All Hail West Texas

	All Hail West Texas
Studio album by The Mountain Goats
Released	February 19, 2002
Recorded	???
Genre	Lo-fi
Length	42:02
Label	Emperor Jones
Producer	John Darnielle
Professional reviews
	Allmusic link; Pitchfork (8.2/10) 4/30/2002; Popmatters (favorable) 3/29/2002;
The Mountain Goats chronology

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All Hail West Texas is an album by The Mountain Goats. After the slight increase in production values on 2000's The Coroner's Gambit, All Hail West Texas is, as of 2008^[update], the last Mountain Goats album on which all the songs were recorded on John Darnielle's trademark Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox.

The album is loosely a concept album, with the cover stating that the album consists of "fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys". Many of the songs explicitly reference places in Texas, and evoke a lifestyle ethos born of the vast expanses of desert and highway found in West Texas itself.

Several songs were written to appear on the record that were not included in its final version. Three were given away on the Tiny Mix Tapes website ("Song for God", "Warm Lonely Planet", and "Waco"). John Darnielle said there was a full set of fifteen outtakes that he intended to release for free one day, but he destroyed them after hearing about the leak of Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg. It is not known if that set included the three listed above or not.

When the promotional copies of this album were sent out, a unique General Highway Map of a part of West Texas was included in the mailing. Apparently this was not acknowledged by any of the critics who received it.^[1]