At Dawn They Sleep: 5 Songs on Vampires
This week's songs are from The Mountain Goats, Frankie & the Witch Fingers, Jason Isbell, Neil Young, and Cindy Lee
RIP - D’Angelo
A member of the Soulquarians working out of Electric Lady Studios in the late 90s, D’Angelo helped shape a musical movement that embraced all Black culture had to offer—jazz, hip hop, rock, soul, and poetry. The collective included Talib Kweli, The Roots, Common, Erykah Badu, Pino Palladino, Mos Def, J Dilla and others. Their influence is apparent in artists today like Esperanza Spalding, Kendrick Lamar, Robert Glasper, and Makaya McCraven. I was setting “The Charade” up for a future entry, but his passing today moved up the timeline.
Black Messiah is a front-to-back fantastic album. It’s funky, jazzy, and incredibly accessible for how weird it is. Were he to release more music in his lifetime (just three albums in a 30 year career), he would be up there with Prince, Sly Stone, and George Clinton as a singular artists and incredibly versatile musicians weaving together the threads of Black music into their own tapestry. The drums on “The Charade” pull me in, but the sitar-like guitar line keeps a relative cool throughout.
Halloween month continues.
Last week it was all ghosts, which were pretty one-dimensional. They represented a past left behind, an absence, or something we cannot resolve—a thing that isn’t there.
Plot-wise, Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s horror hit from earlier this year, was more or less a riff on Dusk Till Dawn. But in execution it explored how art forms (music first and foremost), and artists’ techniques, merge with folklore and transfer over generations and across cultures, creating a form of immortality. A recent Pitchfork review for Weirs’ engrossing new album Diamond Grove put it perfectly:
“Folk music is a memory that leaps from skull to skull, riding our dreams through time.”
Many horror myths follow a similar pattern of a contagion. Something transferred person to person and impossible to contain, whether very real—COVID-19, obeying in advance—or imagined, like vampires for example.
Vampires and vampire mythology is much more fertile symbolic ground than ghosts. They invoke a wider range of allusions and metaphors: parasitic relationships, drug addiction, predatory behavior, soul-sucking life experiences, mortality as a best-case-scenario, nocturnal living, and yeah—maybe some blood-sucking bastards too.
Here are 5 songs about vampires.
“Art is always a backlash to itself. Everything always goes in cycles, but I feel like people who come see our shows are rowdy as hell. They’re happy to be there. They’re really engaged in what’s happening, so I don’t think rock’n’roll has gone anywhere.” - Nikki ‘Pickle’ Smith
Frankie & the Witch Fingers - “Dracula Drug”
Originally formed as a two-piece in Bloomington, Indiana, Frankie & the Witch Fingers are now an LA-based 5 piece tour de force. It’s psychedelic punk metal of the Osees variety, or Ty Segall if he’s had too much coffee. The opening track off of 2019’s ZAM, “Dracula Drug” takes its time building toward the menacing riff that drives the song. Much like Dracula, the lyrics are singularly focused on draining the life out of others.
Gimme your life
Take it away
Leave it behind you
Body can stay
An epic run time, ripping guitar work, nasally and cartoonish vocals, all building towards a wild crescendo—this sounds like Television covering a Misfits song. Play it loud and let it rip.
“So I was watching Hoarders, and Amanda came in, and said, ‘You’re going into the studio on Monday. You need to stop watching Hoarders and write.’
And I said, ‘I don’t want to. I’ve got enough songs.’
And she said, ‘No, you have to. Anybody can watch Hoarders, but you have a record to make.’
So I turned off the Hoarders and started writing, and that is the song I wrote.” - Jason Isbell
Jason Isbell - “If We Were Vampires”
Anyone in a relationship for long enough might agree that the day-to-day interactions are more like the above story on how this song was written than the heightened emotional stakes of the song. But Isbell clearly had relationships on his mind when he picked up the guitar, and this one’s a knock-out. It picks at the “Til death do us part” of wedding vows and looks at the best case scenario of that promise being “one of us will spend some days alone.” Isbell being a gifted songwriter is able to go another step further. He looks at mortality as what makes our time on Earth special, and that having no promise of another day, is what makes the small moments between couples important.
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
Laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I’ll work hard ‘til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind
It’s an impressive turn on a familiar metaphor that cuts deep.
“On the Beach [is] probably one of the most depressing records I’ve ever made. I don’t want to get down to the point where I can’t even get up. I mean there’s something to going down there and looking around, but I don’t know about sticking around.” - Neil Young
Neil Young - “Vampire Blues”
There are few cultural hangovers bigger than the one experienced by the 1970s LA music scene. The Manson Murders and cocaine wreaked havoc. During this time, a group of musicians including Alice Cooper, Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon, John Lennon on his 18-month long “Lost Weekend,” Iggy Pop, and John Belushi, among others, formed a drinking club called the “Hollywood Vampires” at the Rainbow Bar & Grill. Initiation into the group involved out-drinking the others. A few miles up Sunset Boulevard, Neil Young ran with his own crew at Sunset Sound Studios that included slide guitar player Rusty Kershaw. They would make a marijuana concoction called a “honey slide” that Young’s Manager Elliott Roberts would call “debilitating” and “worse than heroin.” Kershaw even scared away Young’s bandmates Stephen Stills and David Crosby—no choir boys themselves—after pulling a knife on Stills for taking his guitar. So much for dirt weed, peace, and free love.
You’d be hard pressed to find another album that captures that craggily, too-loose-by-half, bloodshot-eyed ominous feeling than Neil Young’s one-two punch of On the Beach (1974) and Tonight’s the Night (1975). If I’m being honest, both of them give me the heebie-jeebies. On the Beach starts with the fun “Walk On,” but the storm clouds of “See the Sky About to Rain” spell trouble ahead, and it does pretty quick with the Manson-inspired “Revolution Blues,” which features Rick Danko and Levon Helm of The Band. But for the most part, it’s Young, Ben Keith, and Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina. George Whitsell, the only member of The Rockets Young did not invite to join Crazy Horse, came to LA to record with Young for a month, but “Vampire Blues” would be his only credited track on the album, and he wasn’t even aware it was being recorded when he was playing.
“We played the song for about fifteen minutes. I said, ‘That was pretty good. You wanna try one?’ Neil said ‘You wanna hear the playback?’”
That single take was cut down to 4 minutes, 14 seconds. There’s flubbed bass lines, dropped beats, and bassist Tim Drummond overdubbed playing a credit card against his beard for an extra bit of shuffle. Over all of this is Young’s froggy declarations
I’m a vampire, baby, suckin’ blood from the earth
Well, I’m a vampire, babe, sell you twenty barrels worth
When he goes on to promise “Good times are comin’” it’s pretty easy not to believe him.
“I just love music so much. I love writing and recording music and I like living slow. I work very hard on music and I take it very seriously, I’m really passionate about it. I love it, and I have it, and I don’t take it for granted. I appreciate that I have something that I love so much. I see it as my trade, and it’s a trade that doesn’t pay, but that’s cool. I’ve always been fine with nothing.” - Patrick Flagel
Cindy Lee - “Dracula”
Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee was one of 2024’s best albums. It’s got grooves, whorling guitar licks, and retro-R&B cool, with a distinctive and highly consistent tone over nearly an hour and a half. Cindy Lee is the stage persona of Patrick Flegel. Taken together, it’s like a 60s girl group from a David Lynch movie. Flagel avoids social media, most all press, and most streaming platforms (give it a listen on Bandcamp if you haven’t already). “Dracula” poses the question: Is Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On? an electric guitar away from being psychedelic garage rock? Beyond the ultra-cool bass line and percussion, the song shares some thematic DNA with What’s Goin’ On?—interrogating what they’ve done to end up where they are, strung out, alone, and alienated.
Six o’clock in the morning
And I’m feeling no pain
I’m living like Dracula
“For those of us who are into horror, dread is a nice, sort of powerful feeling. It’s not that you’re afraid of something; you’re riding that feeling. And that’s what I think surviving stuff is about—learning to ride stuff like waves instead of letting it crush you.” - John Darnielle
The Mountain Goats - “Damn These Vampires”
The Mountain Goats are mostly known for there acoustic guitar-driven, literary anthems about surviving abuse. So at a distance, hiring death metal producer and musician Erik Rutan to record 2013’s All Eternals Deck didn’t seem like an obvious choice. But Darnielle was fascinated with how he worked watching a documentary on Cannibal Corpse.
“I said, ‘Wait, Erik, have you ever recorded a band that only needs one kick drum?’ He says, ‘No, I don’t think I have.’…That was awesome.”
But John Darnielle, the creative force behind the band, is unfortunately familiar with the darker aspects of human nature, but fortunately able to not only survive them, but speak of his experience and articulate them in a way that resonates with a deeply loyal fan base. Their most well-known songs are defiant in the face of defeat (“No Children”, “This Year”), and “Damn These Vampires” fits the mold. Dealing with drug abuse, it takes on the perspective from the exact moment of realization that the singer is at rock bottom, and what’s kept them there is the people they are surrounded by. The lyrics read like Cormac McCarthy—stark, but vivid, and biblical.
Feast like pagans, never get enough
Sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men
And when the sun comes, try not to hate the light
Someday we’ll try to walk upright
While the lyrics shy away from anything too specific, the song structure and the arrangement offer a broadly applicable feeling of catharsis. This is Darnielle’s craft at work. His realization in the throws of drug addiction is someone else’s celebration of leaving a shitty relationship, or a soul-sucking job— or maybe even deleting social media apps and going for a walk. It’s liberation and you can feel it.
Thanks for reading. Enjoy listening.
Full playlists of songs featured in 5 Songs: