all hail west texas at 20
fourteen songs about two people, two continents, therapy, and a missed connection at DFW.
For All Hail West Texas’ 20th birthday, I thought I’d tell you all a story.
I spent a lot of time in Texas in 2019— I was dating someone who lived there and would visit regularly, staying for a couple of weeks at a time. Naturally, I started associating the album with those visits. This was someone I loved; when I heard “we were the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have his eyes on,” I thought of spending time with that person.
I remember being picked up after a long flight, being instantly enveloped in the dry Texas heat, and thinking about “I wish the West Texas highway was a Möbius strip” when we hit traffic on the highway out of the airport.
Then, in 2020, just before the pandemic, that relationship broke down. In retrospect, it had been breaking down the entire time; if you build a house on rotten foundations it can only stand for so long before it starts to crumble.
In her 2019 memoir In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado posits the following theory: you don’t willingly start living in a haunted house of a relationship. It gets built around you, walls you in brick by brick, so slow you don’t notice until you’re lost among its endless corridors and doorways that move like the goalposts the person who built it keeps setting.
This is how I spent almost a year going from Texas and back to see someone who made me into a ghost— she built the house and I made myself so small I disappeared within it. She would never visit me where I lived, and so all of the horrors happened there, where everything is big and bright and American.
After everything broke down, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to All Hail West Texas at all— even the very first notes of The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton would make me nauseous. It felt like reopening a wound, but more than that, it just felt embarrassing. How could I have listened to John Darnielle’s earnest words on Jenny and thought that ever applied to the situation I was in, when I was with someone who kept telling me about how much she hated The Mountain Goats?
Then, in December 2021, I went back to where it happened.
While I spent a good 80% of my time in Texas in awful company, some of my closest friends live there too, and I set out to fix my relationship with it as a place by making newer, happier memories.
It was, as you can imagine, my first time travelling that far since the start of the pandemic, so there were two reasons why I was so emotional before I even got on the plane; one, the fact that it was at all possible for me to travel, and two, the meaning behind the trip.
Because of the pandemic, my usual direct flight wasn’t available and I had to make a connection at Dallas Ft. Worth— as I stood in line for the border, the opening line of Color in Your Cheeks obviously came to mind.
Because of how backed up the line was, I missed my connecting flight. By the time I boarded the next one I had been awake for over 24 hours.
But even in my deliriously tired travelling state, I knew what I had to do next.
I looked down on the illuminated cities below me and the pitch-black night sky, and I did something I hadn’t done in a very long time: I put on All Hail West Texas.
I don’t think there will ever be a day where I listen to Jenny or Riches and Wonders and don’t feel a pang of sadness. But next to that now is the way I felt when I landed back in Austin and hugged my friends after so long. At long last, I can listen to one of my favorite Mountain Goats albums again.
So happy 20th birthday, All Hail West Texas— may we continue to have a complicated but perpetually healing relationship.