. That’s how it is in the height of the heat down South, like the air is closer somehow, pressing in on you. And they notice as they pull into the neglected driveway that the front door is open.

The cover for Zopilote Machine, on which “Georgia” is the penultimate track.

The narrator sees them get out of their car. I think they’re angry at first, or confused, because this throws a significant wrench in their plan to leave this world in a timely and unobtrusive manner, and they had been glad to go. But then the light! ‘The world throws its light underneath your hair,’ the crux of the song: that there exist in this life such small and fine splendors as sunlight threaded, however briefly, into the hair of someone you once loved. The light touches everything here in this house that still stands mostly upright, whether or not you are there to see it. But wouldn’t it be nice to see it?

And outside it will still be hours before the jimsonweed blooms. And I don’t know how the story ends, but I think it doesn’t end here with a gun and an old house and two people who haven’t seen each other in many years. That’s as far as my imagination takes me. The song is still only two minutes long.

Because this is a story—or a story within a story, neither of which I have any particular claim to—there can be meaning here, or a symbolic significance that wouldn’t exist in reality. I suppose the way I’m telling this suggests that the narrator’s former partner felt compelled to drive past this old relic of a house on this random evening because somewhere, deep in their heart, they knew there was something wrong: they somehow knew that their ex-lover needed them. But I have always been a devotee of coincidence so I am choosing to believe it was chance instead, and then a little bit of tender mercy, that enabled such events to happen.

It’s unclear to me now whether JD intended the harm to befall the song’s narrator or the person whose porch they are arriving on. I’ve tried to figure out who the gun is supposed to be aimed at, or whether it was going to be fired at all, or if the gun even existed in the first place except as a symbol of a way out. I’m not sure if JD himself knows; he often contradicts himself in his explanations. His interpretation of the song seems to have shifted over the years—he’s decried it first as simply narcissistic and later as misogynistic and patriarchal, which leads me to think that it was originally written as the (male) narrator trying to murder his (female) partner, though he has also made reference to the narrator intending to harm himself. I suppose the (male) narrator attempting or threatening suicide in front of his (female) partner could also qualify as misogynistic abuse, if you want to look at it like that. But it never occurred to me to look at it like that until I read JD’s comments about the song. The narrator never had a gender or a face or even a real body in my mind. They were solely defined by a shapeless desire to die and then the equally intangible ability to live despite that.

And it does make me sad, yes, that what I saw as a survival story was meant all along to be one of revenge instead. For a long while this information curdled the hope that the song initially instilled in me. And yet I found myself listening to it anyway, at first somewhat guiltily and then with less and less shame as time went on.

I would be remiss to ignore the writer’s impassioned dislike of his own song, of course. Stories get away from you, once you put them out there in the world—I understand that. I know I will never get to hear “Going to Georgia” live no matter how many Mountain Goats shows I attend. There are plenty of other songs in their vast catalog that detail unhealthy and sometimes downright cruel relationships, often from a limited perspective, that JD continues to play. Nonetheless, I don’t feel that it’s entirely my right to question which ones he does and does not feel able to reclaim, and I respect him too much as a writer and a thinker to really pick that apart. Sometimes a person just gets tired of telling a story. But that doesn’t mean I have to get tired of hearing it, or hearing my own version of it. It’s the most extraordinary thing in the world…

—ECT