I have two big hands and a heart pumping blood and a 1967 Colt .45 with a busted safety catch
On The Mountain Goats' "Going to Georgia" and the feeling of being in motion again
In a January 2010 performance for NPR’s All Songs Considered, John Darnielle interrupts himself. Three chords into “Going to Georgia,” the Mountain Goats frontman quickly stops playing his acoustic guitar, looks up, and blurts out “The thing is, about this song…”—quick pause for a laugh here, then he starts over:
“The thing is about this song, when…I mean, I’m still a young man and I’m permanently a young man and no matter how I start to look I’m still 20, right? But when you are a young writer, boys get this idea that to really show a woman the depth and purity of your love, what you have to do is something drastic and stupid. And young writers think it would be really intense to have a guy always harm himself real bad and then, you know, I tell these stories, and so I was a young writer once and here’s a song about a guy who travels someplace with a gun.”
He trails off toward the end before launching back into the three-chord progression to “Going to Georgia.”
The song follows the plot of a young man coming home to Georgia, excited to see the woman he loves again after a long time away. He’s mostly excited about “the feeling of being in motion again.” When he shows up on her front porch, holding a “1967 Colt .45 with a busted safety catch,” he sees her in halo of blinding light, shining as she coaxes the weapon away from him. He’s overcome with joy as the song ends.
Darnielle has disavowed the song many times over the years, in no uncertain terms: in 2012, during a show in Vancouver, the songwriter said “I think ‘Going to Georgia’ is a bullshit song. Bottom line: I know it's got a nice melody, and it's got a cool vibe, but that dude is bullshit and I don't want to be involved with him anymore”; in 2016, in Chicago, he said “If you should find yourself in this song, heaven forbid, don't say 'Oh! What's the chance for epiphany here?' Call the cops. There's a fucking psychopath on my porch. I hate him, and I want him to go to jail. And if the police say 'What if he's having some deep feelings?' Tell them 'Take your patriarchal bullshit down to the garbage can where it belongs and haul this guy off to jail because he has a gun”; a year later, when a fan requested the song during an Alabama show, Darnielle simply said “Dude, I don't know if you got the memo, but I don't play that song anymore.”
I’m sure Darnielle has found himself in the company of many unpleasant people who idolize the deranged protagonist of “Going to Georgia” over the years, and I respect his decision to part with it for its glorification of what he sees as a violent misogynist. But I have always liked “Going to Georgia” for how Darnielle paints the small, myopic world of a man who oscillates between incredible stupor at the things he loves and the certainty with which he expresses his own impending doom. My enjoyment of the song now sits solely in these small moments within that create space for the possibility that one can be both enamored with the smallest, most beautiful idols of being, and beat down by the tragedy of their own existence. It’s metaphor more than anything, a vessel with which to deliver the feeling of the narrator’s pure love of existence as he stares down his own undoing. In the opening line, in a Springsteen-esque manor where too many syllables crash together over a short line of music, Darnielle sings “The most remarkable thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again. / It’s the most extraordinary feeling in the whole world.”
I discovered “Going to Georgia” during the fall of my senior year of high school. Big into the emo scene at the time, I liked anything laced with a sense of desperation, and I listened to the Mountain Goats, Bright Eyes, Brand New, and Neutral Milk Hotel every morning as I walked to my locker.
My world was small then, walled off by my high school and the edge of town. I had only started to think about going away to college, and I wasn’t excited about leaving my friends, my life at the beach. If I could have frozen time that fall, I would have, and I would have stayed seventeen forever, suspended eternally in my small world, my small group of friends, my small 2003 Ford Escape that wouldn’t start sometimes if the air was too cold and dry.
But the hurricane came and cracked everything open. A few months before my eighteenth birthday, I rode my bike from West Long Branch to Monmouth Beach, assessing the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy that hit the night before. I rode by downed power lines, traffic signals smashed in the middle of intersections, piles of sand that rose four feet tall on the sidewalk next to the beach, tree limbs crashed on top of sedans, broken windows. Some beachside storefronts were boarded up with words like “Closed for now” and “God bless us” and “Stay safe, New Jersey” spray-painted on the fiberboard used to secure the glass doorways. Others were simply flooded, and some of those still haven’t re-opened.
Instantly, everything grew. I saw past the breakers in the ocean, past the cinder block walls of my regional high school, and realized, maybe for the first time, that the world had a beginning and an ending, that there was more to life than New Jersey, that the depth of destruction in my whole town was not the end of the world, but rather a bunch of big waves in one corner of one country. The world kept ticking on, the news rolled along, Halloween was cancelled in New Jersey, but the election still happened.
In that second week of cancelled school, when our power had returned in West Long Branch, I listened to “Going to Georgia” for the first time. There, in the dim light that I was sure would flicker out at any time, as Darnielle sang “The most remarkable thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again,” I wondered if I had been standing still for my entire life.
My first year of college didn’t work out. I lived in a dorm room in Bergen County with a roommate who I must have spoken to less than 100 times over the course of my two disastrous semesters. He went home on weekends and slept at his parents’ house on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, so I rarely saw him. Mostly, I was alone.
My room didn’t have WiFi, so I bought a 25-foot ethernet cord and sat on my bed with my laptop and my guitar, looking up the chords to songs by Death Cab, Paul Baribeau, Against Me!, and the Mountain Goats. I strummed along as “Going To Georgia” played over the tinny speakers in my MacBook.
Maybe “Going To Georgia” is just a song about the joy being alive. The narrator focuses on so few things in the short verses, and two of them are his own body parts—“I have two big hands and a heart pumping blood and a 1967 Colt .45 with a busted safety catch.” Here are my hands, how incredible is it that my heart pumps blood through them? How incredible is it that the chemistry of human life is possible? How perfect is it that I am alive, existing in a moment of utter joy, in motion again after a spell of sedentary solitude? Maybe the gun just exists as a symbol of contrast between the miracle of life that pumps blood through huge, stable hands, and the fact that something as old and broken as an old gun without a safety could take that all away?
I came very close to failing Physics that spring semester. I rarely went to class. I just sat in my dorm room, strumming my guitar, looking at Twitter on my phone, missing my friends.
During the last few weeks of the semester, I parked my car outside of my dorm room, where only sophomores were allowed to park. Campus security gave me a ticket. They emailed me about it every day until the last day of my semester. As soon as I signed the papers and officially dropped out, I received an email notification that my ticket had been voided. I filled my car with everything I owned, and left the parking lot, past the ever-shrinking pile of snow that had accumulated that winter. It stood barely two feet tall as I drove past it. I opened the windows as I drove south down the Garden State Parkway, my awful year shrinking in the rearview behind me, and the world shined.
While introducing “Going to Georgia” at a 2006 show in Athens, Georgia, Darnielle says, as he strums the opening chords: “I wrote this song on Christmas morning in like, '93—I know, we're all old—and to me, at the time, Georgia was a distant continent, shrouded in mystery, and I never figured I'd ever see it. I lived on the West Coast. Those of us who grew up in California aren't really fully convinced that there's another world beyond southern California. I remember the day in 1998 that Simon Joyner and I were on the highway, and I crossed the Macon County line, and I was like holy fucking shit.” He laughs as the crowd cheers.
This is my favorite Darnielle “Going to Georgia” intro because it omits the man with the gun entirely. Here, he claims it’s just about the realization that the world is bigger than previously assumed, that there’s a joy in realizing your entire existence is microscopic in comparison to the breadth of the world.
I don’t listen to the studio version of “Going to Georgia” very often—I prefer the live version from All Songs Considered, the one where Darnielle interrupts himself to provide a disclaimer about how he was young once, or the 2006 performance in Athens, or a 2017 performance where Darnielle refuses to play the song until someone in the audience gives him $60 to do so. I like the way Darnielle sings it live, how he belts out the chorus, holds the note over his chords like he’s proving something about his own aliveness to the room. But I do appreciate the subtle differences in the studio version, where Darnielle’s voice is subdued and quiet, almost slipping into a speaking voice as he sings the introduction. He speeds up as he goes, like a statue taking a few careful breaths before coming to life. By the time the song ends, Darnielle is shouting, his voice breaking and the tape recording clipping as he pounds away on his guitar strings, like he’s proving something to himself. It’s almost enough to forget about the narrator, standing alone on his love interest’s front porch, gripping a faulty gun with his big hand and his heart pumping blood.
A few days ago, I got so worked up about money that I took a walk around the block just to cool my head. It was warmer than I thought it’d be. I carried my sweatshirt in one hand as I headed toward the lake next to the boardwalk at the edge of town. I listened to “Going to Georgia” as I walked, and as I felt the sun shining on my face, I thought about how small the town was, how a simple sense of motion can calm me down on my worst days. I thought about Darnielle stopping himself before the chords play out. I hummed along, loud enough for only me to hear, as the chorus rang out.
Thank you for subscribing to B-Side Collection, a newsletter by John Bazley. Everything I write for this newsletter is completely free, but if you like what you read and you’d like to support this project, you can do so at the link below.