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        <title><![CDATA[ Miscellany - pckt ]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[ https://miscellany.pckt.blog ]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
        <language>en</language>
        <pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:04:07 +0000</pubDate>

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                <title>I worked out what I&#039;m going to do with this</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/i-worked-out-what-im-going-to-do-with-this-hejt4ef</link>
                <description><![CDATA[So I&#039;m compulsive about signing up for new things and then not using them. Over the more than two decades that blogging has been a thing I&#039;ve probably made more than twenty and not used them because there&#039;s something terrifying about the blank feed that could be anything. I always want it to be Important. And in my brain the barrier between Important and Pretentious is at best semipermeable. I always work better with a structure or a challenge than without one, so I&#039;m going to steal a challenge ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">i-worked-out-what-im-going-to-do-with-this-hejt4ef</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:24:49 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 16th - The Autopsy Garland</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-16th-the-autopsy-garland-dnve23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Another rich vein of Mountain Goats songs: songs about Guys. This is a haunting and oppressive piece of music, one that sounds like night, the kind of night with something in it. There&#039;s a darkness in it, and some themes dealt with much more directly than in most Mountain Goats songs. Mentions of rich men loving their twelve year olds are direct and painful body blows, dangerous noises that let you know that someone had been exploited and someone had been failed. It&#039;s obviously a song about Judy...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-16th-the-autopsy-garland-dnve23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:40:23 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 15th - For Charles Bronson</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-15th-for-charles-bronson-dn5y23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I love a good Mountain Goats biographical, almost as much as I love a good Mountain Goats instruction song where each line is something that the song&#039;s subject should or must do. I was in the wrong generation for Charles Bronson. I was born after his great performances (Dirty Dozen, Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape) so my reference points were a mix of films that people&#039;s dads liked that were played on Sundays during the day on BBC2, star of extremely ropy TV movies like Family Of Cops, and m...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-15th-for-charles-bronson-dn5y23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:33:08 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 14th - Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-14th-rotten-stinking-mouthpiece-u400g9n</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is a fragment of a story turned it not a different story. An inspiration from the culmination of an old film where Lon Chaney Jr&#039;s part was rewritten to contain almost no dialogue, apparently due to his recovery from surgery, with this song&#039;s title being part of his only dialogue. There is a delight in finding the art in shlock. The Indestructible Man is a short film of no real note and seemingly not a tremendous about of quality, but the motivation of the tragic monster at its core is enou...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-14th-rotten-stinking-mouthpiece-u400g9n</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:09:46 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 13th - Catherine Antrim&#039;s Kid</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-13th-catherine-antrims-kid-e3h148c</link>
                <description><![CDATA[A couple of neat mini-genres coming together here. Mountain Goats demo tapes and extras, and Mountain Goats biographicals. This is the story - apocryphal and purposefully anachronistic - of Billy The Kid, a person who is these days almost entirely fiction. There&#039;s one photo, a handful of records and accounts, a number of very real murders, and a story so powerful it has outlasted any sense of the reality. What remains is essentially as folkloric an American creation as John Bunyan, considerably ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-13th-catherine-antrims-kid-e3h148c</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:05:10 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 12 - Used To Haunt</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-12-used-to-haunt-w5a764p</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is a ghost story. And so obviously it&#039;s beautiful. The sort of warm piano that makes you feel like you&#039;re on a show on network television that&#039;s too sentimental to be a comedy and too funny to be a drama. This is a ghost story. And so it&#039;s actually a story about memory. The traces of people, the secrets they leave behind, the things you loved and hated and regretted about them, the things you miss about them. It&#039;s a song about where people aren&#039;t, and that&#039;s why it&#039;s fun and tragic at the s...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-12-used-to-haunt-w5a764p</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:52:49 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 11th - Bristol Hotel Sutra</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-11th-bristol-hotel-sutra-w54x64p</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Moving away from The Life Yet To Come but staying with God, this is a small but delightful devotional. It&#039;s about loving something greater in trying times, and finding ways to feel and express that love in times where the world feels loveless. While this isn&#039;t my favourite Mountain Goats song, this is one that sums up a particular aspect of who John is in fiery intensity. Faith shining through trauma. This would also be an essentially perfect song over the end credits of a Mountain Goats documen...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-11th-bristol-hotel-sutra-w54x64p</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:23:16 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 10th - Enoch 18:14</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-10th-enoch-1814-j9dypt6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Now this is interesting. The book of Enoch is not a book of the bible. Or rather not a book of most bibles. It&#039;s not within the Old Testament as it appears in most versions of the Christian bible, nor within the canon of Rabbinic Judaism, outside of certain faith traditions largely in Ethiopia. It&#039;s an apocalyptic text about angels. Which makes it fertile ground of a song largely inspired by a Playstation 2 JRPG. It&#039;s a pleasant little horror about forbidden places, where you can get to the thre...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-10th-enoch-1814-j9dypt6</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:31:50 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 9th: Matthew 11:14-19</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-9th-matthew-1114-19-ps2vfky</link>
                <description><![CDATA[The unreleased demo of a song intended for an album based on bible verses is even for the Mountain Goats a fairly obscure corner, and one that this song scuttles into still further with an allegorical narrative that I don&#039;t think I have the brain to fully unpack. I feel like I can see both why John wrote this and why it didn&#039;t make the album. It&#039;s undeniably pleasant to listen to (probably because it&#039;s using the same four chords john uses most of the etc etc) but it&#039;s an earlier way of approachi...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-9th-matthew-1114-19-ps2vfky</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:22:40 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 8th - Matthew 25:21</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-8th-matthew-2521-re4buz7</link>
                <description><![CDATA[To my knowledge, I have only been in a room while someone died there once. It was predictably enough a hospital room, and it was not unexpected. My wife&#039;s grandfather. Basically my grandfather. He was older, had lived a long and eventful life, and had his granddaughters by his side, although I don&#039;t believe he was aware enough of what was happening to know this. But he left this world loved. It&#039;s a strange vigil, sitting in a hospital room, waiting for something you don&#039;t want to happen to happe...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-8th-matthew-2521-re4buz7</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:51:15 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 7th - Deuteronomy 2 10</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-7th-deuteronomy-2-10-qbc29a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[All I could think of the first time I heard this song was the Thylacine Wolf. And how unlikely it was that such a creature survived just long enough for us to get weird video of it, and then - entirely because of us - died out. This is a lament for endings. Specifically endings we caused. There was diversity and strangeness and beauty in this world that went away because we were careless or because we wanted a world we controlled more. And that is quite simply hard to properly comprehend and dea...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-7th-deuteronomy-2-10-qbc29a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:01:30 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 6th - I Used To Live Here</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-6th-i-used-to-live-here-qbbd9a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Afraid I don&#039;t have much for this one. It&#039;s a song about going back to where you used to belong. Sort of like The Old Apartment by Barenaked Ladies, which is the most blasphemous comparison I will make this whole year I think. Sorry, I&#039;m drained. Multiple long days. Prepping for an appraisal and there was a question about how I was doing and it took me 15 minutes to even start answering it]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-6th-i-used-to-live-here-qbbd9a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:25:35 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 5th - John 4:16</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-5th-john-416-j9qupt6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[The core of this song is a simple and beautiful ballad. Someone living with the torments of the world finding consolation in the memory and love of someone who is not there. I know you&#039;re thinking of me &#039;cause it&#039;s just about to rain is an entirely perfect line and strongly evokes the feeling of inner comfort when the world is only bearable because beauty and love exist somewhere. Because this is John, the main character is a prisoner in a gladiatorial arena of some kind, but that&#039;s the lavish a...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-5th-john-416-j9qupt6</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:49:15 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 4th - Hebrews 11:40</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-4th-hebrews-1140-407ya1t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is an oblique song, and seemingly deliberately so. John likes to unpack the personal behind walls of allegory and imagery, and so allegory and imagery are what we&#039;re left with. This gives us a second day of songs about bodies. And in particular about the yawning chasm between the actual and the perfect. This makes this a song of self inflicted injuries, of challenges that nobody asked the singer to fight, and of things that are not real that he is trying to reify into existence. Making his ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-4th-hebrews-1140-407ya1t</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:26:57 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 3rd - Isaiah 45:23</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-3rd-isaiah-4523-5megv73</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I&#039;ve gone through a lot of influences that I see prominently in Mountain Gopats songs. Lots of Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen, some They Might Be giants, a lot of hardcore and post-hardcore. I wasn&#039;t expecting Creedence Clearwater Revival. And yet here we are. That&#039;s where we are musically. Lyrically, we&#039;re in a place that I&#039;ve found myself a lot in the discomfort of this current heatwave and more broadly in the discomfort of this current world. Trying to find the distance that can exist between t...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-3rd-isaiah-4523-5megv73</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:46:27 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 2 - 1 Samuel 15 23</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-2-1-samuel-15-23-qbsf9a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is a smoky and low key song, primarily John and his guitar with strange itinerant percussion moving through slowly. In terms of content it&#039;s a meditation on witchcraft, or upon what is treated as witchcraft. The lead character is a healer of - as far as we know - no actual ability. The extent of the good he does is probably in that he allowed sick people to be seen by someone. Nonetheless that is something, and as Terry Pratchett said, some people will get better from anything. So the quest...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-2-1-samuel-15-23-qbsf9a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:17:19 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 1st - Romans 10:9</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-1st-romans-109-9czds7z</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Going to do this for The Life Of The World To Come. These songs have associated bible verses, so let&#039;s actually read the bible verses. KJV because I&#039;m English and that&#039;s the C of E bible: Romans 10:9 I&#039;ve observed before that one of the areas where I feel most external to John and his music is in the area of faith. Namely that he has it and I don&#039;t and that&#039;s not a positive or a negative about either of us, it&#039;s just who and what we are.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-1st-romans-109-9czds7z</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:05:11 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>31st June - Supergenesis</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/31st-june-supergenesis-q2th9a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[There&#039;s a subtle lie that songwriters tell you, and it comes in the form of songs that tell you that you might be beaten down and defeated now but one day you will rise. The lie is not in what the songs say but in the tone. It&#039;s a hope, an article of faith, an assurance of better days to come. And something that&#039;s true. But sometimes the fact that you will get up and keep fighting is a fucking lament. Things suck, and they hurt, and they&#039;re too much, and in the misery of defeat there&#039;s always th...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">31st-june-supergenesis-q2th9a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:48:57 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 30 - Sax Rohmer #1</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-30-sax-rohmer-1-d8zb23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It&#039;s easy and not necessarily helpful to talk about eras of Mountain Goats songs. Certainly it&#039;s clear that songs with the mechanical groan of a tape recorder belong to a particular period -unless they don&#039;t - but other indicators are vaguer. There&#039;s several albums where the songs become much more personal, there&#039;s many points where the music gets more experimental, or John&#039;s love of pastiche comes to the fore. But these periods blend into each other. I&#039;m saying all this to slightly undermine my...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-30-sax-rohmer-1-d8zb23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:08:27 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 29th - Lovecraft In Brooklyn</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-29th-lovecraft-in-brooklyn-tdppqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Guys, it&#039;s fucking hot. Not just July hot, but the continuation and worsening of a literal month long heatwave. Today&#039;s been worse than it&#039;s been the last week, and we&#039;ve been huddling behind fans and air conditioners. We don&#039;t have proper AC in England, our buildings aren&#039;t built for it. So we have this freestanding one with a hose that goes to the window. I love it and it doesn&#039;t work well enough. The garden is dying apart from the bits I remember to water, which isn&#039;t enough of it, just the r...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-29th-lovecraft-in-brooklyn-tdppqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:32:23 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 28th - New Zion</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-28th-new-zion-sctwz85</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Sometimes all you need is a pastoral about an imaginary cult. A quiet idyll about the charismatic movement when it&#039;s become less charismatic, when you&#039;re not even desperate to get away, it&#039;s just a minor irritation of your day. That&#039;s in a sense when a cult really dies, isn&#039;t it? We think it&#039;s when it turns from being a place people love to a place people fear, but you can keep people together with fear. You might even be able to turn them back towards love if you&#039;re clever. But if you&#039;re just a...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-28th-new-zion-sctwz85</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:11:55 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 27th - Going To Lubbock</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-27th-going-to-lubbock-hz0et4e</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It&#039;s appropriate to have a song that sounds like it&#039;s been unearthed, from a band that John was in rather than strictly speaking the Mountain Goats, about a Weekly World News story of a man discovering Goliath&#039;s skull. The This Year notes even give us a pretty good idea of when the song was written, which is handy. John started pretty good, and got even better, at these slices of life. Life breathed into a weird vignette of oddness in the world. Things that aren&#039;t real but feel real, rendered wi...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-27th-going-to-lubbock-hz0et4e</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:18:08 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 25 - Surrounded</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-25-surrounded-td3tqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[One of the joys of the Mountain Goats, especially in their collaborations, is their ability to write songs about things nobody has covered before. There&#039;s so many songs that everyone&#039;s done. But which other band is going to give you an inside look on the ennui suffered by the workers on the moon based organ harvesting operation during their off-time in seclusion in Colorado? All right, maybe the Decemberists or the Mechanisms, but who else? It also helps that it&#039;s a bop. A cheerful sad lonely bo...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-25-surrounded-td3tqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:58:44 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 26 - Satori In Denver</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-26-satori-in-denver-d8h923r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I realised I was a day ahead just after listening to this, but I figured I&#039;d comment on it anyway. This is (in a complimentary way) simultaneously the most Nick Drake and the most Smashing Pumpkins I&#039;ve heard Mountain Goats sound. This is a sing that makes sense in the weird space where night hasn&#039;t ended bot morning has sort of begun. Lost hours, where it can feel like nobody in the world is awake or around. John says in his notes that this is about an astronaut breaking protocol and making a c...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-26-satori-in-denver-d8h923r</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:46:29 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 24 - Sudden Oak Death</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-24-sudden-oak-death-z1f6dj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[There&#039;s something oppressive about this one, a feeling like the instruments are too loud and too close and too much. It fits the subject matter incredibly well. And also means that this is a hard one to write about. It&#039;s been a lot of week, and I need the music to be further away and to matter less.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-24-sudden-oak-death-z1f6dj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:47:37 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 23 - Black Pear Tree</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-23-black-pear-tree-bwtecy2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[An unexpected voice on this one. I haven&#039;t heard Kaki King before, and that&#039;s fairly obviously an oversight and one I&#039;ll have to correct. This, to me, is a song about the wrong kind of peace. The sort that&#039;s a respite between moments of pain, not an end to pain. Of knowing that the pain is still there even if you aren&#039;t able to feel it at this second. Back in 2012 I pulled a muscle in my back. Pulled it badly, and in such a way that I couldn&#039;t comfortably sit, stand, or lie. I was a crablike thi...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-23-black-pear-tree-bwtecy2</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:27:15 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 22 - So Desperate</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-22-so-desperate-43k1a1t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Back to heresy again for a while. What&#039;s interesting is that if you&#039;d played this song to me without me seeing the cover and asked me to guess what album it was from, I would definitely have guessed The Sunset Tree. It has that album&#039;s sense of yearning, of need. It&#039;s often the case that different eras of the Mountain Goats leak into each other, either as early hints of what is to come, or references back to what came before. There&#039;s a song on Transcendental Youth that I&#039;ll talk about when we ge...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-22-so-desperate-43k1a1t</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:27:49 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 21 - Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is In Another Castle</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-21-thank-you-mario-but-our-princess-is-in-another-castle-d8jh23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Sometimes John Darnielle&#039;s songs are complex and multilayered, sometime beautiful in their simplicity. This is a sing about what it must feel like for Toad when mario shows up and kicks ass, what else is there to say?]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-21-thank-you-mario-but-our-princess-is-in-another-castle-d8jh23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:25:52 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 20 - Mosquito Repellent</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-20-mosquito-repellent-d80f23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Most of the songs in This Year are Mountain Goats alone, or something calling itself Mountain Goats when it&#039;s John and miscellaneous other people. There aren&#039;t many (although there&#039;s a couple) that are full collaborations. The first thing to note about this song is how fucking great the guitar is. Kaki King isn&#039;t someone I had come across before, but now I&#039;m going to have to go digging, which is what collaborations are for, after all. There is so much in this one guitar part, and so much more in...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-20-mosquito-repellent-d80f23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:12:10 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 19th - Satanic Messiah</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-19th-satanic-messiah-vm14y0t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It&#039;s tough to know where to start with this song. It&#039;s one you feel more than hear, and one you experience emotionally. I get hit by a wave of sad and happy nostalgia when I hear it, as if something had happened and it was right that it had happened, but that it meant that a status quo I was comfortable in was ending. One of the sad but also slightly comforting things about being raised outside of any religion is that I have no firsthand expectations of what prophesied times would be. Only cultu...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-19th-satanic-messiah-vm14y0t</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:44:17 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 18th - Sarcofago Live</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-18th-sarcofago-live-d83g23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Appropriately for a track on Satanic Messiah this isn&#039;t a song about satan or anger or anything similar, but is instead a sing about a different kind of universal experience: the gig that is about to change your life. The room and the people where music is about to change things for you in the most profound way. I have a couple of candidates for this. One was my first gig. Therapy? at the Royal Court in Liverpool, nearly 32 years ago now. I was 16 and with a group of people I nervously and tenta...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-18th-sarcofago-live-d83g23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:14:54 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 17 - Wizard Buys A Hat</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-17-wizard-buys-a-hat-fsvnhyp</link>
                <description><![CDATA[If you were to map out all of the Mountain Goats discography on a piece of paper, or a 3d display, or some other way of doing such an obviously absurd thing, and on that map or whatever you found Up The Wolves and then you found Training Montage, Wizard Buys A Hat would be the exact midpoint. Or it wouldn&#039;t. The visual metaphor is incoherent. Sorry. What I&#039;m trying to say is that Character plots revenge is a genre in songs by John Darnielle, and at one end of that scale you have ...and knows it ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-17-wizard-buys-a-hat-fsvnhyp</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:17:41 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 16 - Heretic Pride</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-16-heretic-pride-e7cv48c</link>
                <description><![CDATA[The title track of this album is a great short work of fiction about zealotry and faith and standing for what&#039;s right even when the world says you&#039;re wrong. It&#039;s also a great short work of fiction about why those things I just said aren&#039;t necessarily always positive. This is the story of a martyr, right up to the very moment of his martyrdom, where a number of truths will either be the case or not be the case. The heretical reckoning he is waiting for will (let&#039;s play the odds here) not be comin...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-16-heretic-pride-e7cv48c</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jul 2026 22:24:56 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 15 - Tianchi Lake</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-15-tianchi-lake-fs58hyp</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Well, I wrote an entire post for this and the blog ate it. Lost forever, like a sea monster in a Chinese lake.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-15-tianchi-lake-fs58hyp</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:25:37 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 14 - Sept 15 1983</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-14-sept-15-1983-hz5nt4e</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Nobody writes a musical obituary like John Darnielle. He has a particular gift for the last moments, for the codas of lives that end up defining or describing them exactly. I&#039;ll admit to being unfamiliar with the work of Prince Far I before this, clearly my loss. But I&#039;m aware from reading after hearing this of how important his faith was to him, and the most powerful part of this song when viewed through this lens is its consolation. This is not a lament. It&#039;s an act of coming to terms. This ha...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-14-sept-15-1983-hz5nt4e</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:07:49 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 13 - In the Craters on the Moon</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-13-in-the-craters-on-the-moon-td55qge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Paranoia has a sound. It&#039;s something close and noisy and dark and warm. It&#039;s too many things too close that you can&#039;t see until you bump into them. it&#039;s unexpected strings and a voice going from singing to screaming so slowly that you can&#039;t say exactly when the change happens. If Get Lonely was an album examining loneliness, this song is examining what happens when that loneliness is internal, where nobody can get close and survive, and what that does to you. When you&#039;ve gone past the point wher...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-13-in-the-craters-on-the-moon-td55qge</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:18:29 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 12 - Autoclave</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-12-autoclave-wgjt64p</link>
                <description><![CDATA[In the middle period of the Mountain Goats (and it&#039;s July, we&#039;re well into that) there are a couple of overarching themes that it&#039;s worth observing. The songs are more confessional biographically, but they&#039;re also often much more nakedly emotional whether what is being talked about is directly an incident from the songwriter&#039;s life or not. Early Mountain Goats had a tendency to hide behind poetry, to allude to horror and vulnerability and indeed enthusiasm and passion rather than addressing thes...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-12-autoclave-wgjt64p</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 11 - Michael Myers Resplendent</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-11-michael-myers-resplendent-p96efky</link>
                <description><![CDATA[All right, let&#039;s be heretics. This song could not be more different from the previous album. Huge, bombastic, drums like gunshots, soaring strings, and a narrative about the focal role of the killer in a slasher film. I love a good villain. And my definition of good villain is very particular. I love a character who moves the narrative, whose presence is the cause of action. I love seeing the motivation that means that the story is something instead of nothing. Sometimes that&#039;s revenge, sometime...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-11-michael-myers-resplendent-p96efky</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:02:38 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 9 - Wild Sage</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-9-wild-sage-scg9z85</link>
                <description><![CDATA[An interesting, although perhaps inevitable - thing about this album full of songs about loneliness: they&#039;re all first person. John&#039;s songs tend to be first person anyway, especially the ones that are to a degree autobiographical, but it strikes me listening to this one that it would be even more difficult to write a second person song about loneliness. Because caring about someone enough to observe their loneliness usually means they aren&#039;t alone any more. Some manage it: Ben Folds&#039; Fred Jones ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-9-wild-sage-scg9z85</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:30:50 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 8 - Songs for Lonely Giants</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-8-songs-for-lonely-giants-5ahjv73</link>
                <description><![CDATA[After several days of solitude songs where the loneliness was the absence of a specific other, we come back to one where the absence is of... everyone. Alone not in the crowd but in its absence. It&#039;s impossible to say if this is a better or worse loneliness but it is markedly and remarkable different. In one the absence is concentrated to a human shape, or a human-shaped gap where someone isn&#039;t. Here, the absence is like a field, encompassing all There&#039;s a sense in which this feels more natural....]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-8-songs-for-lonely-giants-5ahjv73</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:43:37 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 7 - Woke Up New</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-7-woke-up-new-e7qw48c</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This song is a joyous whisper, a small delight that revels in its own quiet guilt. It&#039;s a song - as most of Get Lonely is - about absence, but it&#039;s a song that carried its own guilt. Not guilt for what the narrator has done, but distinct guilt for how the narrator feels. The core of this is the ambiguity of its central message. Free, lonely, scared. What do I do without you? How can the mundane feel so alien? It is, crucially, not quite a lament. The narrator is sad and confused, but not despair...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-7-woke-up-new-e7qw48c</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:04:14 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 6 - Moon Over Goldsboro</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-6-moon-over-goldsboro-fsn1hyp</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is a lush dark landscape of a song. It reminded me of some of the early Mountain Goats songs, which was appropriate, as this album seems to be revisiting the places in retrospect that the early songs were experiencing as they happened. Fictional but not less real. This is a ghost story. Every song about loneliness is a ghost story. Every song about guilt is a ghost story. We&#039;re haunted by places not being what they were, people still being there in a sense and being gone in every other sens...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-6-moon-over-goldsboro-fsn1hyp</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:36:58 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 5 - Get Lonely</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-5-get-lonely-p91afky</link>
                <description><![CDATA[We reach the album&#039;s title track, and every word of it is a body blow. It&#039;s a day to day itinerary of things being done by someone who is alone in the sense of without one particular person. And I&#039;ve mentioned it before on here but there was a period of my life where that was me. Several periods, actually, if I think about it. I&#039;m not really counting the ones where I was alone because there wasn&#039;t anyone there yet. That&#039;s honestly standard for somewhat neurodivergent young people without particu...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-5-get-lonely-p91afky</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 05 Jul 2026 22:13:36 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 4 - Half Dead</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-4-half-dead-jqbapt6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Our tour of loneliness takes us somewhere quite specific this time: the loneliness not of being alone but of being without one person in particular. And, John being John, it does so in the most jaunty, breathy way possible. There&#039;s a curse: life goes on. We can&#039;t help it, we don&#039;t really have any control over it apart from the obvious, but the wheel keeps turning even when it shouldn&#039;t. This isn&#039;t a new phenomenon, and some of the best art in the world has come about as a result of this. Auden&#039;s...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-4-half-dead-jqbapt6</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 22:41:33 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 3 - Maybe Sprout Wings</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-3-maybe-sprout-wings-jq24pt6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[For a summer day this is a cold song, cold and sitting in empty and foggy space. What I get from this song is the ghosts of trauma. Voices in dreams that aren&#039;t really there and don&#039;t say what they said. Memories given form and distorted through the process. Those moments before dawn where the membrane between what you dreamed and what you think is at its thinnest. There&#039;s someone I wake up with a lot who has a superstition, and when someone you love has a superstition, so do you. If they have a...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-3-maybe-sprout-wings-jq24pt6</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:13:55 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 2 - If You See Light</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-2-if-you-see-light-bwuzcy2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[After an album of deeply personal songs where the identity of the I was known, it&#039;s interesting to get to a series of Mountain Goats songs from points of view that are more distant, more fictional, or otherwise exploring new ideas. John is nothing if not a sucker for a concept album, and when the concept changes sometimes it changes. This is a song about solitude, but a different kind of solitude from a lot of the rest of this album. It&#039;s solitude when you are kept apart from others by circumsta...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-2-if-you-see-light-bwuzcy2</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:49:39 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>July 1 - Ox Baker Triumphant</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/july-1-ox-baker-triumphant-uex7g9n</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Second half of the year begins here. This is a cheerful song about a villain, which is always nice to hear. I don&#039;t have much for this one today, even through this is a song about a pro wrestler and thus very in my wheelhouse. I&#039;ve had a combination of time off work, not enough sleep, and stupidly hot weather. I&#039;m coming back to myself and it takes time. Hope that&#039;s OK.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">july-1-ox-baker-triumphant-uex7g9n</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 01 Jul 2026 22:10:17 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 30 - Going Invisible</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-30-going-invisible-2nkfbg2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[The revisiting of demos is one of my favourite parts about the late month in This Year. Rarities, strange versions of things, small pieces of nearly forgotten art, and amongst them we have this: a song that is so perfect in its simple version that any studio version would feel like a downgrade. I never worry about feeling like a background figure. In fact, when it happens I usually welcome it. There&#039;s something worthwhile about not having to be the centre of the conversation, to working unseen, ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-30-going-invisible-2nkfbg2</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:18:44 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 29 - Keeping House</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-29-keeping-house-bwk9cy2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Before I get into the lyrics I just want to delight in the gorgeous, sumptuous orchestration of this track, which starts and frenetic jangling guitars and grows to a joy of brass. And then we come to a fast upbeat set of lyrics about the futility of running from the past and the necessity of trying. Everything you try and leave behind comes with you. Everything you do to tidy up after the past just leaves more clean space for memory to track muddy footprints into you. The ghost on your doorstep ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-29-keeping-house-bwk9cy2</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:55:31 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 28 - Attention All Pickpockets</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-28-attention-all-pickpockets-q2cz9a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It&#039;s interesting to move away from the Sunset Tree and towards something that feels a lot fuzzier around the edges, albeit on a number of related subjects. This is a song about change and how we cope with it or don&#039;t cope with it, and the realisation that the past really did happen to someone else, even if bits of that someone else are still here. And you can&#039;t change this. The past happened, and a version of you was there and you have the memories, and some of those still feel like they happene...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-28-attention-all-pickpockets-q2cz9a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2026 21:10:24 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 27th - Tyler Lamber&#039;s Grave</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-27th-tyler-lambers-grave-z11mdj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I don&#039;t have much to say about this one. It&#039;s musically beautiful, deeply sad, and something about it feels like listening to it is hearing something I&#039;m not supposed to hear. The unexpected deaths of the famous are often uncomfortable because of how the press treats them. The unexpected deaths of the relatives of the famous... that&#039;s where I cross from feeling uncomfortable to feeling like my presence is an intrusion.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-27th-tyler-lambers-grave-z11mdj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:25:38 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 26 - Song For Dennis Brown</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-26-song-for-dennis-brown-2n83bg2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[A small and occasionally visited microgenre of The Mountain Goats is that of songs of the last moments. Early in this year we had Jimi Hendrix. Later on we&#039;ll have artists and bluesmen. Here it&#039;s a reggae singer whose influence outstrips his fame. But this is also not a sing about Dennis Brown. It&#039;s a song about how normal the world is when someone isn&#039;t going to be part of it any more. The Last Day Of Jimi Hendrix&#039;s Life was about how normal the world was for Jimi before his death. This is a si...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-26-song-for-dennis-brown-2n83bg2</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:22:05 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 24 - Build Your Own Container Garden</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-24-build-your-own-container-garden-q2dz9a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is a suitable song for a day when the heat and the humidity are causing the air to act like water, and I&#039;m rising and falling on every wave. This is a temperate country and it&#039;s currently not behaving in a temperate manner. So what better than a sleepy sad meditation on a journey taken to find a place to test one&#039;s commitment to remaining alive? This is a low late night drive on a hot day, looking out at landscapes of close shadows and distant homes. The thing about loneliness is that it&#039;s ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-24-build-your-own-container-garden-q2dz9a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:19:50 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 21 - Whon</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-21-whon-tzfhqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is a barely recorded song that seems to only exist online as a live taping complete with audience sound. It&#039;s like listening at a bedroom door to someone playing for themselves. When writing the book, John apparently thought there was no live version of this. I&#039;m glad there is. It&#039;s John in a mood of quiet tired whimsy, and some of the lines are absolute all timers. You will never quite escape last year. None of us will. Because Mountain Goats are very much a taper&#039;s band, in the same way t...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-21-whon-tzfhqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 21 Jun 2026 20:57:25 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 20 - The Day The Aliens Came</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-20-the-day-the-aliens-came-28z4bg2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[The way this year of songs moves from demos to much more produced material is part of its charm as each day is either a treat you know or a curiosity to discover. This song is fascinating because it feels like one that needed to be written, needed to be recorded, but in some ways that was enough. This is a song that feels foundational to a lot of other later Mountain Goats songs. The violent wish fulfilment fantasy at its core (of aliens coming to destroy everyone but you) feels like a precursor...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-20-the-day-the-aliens-came-28z4bg2</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 21:14:01 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 19 - Pale Green Things</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-19-pale-green-things-qdff9a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[There&#039;s a sense in which this is a strange song to be on The Sunset Tree. It takes place a long time later, and while the your in the first verse is clearly the person who The Sunset Tree is about, everything about this song feels... later. A different person with only the most general view of who the rest of the album was about. What I get from this song is that forgiveness is hard and ugly and doesn&#039;t feel worth it and yet is necessary to avoid carrying frozen poison around with you. There are...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-19-pale-green-things-qdff9a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:12:06 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 17 - Pseudothyrum Song</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-17-pseudothyrum-song-6g1hkgj</link>
                <description><![CDATA[A blast from the even further past, this song feels like an ancestor of the Sunset Tree but simultaneously sung by an older narrator, one who could get the perspective that The Sunset Tree deliberately eschews in favour of immediacy. It&#039;s a song about sadness regarding cruelty, and feels like it comes from a place of regret and an attempt at understanding rather than anger. But that said, the first time I heard the line I think someone was mean to you when you were little it felt like the funnie...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-17-pseudothyrum-song-6g1hkgj</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:18:47 +0000</pubDate>
                            </item>
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                <title>June 16 - Up The Wolves</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-16-up-the-wolves-zct8dj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[The thing about pain is that sometimes its temporary absence feels blissful. It&#039;s how a lot of people I&#039;ve known with addiction issues have explained it to me. Just not being in pain. Up The Wolves is not without pain, it&#039;s a song about emotional and physical neglect and abandonment, but it has some moments of such perfect promised relief that listening to it feels like being washed in joy. Joy, and of course anger. For every There&#039;s gonna come a day when you feel better there&#039;s a I&#039;m gonna brib...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-16-up-the-wolves-zct8dj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:16:40 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 15th - This Year</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-15th-this-year-tz0jqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Happy This Year day, everyone. You made it. If the Mountain Goats are remembered for one song, it&#039;s likely to be this one. And if not this one then No Children. I don&#039;t know if that was true ten years ago, but post-pandemic this song kept so many people alive in ways that are at best partially associated with the lyrics. Taken as just the song, this is an incredible mix of reminiscence, horror, and defiance. The trauma of being young, of tasting the solace of a better life, of returning to the w...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-15th-this-year-tz0jqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:57:09 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 14 - You Were Cool</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-14-you-were-cool-f97xhyp</link>
                <description><![CDATA[A remarkably simple song that connects in the simplest way to its emotions. I think of this as a cousin to Song for my Stepfather, albeit a cousin in a healthier place. It&#039;s also very strongly linked in my head to Amy AKA Spent Gladiator. It&#039;s often odd for me to listen to John&#039;s very early material and see how deep he was in allegory, trying to sneak meaning through in deniable ways. And then at some point figuring out that in a lot of cases he could just come out and say what he felt, what was...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-14-you-were-cool-f97xhyp</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:30:59 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 13 - Rescue Breathing</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-13-rescue-breathing-16zw8wv</link>
                <description><![CDATA[John&#039;s ephemera (and this sat in a notebook for twenty years before being recorded) are often the places where he is at his most playful. And by playful I definitely don&#039;t mean unserious or lighthearted. Often the sweetest smallest song is the most direct route to the darkest and most painful material, with the light of the melody allowing the lyrics to carry what they need to carry. And here what they carry is a combination of tenderness and everyday horror. This is an overdose story framed as ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-13-rescue-breathing-16zw8wv</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:13:08 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 12 - From TG&amp;Y</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-12-from-tgy-8kzhnwy</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is an anthem of helplessness. Not despair, at least not overt despair, but a song about the impossibility of changing what is happening without changing who you are, and how the attempt to keep things together can just mean destroying them more slowly. Depression is exhausting. You feel all these things or nothing, you find yourself cut off from so much that meant something to you. And at the same time you still have to get up and have a shower and worry about functioning either within soci...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-12-from-tgy-8kzhnwy</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:36:22 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 10 - Dilaudid</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-10-dilaudid-tz73qge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Everything about listening to this makes me tense in the best way. The staccato strings and the urgent nature of the lyrics add up to the feeling of something constrained, desperate, vulnerable, and passionate. This song has some of John&#039;s best lyrical content, moving effortlessly from the urgent paranoia of the world going wrong to the horny desperation of an early girlfriend where lust is taking over from love, and the way these two things crash into each other. it&#039;s a song of fumbled encounte...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-10-dilaudid-tz73qge</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:40:57 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 9 - Scavenger Babies</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-9-scavenger-babies-bnt4cy2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It&#039;s never not going to be a good time when you have a rolling guitar, John in trembling voice, and a list of things to do. A good John List Song feels like a properly conducted ritual. These are the things that make you good or pure or proper or maybe just will reduce the feeling of dread in your heart for five minutes. This is both an odd song and a perfectly sensible song to drop in Sunset Tree Month. This is how you keep it together afterwards. This is how you stay as the person you became. ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-9-scavenger-babies-bnt4cy2</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:17:49 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 8 - Broom People</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-8-broom-people-923ps7z</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I mean, shit. I have coherent things to say about this song, but friends who don&#039;t have a clue, well meaning teachers is a fucking novel in a line. Solace in a chaotic life, beauty in the wild and the cold, rage and despair turning into power through pressure and releasing in the right places. The transformative power of having someone who care when nobody did.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-8-broom-people-923ps7z</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:44:17 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 7th - Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-7th-hast-thou-considered-the-tetrapod-rvb3uz7</link>
                <description><![CDATA[If Song For My Stepfather is John&#039;s pain at its most naked, this is perhaps John&#039;s pain at its most transubstantiated. Both songs describe blunt and unforgivable violence upon a child, but the points of view and the way the reality of it are processed couldn&#039;t be more different. This song, and its huge and soaring organs, aren&#039;t about the violence that was experienced, painful and traumatic though it was. This song is about the not the consolation that it might end but the consolation that one d...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-7th-hast-thou-considered-the-tetrapod-rvb3uz7</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:29:11 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 6 - Magpie</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-6-magpie-hsajt4e</link>
                <description><![CDATA[The most consciously folksy song on a not-very-folksy album, and one of the only ones to fit the Mountain Goats trope of list of things you must do which is one of my favourite tropes. Remember what we had here when there was something left to save is the kind of line that I&#039;m always going to regret not being good enough to write myself. This is a song about reckoning, and scavenging, and paying prices that might well be too bad. There&#039;s no reasoning with the magpie, he will take what he takes a...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-6-magpie-hsajt4e</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 06 Jun 2026 22:38:33 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 5 - Song For My Stepfather</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-5-song-for-my-stepfather-9275s7z</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This small beautiful song, a simple chard structure, a voice and a guitar, is the purest distillation of everything that John elaborates and explores in The Sunset Tree. It&#039;s quite shockingly painful, a story of smallness, helplessness, and the places people go in their heads when bad things happen. It&#039;s no wonder to me at all that this didn&#039;t make the album. My understanding is that John plays it from time to time to keep it alive, but I can&#039;t imagine the pain that playing this every night on a...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-5-song-for-my-stepfather-9275s7z</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:22:35 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 4 - Dance Music</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-4-dance-music-va8my0t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This gorgeous song is two vignettes of two different types of trauma. Both told in the same stream of consciousness moment-of life style, as if jumping straight into a memory already in progress. The first and simplest is about the fear of physical harm: harm to the self, harm to a loved one, from the moster living in the house. Here the dance music coming from the record player is escape and guilt and shelter all at once. The second is more complex, although it&#039;s built on the trauma of the firs...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-4-dance-music-va8my0t</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:58:17 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 3 - Abandoning My Father Talking Blues</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-3-abandoning-my-father-talking-blues-pqyjfky</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is, as John says, when it starts, a sad one. It&#039;s about people who have no choice and the choices that get made for them. It&#039;s about things that are presented as opportunities and are actually just mitigations. It&#039;s about sandboxes in parking lots and the ever present silent threat of things being worse. I&#039;ve been through many things in my life. Everyone has, that&#039;s why they call it a life. But I&#039;m quietly glad that I&#039;ve never felt unsafe in the place where I&#039;ve lived. I&#039;ve felt depressed a...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-3-abandoning-my-father-talking-blues-pqyjfky</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:30:24 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>June 2 - You Or Your Memory</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-2-you-or-your-memory-8kt0nwy</link>
                <description><![CDATA[God, this is going to be a month. The first thing to note about this song is that by the standards of the Mountain Goats it&#039;s incredibly simple. A narrative without allusion, without hiding. The events of a young man in pain contemplating something. The rest of the album is there to explain how he got here, but this song is painfully simple and to the point. The second thing to note about this song is that it&#039;s basically fucking perfect. A rolling, almost sweet song that carefully packages how d...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">june-2-you-or-your-memory-8kt0nwy</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:32:56 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 31 - Porcile</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-31-porcile-qday9a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[End of the month, time for a rarity, and this feels very much like a song that acts as a portent of times yet to come. The conceit of this song is that it&#039;s written from the point of view of a person who is changing into a pig, and the violence they unleash upon themselves in trying to cope with it. A simple theme we&#039;ve heard a thousand times before as I&#039;m sure you&#039;ll agree. The part where this sing feels like a portent is in its fear of violence. The idiot, caught in accident, expecting punishm...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-31-porcile-qday9a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 31 May 2026 22:53:19 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 30 - Cotton</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-30-cotton-vabey0t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Is whimsical catharsis a thing? This song is light and beautiful and soft, a gentle account of the things we hang onto, the memories that pain us, the scabs we pick at, the guilt we tend and maintain, and an easy instruction to do the hardest thing possible. Leave it behind. It&#039;s not forgiveness per se, it&#039;s not even forgetting. It&#039;s just... not hanging onto things.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-30-cotton-vabey0t</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 22:45:47 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 29 - Rose Quarter Drifting / We Shall All Be Healed</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-29-rose-quarter-drifting-we-shall-all-be-healed-d1xu23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is a fragment, an unreleased song that only exists in versions from radio stations and live shows. And as such it&#039;s easy to see the ideas that started here and came out later. The line stared down demons, came back breathing felt like a preview of You Were Cool or Spent Gladiator 1. And those are two of my absolute favourites. This is a song about being a ghost, about visiting ghosts. About going back to old places, which is not something you can ever actually do. There&#039;s a town I can never...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-29-rose-quarter-drifting-we-shall-all-be-healed-d1xu23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 22:22:13 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 28 - Against Pollution</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-28-against-pollution-ex2548c</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I don&#039;t know if there&#039;s such a thing as a stadium anthem of eschatological nihilism, but if there is, that&#039;s this song. A huge and momentous sound to this song, coupled with lyrics that start with a narrow focus of the mundane and horrifying, but can&#039;t help but look up to see vast and impossible futures. This is a song of redemption. Of viewing ourselves and our actions in their total form, from a perspective we can&#039;t imagine. Once you&#039;re through the nihilism it&#039;s a song of trust and hope. We wi...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-28-against-pollution-ex2548c</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 22:21:27 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 27 - Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into the Water, Triumph</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-27-pigs-that-ran-straightaway-into-the-water-triumph-d1ak23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This song is two things. First of all, it&#039;s a song played on a bus while someone is being taken to jail. Second of all, it&#039;s a song of the heart and of triumph. We Shall All Be healed is a remarkable and powerful album, but it&#039;s also kind of a beginning-to-end bummer. It&#039;s an album about addiction and the ways people survive it and don&#039;t, and neither of those options comes without pain. it&#039;s possible to sing beautifully about pain, but pain is also exhausting. This book of days isn&#039;t in strict o...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-27-pigs-that-ran-straightaway-into-the-water-triumph-d1ak23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 22:37:32 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 26 - Home Again Garden Grove</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-26-home-again-garden-grove-vasgy0t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[A rolling boil of paranoia, this is a song about scoring. The mania and the on-edge nature of looking desperately for something, caught in the rabid simplicity of needing your fix and nothing else. Everything about the song here, from the lyrics to the instrumentation to the mix, is a set of spiky lines where nothing comfortable can happen. One of the reasons I started doing this blog, started following John Darnielle&#039;s music from its earliest forms through whatever came after, is how utterly un...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-26-home-again-garden-grove-vasgy0t</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 21:38:24 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 25 - Mole</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-25-mole-tzg5qge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Sometimes the simplicity and audacity of a song just wash over you. Mole is a simple, tiny melody, a story of an addict going to visit another addict in a hospital bed that had been gained via misadventure. Small and sad and kept afloat by a false hope of better times. And then the tidal wave of the middle movement hits you, and all the chaos that is being carefully kept out rushes through the song uncontrollably and everything is enormous piano and uncontrolled noise. And then it&#039;s quiet and sm...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-25-mole-tzg5qge</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 22:15:26 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 24 - Your Belgian Things</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-24-your-belgian-things-zcysdj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[So, going to start by looking at the musicality here. This is an absolute joy of a mid century ballad. The way the guitar and bass and piano wrap around each other and the repeated poetic refrains. I can&#039;t imagine exactly what the musical this came from would be, but it would absolutely make me cry. What a mature, subtle, sensitive piece of music. And now the lyrics. John exists deep in a landscape of metaphor and imagery, and this is all about absence and traces and the things we leave behind i...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-24-your-belgian-things-zcysdj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 24 May 2026 22:15:43 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 23 - Letter From Belgium</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-23-letter-from-belgium-tzugqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[A really gorgeous post-punk sound to this one, and a style of song that has a number of my favourite features of Mountain Goats songs. I&#039;ve never done methamphetamine. For so many reasons. One of the more minor ones is that someone once descibed the feeling of it to me as like you&#039;ve stayed up until 3AM and burned past the fatigue only that&#039;s the best feeling in the world and I can&#039;t actually think of many things I&#039;d like less. Nonetheless the sound of this song is the sound that I imagine from ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-23-letter-from-belgium-tzugqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 23 May 2026 22:24:42 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 22 - Hommel West</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-22-hommel-west-6gjvkgj</link>
                <description><![CDATA[]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-22-hommel-west-6gjvkgj</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 22:32:43 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 21 - Butter Teeth</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-21-butter-teeth-vaqry0t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Still in the We Shall All Be Healed headspace, this is a b-side from a Mountain Goats single and also a quiet and assured banger. The rhyme scheme and melody are the sketch of an idea that will one day become Lovecraft In Brooklyn (more on that later), and the song itself is a slow almost leisurely exploration of the mania of an amphetamine high., This is the up, the point where everything is forward, you have been launched into gear by a substance hitting your brain and while it&#039;s there you are...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-21-butter-teeth-vaqry0t</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 21:08:30 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 20 - Linda Blair Was Born Innocent</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-20-linda-blair-was-born-innocent-16mh8wv</link>
                <description><![CDATA[We&#039;ve hit another pre-existing favourite. The opening line of this has been following me around online for like fifteen years now. And when the strings come in at the line hungry for love, ready to drown this song flies. There&#039;s something about a sing about desperate lost youth who are doomed but still celebrating. There is a joy in nihilism. As Willow Nightingale tells us, nothing matters, smile anyway.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-20-linda-blair-was-born-innocent-16mh8wv</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 21:33:12 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 19 - All up The Seething Coast</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-19-all-up-the-seething-coast-54tfv73</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is the sound of the high, the sound of contented paranoia. This whole album is about the things people go through during addiction, and this is about the worst part: the pleasure. From the droning guitar to the half spoken lyrics, this is the sound of lethargy masquerading as contentment. There&#039;s an Irvine Welsh line in Trainspotting about one of the pleasures of junk being that it simplifies everything. You&#039;re not worried about your car or your house or your girlfriend or the guy living on...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-19-all-up-the-seething-coast-54tfv73</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 21:31:02 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 18 - Slow West Vultures</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-18-slow-west-vultures-bn4ncy2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[My god, this song is huge. The soundscape is vast, the lyrics cryptic and visionary, everything about it is the overture for a statement of strangeness and desperation and hope. This is a sing by a slightly older man from the perspective of his younger self, viewing nihilism from the outside, singing about the future without imagining he would be in it. The lyrics here are sly and cynical and hu7morous and angry at the slivers of hope within. There&#039;s a maturity to this that is about more than ju...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-18-slow-west-vultures-bn4ncy2</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 21:38:27 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 16 - Beat The Devil</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-16-beat-the-devil-8kmvnwy</link>
                <description><![CDATA[So we&#039;re in the heyday of songs about smuggling, then. This is tense and lyrical, an ode to the emotions of doing something unwise and uncertain because you have to and you want to and it&#039;s the only way to get money. This is a dark song about hope, or maybe a bright song about ongoing despair. You want the narrator to succeed, and you know that on any even medium timeline he won&#039;t. And that the best and least likely outcome is that he gets out and does something else and finds a way to deal with...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-16-beat-the-devil-8kmvnwy</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 21:59:40 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>March 15 - Duane Allman Slept Here</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/march-15-duane-allman-slept-here-164p8wv</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This song is smoky and slow and tired. The lyrics in this, the live version, possibly the only version, are tired and strange and doubt themselves. And it&#039;s amazing It is what it sounds like. A song about burning yourself out of your own mind. I got five minutes sleep, it was an accident.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">march-15-duane-allman-slept-here-164p8wv</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2026 21:19:49 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 14 - Snakeheads</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-14-snakeheads-zcuhdj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[If you&#039;ve never heard a picaresque song about people smugglers heading across country in a u-haul... well, now you have. Like the best Mountain Goats songs, this one is a cheerful knife to the heart, with a combination of tenderness and cruelty. The result is a gentle portrait of ungentle people, exactly on the knife edge between being unsettlingly human about people involved in human trafficking, and unflinching in its acceptance of the reality that this means. Good music makes you think. Which...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-14-snakeheads-zcuhdj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2026 21:31:04 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 13 - Deserters</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-13-deserters-tzw6qge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It&#039;s amazing how dark and directionless this song sounds. The vocal is purposefully listless, the guitar work dissonant and uneven, and all of it adds to the effect of someone who is unconnected from reality and deeply exhausted about it. I worry about paranoia. This is a paranoid age, and it can be tough to tell the difference between justified fears and irrational impulses. This is a song that exists at the grubby edge of sanity, pushed there by drugs or psychosis, or other things. I remember ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-13-deserters-tzw6qge</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 22:17:44 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 12 - Cut Off Their Thumbs</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-12-cut-off-their-thumbs-d1gc23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[So, no song yesterday, or rather no song with a recording yesterday. This is a small delight and a curiosity, a song recorded just after Tallahassee but not released until it was posted on the Mountain Goats website a few years later. It&#039;s a rolling ballad about being in great danger and having to decide if, when people get hurt, you&#039;re one of them. Or one of the people doing the hurting. It&#039;s also a very nice sign of how far John has come as a single guitar and single voice guy that everything ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-12-cut-off-their-thumbs-d1gc23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 22:05:52 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>May 10 - No Children</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-10-no-children-f919hyp</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It&#039;s tough now to think of how this song made me feel the first time I heard it. it&#039;s become an old friend who has been there for me in all sorts of times, good and bad. The way the backing vocals burst in on in my life. The way I hope I never get sober is said as an aside. It&#039;s tough to get an objective view on something you can hear whether or not it&#039;s playing. So instead I&#039;ll talk about why I think this song has engrained so deeply in people. For one thing it&#039;s musically beautiful. The roll o...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-10-no-children-f919hyp</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 22:07:57 +0000</pubDate>
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                    <item>
                <title>May 9 - Alpha Rats Nest</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-9-alpha-rats-nest-exf848c</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Sometimes things creep up on you. They become true over a course of enough time that by the time you realise it you&#039;re realising what has happened not what is happening. So it is with this song and the realisation that Mountain Goats have gone from being a band of inscrutable, impenetrable lyrics to being a band of equally inscrutable but deeply accessible lyrics. This joyful bitter song is just as much of an expression of poisoned joy as the rest of this concept album, bus its odd wordplay seem...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
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                <pubDate>Sat, 09 May 2026 22:01:24 +0000</pubDate>
                            </item>
                    <item>
                <title>May 8 - See America Right</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-8-see-america-right-d1rv23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp is one of the lines of all time. This is an intense song of chaos, in the intense part of a relationship going bad. John&#039;s alpha couple have many twists and turns on their way to purgatory, but this one is particularly atmospheric. We don&#039;t know why the narrator was in jail, or where he and his co-conspirator in this doomed relationship will go next. All we can say is that they bring their own chaos with them, and the two forms of chaos they bring are at wa...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-8-see-america-right-d1rv23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 22:23:23 +0000</pubDate>
                            </item>
                    <item>
                <title>May 7 - Oceanographer&#039;s Choice</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-7-oceanographers-choice-ge7k55y</link>
                <description><![CDATA[A driving bop, full of energy. Starts with stabbing Superman with a broadsword and goes up from there. This is full of energy, admittedly dark energy, and is a packed fantasia of fraught things happening to fraught people. It&#039;s also... and even as I type this I&#039;m not sure exactly how I mean this... it&#039;s also one of the most normal songs that I&#039;ve heard from the Mountain Goats so far. Not in a negative sense. In more of a sense that this sounds like something that was professionally recorded in a...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-7-oceanographers-choice-ge7k55y</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 22:16:44 +0000</pubDate>
                            </item>
                    <item>
                <title>May 6 - The House That Dripped Blood</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-6-the-house-that-dripped-blood-47f3a1t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[There is something delightfully sleazy about the instrumentation of this song. I&#039;m getting a strong dose of PJ Harvey. More than that, this is a song with swagger in a way that feels new to Mountain Goats songs. The wild harmonica at the end gives this is feeling of a barely-inside house in the swamp. And in this house we see not people but the remnants of their movement. This is a home that has seen a marriage tear itself apart violently, has seen it recently. The passion and blood are still in...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-6-the-house-that-dripped-blood-47f3a1t</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 22:09:12 +0000</pubDate>
                            </item>
                    <item>
                <title>May 5th - Southwood Plantation Road</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-5th-southwood-plantation-road-zcw0dj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[A secret small love of mine: songs where someone sings la la la la We&#039;re wandering still further into Tallahassee, reaching what might be thought of as an upswing in the dysfunctional relationship that is this couple. There is happiness here, albeit a desperate happiness kicking to stay afloat. I am not gonna lose you, we are gonna stay married is a line not of affirmation but of a death grip on what it thinks joy is. And so the weird pop of this journey into one of the first fully orchestrated ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-5th-southwood-plantation-road-zcw0dj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 22:18:49 +0000</pubDate>
                            </item>
                    <item>
                <title>May 4 - First Few Desperate hours</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-4-first-few-desperate-hours-d16g23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It continues to interest me how much more complete Tallahassee feels as a sound for a band than the previous Mountain Goats albums, and band is the word here. There are at maximum three instruments playing at the same time here, not counting John&#039;s voice, and yet the sound is rich, deep, and complex. This is a song about the past catching up with you. Not in the sense of old decisions haunting you, or things you&#039;ve done biting you in the ass, or even people seeing reprisal for past actions, but ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-4-first-few-desperate-hours-d16g23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 21:37:34 +0000</pubDate>
                            </item>
                    <item>
                <title>May 3 - Tallahassee</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-3-tallahassee-f9dfhyp</link>
                <description><![CDATA[In retrospect this song is a thumping great mission statement. It&#039;s the first track on one of the two most pivotal Mountain Goats albums, with All Hail West Texas being the perfection of the Guitar and buzzing tape recorder era, and Tallahassee being the start of the full band and instrumentation era. And, let&#039;s be entirely clear about this, it&#039;s gorgeous. It&#039;s a quiet overture to an album about two people poisoning each other&#039;s lives. There&#039;s a tension in the soft bassline that gives the whole ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-3-tallahassee-f9dfhyp</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 03 May 2026 22:00:09 +0000</pubDate>
                            </item>
                    <item>
                <title>May 2 - Old College Try</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-2-old-college-try-hs2wt4e</link>
                <description><![CDATA[All right folks, it&#039;s taken us four months but we&#039;ve reached Tallahassee. And we&#039;re starting off with one of the most genuinely wonderful songs on this album. An ode to exhausted but still kicking love. Toxic, poisoned, bleeding, but still real and powerful. And my god, is the instrumentation of this utterly beautiful. The keyboard and the organs and the duochrome of the album cover. There&#039;s something sacred about this sound. It&#039;s weird because so many other versions of this theme highlight the ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-2-old-college-try-hs2wt4e</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 02 May 2026 21:49:21 +0000</pubDate>
                            </item>
                    <item>
                <title>May 1 - Twelve Hands High</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/may-1-twelve-hands-high-6gv1kgj</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Technically this isn&#039;t a Mountain Goats song. It&#039;s instead a song by The Extra Glenns, a band consisting of John Darnielle and Franklin Bruno. But what it actually is is a lovely bop with some honky tonk piano and delightful guitars. As for the narrative of this song, it&#039;s an age old story we&#039;ve all experienced. Just the moment in a tense and destructive relationship where a horse unexpectedly bursts through the wall into your house and crushes you. We&#039;ve heard this story a thousand times of cou...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">may-1-twelve-hands-high-6gv1kgj</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 01 May 2026 22:08:55 +0000</pubDate>
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