February 18 - The Only Thing I Know

This is an interesting time for production on Mountain Goats songs, as they move between solo and multi-instrumental and between tape recorder and studio. Sometimes this works very well, as with Song For Dana Plato. Other times...

OK, that feels unfair. I like this song quite a lot. There's something assured and melancholy about the instrumentation and it both tries things and identifies a solid folk pop groove to sit in. I just kind of want to hear a version of this in a better studio where the levels and the various things that this song is trying to do were able to balance against each other. I want lines like this to blast a hole in the listener's chest:

And I know you're lyingAnd you know you're lying tooThat is just about the only thing I know about you

And that just doesn't quite get there on this one. This isn't disappointment in the sense of something being bad, but I want to see this song fly when it manages to run and leap.