February 19 - Duke Ellington

A mainstay of all eras of the Mountain Goats is the song as a sketch. A small set of details spelling out something very specific, with the potential for universality through the small details. Here, we're getting even more specific than usual and looking at a narrator, barely pictures, listening to a jazz great in Sweden in the early 1960s and thinking about the distance between himself and the musician. A distance increased still further by this scene being drawn by an american musician in the 1990s. A distance increased somehow even further by this being described by an English blogger in 2026.

I'm tethered to something at a great distance. But that's history, really. One hand holds another holds another back to before anyone remembers anything.