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    <channel>
        <title><![CDATA[ Miscellany - pckt ]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[ https://miscellany.pckt.blog ]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
        <language>en</language>
        <pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:36:01 +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>October 7th - Doc Gooden</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/october-7th-doc-gooden-h2yat4e</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Old soldiers are one of the most fun literary tropes. Someone who was promising, and then good, and then great, and is now... this. Someone who has the skills but might now lack the finer points of the conditioning. Someone with all the dirty tricks but not the elasticity to pull all of them off. It&#039;s easy to think of old age (or even not old age but the passing of youth) as a lament. You are not what you were. But the thing is, that&#039;s the only option. Anything else is not being anything. We ido...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">october-7th-doc-gooden-h2yat4e</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:22:46 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>October 6 - Waylon Jennings Live!</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/october-6-waylon-jennings-live-2631bg2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I don&#039;t know, man. This is a lovely little song, and Waylon Jennings always felt like one of those people who was a benefit to the world in his existence. Despite living in the South I&#039;ve never been a real country guy, but the more of it sounds like Waylon and Willie and Johnny the more I like it. Music with the varnish left off. But I&#039;m not sure I connect to this song. I don&#039;t want to give it a yeah, it&#039;s fine or talk about something else, and I&#039;m fairly sure the fault is with me on this one, n...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">october-6-waylon-jennings-live-2631bg2</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:41:11 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>October 5th - In League With Dragons</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/october-5th-in-league-with-dragons-e0bu48c</link>
                <description><![CDATA[So this is the mundanity of heroic fantasy album, so if course we get a Boris Vallejo name check in this story about marking time until the world gets to feel real again. This feels like a sibling song to Up The Wolves, where time has taken the fury of needing revenge and replaced it with the cold certainty of faith. This too shall pass. In fire and blood and a settling of accounts. It&#039;s my brother&#039;s birthday today. He&#039;s 52, and four years older than me, and when you&#039;re socialised male and have ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">october-5th-in-league-with-dragons-e0bu48c</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:26:03 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>October 4 - An Antidote For Strychnine</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/october-4-an-antidote-for-strychnine-dwmw23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I mean, all of this is fiction. Even songs about real life are fictional in order to fit with the format of being a song. But this especially. It&#039;s a small odd fantasy pulp gem, someone in trouble who is trying all their usual sleuthing tricks to get out of it, and just not able to surmount the impossible, so trying new and odder things. The re are bits at the start of this song that read just as easily as desperate attempted chemistry (which you can&#039;t get a Nobel prize for) or attempted magic (...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">october-4-an-antidote-for-strychnine-dwmw23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 04 Oct 2026 21:22:55 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>October 3 - Done Bleeding</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/october-3-done-bleeding-1u3h8wv</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I&#039;m Leaving You is one of the five themes that Elvis Costello said the writers of popular music have available to them, and while the majority of Mountain Goats songs fit into his fifth category (I Believe In Something), this is very much an I&#039;m leaving you song, if you can be defined as a place. This is a song about watch ending. You had a duty, it wasn&#039;t necessarily a great one, but it was yours, and then there comes the day where it isn&#039;t any more, and that might be a good thing or a bad thin...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">october-3-done-bleeding-1u3h8wv</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:06:15 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>October 2 - No I can&#039;t</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/october-2-no-i-cant-gm9y55y</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Wow, we&#039;re a long way from this. There is such difference between the odd experiments of these early EPs and the significantly more ambitious exploration of later albums. Which isn&#039;t to say that one is better or worse than the other. Sometimes the simple execution of an idea makes it more possible to actually crack the idea open and see how it works and what it means. There are two versions of this, one of which is just John with a guitar, and then an alternate version that includes bass and bac...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">october-2-no-i-cant-gm9y55y</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:45:31 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>October 1 - Going Invisible 2</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/october-1-going-invisible-2-bkm8cy2</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Everything in this song, from orchestration to lyrics, feels like a start. Where music and lyrics differ is in the nature of the beginning. The echoing choral nature of the music creates an impression of dawn, of a spiritual beginning, like a warrior in the highlands finishing his prayers before stepping out to see how he can defend his town from the bastard English. It&#039;s simple and it&#039;s holy. But the lyrics are a very different start indeed. They speak of darkness rather than light, not in a mo...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">october-1-going-invisible-2-bkm8cy2</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:42:43 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 30 - Hand Of Death</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-30-hand-of-death-v7qwy0t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[As calypsos about dark magic go, this is certainly one of the better ones. Another Mountain Goats rarity, and one that shows both its past and its future. Bleak lyrics with a cheerful beat is basically the Mountain Goats stock in trade and this is a lovely example, but it feels like it throws forward to other versions of the same. What is here a warrior preparing for a macabre battle is, by the point of Training Montage, a badass hero doing the same. Both songs are even about The Temple. I think...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-30-hand-of-death-v7qwy0t</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:27:17 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 29 - Wizard Level</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-29-wizard-level-dwyc23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[The only recording of this song is done as a live fundraiser for abortion funds. There&#039;s something mildly depressing about it as it was made 8 years ago back when abortion was still a protected right. The song is a small delight of acapella folk magic, trying to capture the magic in the world through its own rituals. And speaking of small delights, this sing by Clover Paradise is a miniature instrumental wonder from a filipino band I hadn&#039;t ever heard of before.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-29-wizard-level-dwyc23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:15:44 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 28 - Swamp Dust</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-28-swamp-dust-zn5xdj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[There&#039;s no recording of this one. It&#039;s included in the book as a this is how far we&#039;ve come, and I might as well use it for that purpose. Four months ago: Coming up on the end of May I was still trying to adjust to life post-secondment. My wife was doing better after a long bout of doing worse. I thought I had an idea of what I wanted to do as my November novel but hadn&#039;t worked on it at all yet, and I was probably burning out a lot more badly than I knew. Fourteen years ago I was a fucking mess...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-28-swamp-dust-zn5xdj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:08:36 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 27 - Get High And Listen To The Cure</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-27-get-high-and-listen-to-the-cure-1ua08wv</link>
                <description><![CDATA[You can tell we&#039;re approaching the end of the month as we have the themed rarities. This one is a weird vinyl-only disco demo that&#039;s about exactly what it says in the title. Imagine being so prolific as a songwriter and performer that 365 songs isn&#039;t enough to recount everything you&#039;ve done. That you have too many songs to fit on all your albums and regular releases. I actually love these sort of rarities and demos in part for their own quality but in part for the fact that finding them is a cha...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-27-get-high-and-listen-to-the-cure-1ua08wv</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:58:59 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 26th - Abandoned Flesh</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-26th-abandoned-flesh-dwvb23r</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It still tickles me that an album called Goths that is about goths is so strongly and pleasantly easy listening. THis is pleasant like a cup of milky coffee, but I&#039;m tired and it&#039;s been a long weekend. It has DNA in common with The Ballad Of Chavo Guerrero, and that&#039;s a good thing. My brain is too cooked for proper analysis. Good night, all you once and future goths. oh, and because it&#039;s appropriate to the moment, here&#039;s Queens Of The Stone Age with Where The Goth Girls At?]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-26th-abandoned-flesh-dwvb23r</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 27 Sep 2026 22:20:48 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 25 - Shelved</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-25-shelved-6y76kgj</link>
                <description><![CDATA[There&#039;s a curious thing in some forms of storytelling where the apex is the end. Where you struggle to make it, and then the act of making it is the end. This is a song about a goth band who know that signing to a major label is when what they&#039;re doing is going to stop working. It makes me think of a story I wrote about 15 years ago called Say Not A Prayer For Me about someone who was - in person - the most beautiful person anyone present had ever seen. They could make people fall in love with t...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-25-shelved-6y76kgj</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 27 Sep 2026 22:09:46 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 24 - Paid In Cocaine</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-24-paid-in-cocaine-zngmdj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It took a while for me to get this song. It got in its own way a little, and it wasn&#039;t until I was reading the lyrics in the book that this ballad to the people who were adjacent to fame really clicked. Oh, I thought. This song is about me. The band I was in ultimately were unlikely to make it. We were good enough to get a foot in the door, though, and in the right place and the right time to make it far enough to at least fail on a good stage. Clint Boon from the Inspiral Carpets came to watch ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-24-paid-in-cocaine-zngmdj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:38:12 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 23 - Rage of Travers</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-23-rage-of-travers-pz8ufky</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This is a song about the passing of musical legacies, of the hot current thing becoming a thing of the past. And interestingly this is a concept that I think is slowly fading away. Whatever else one might say about the way music works or doesn&#039;t work in the modern era, something that has happened is that music has greater latency. There are bad reasons for this (nostalgia and recycling and a lack of risktaking) but it means that if you were in a successful act in 1998 you can probably tour today...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-23-rage-of-travers-pz8ufky</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:28:25 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 22 - We Do It Different on the West Coast</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-22-we-do-it-different-on-the-west-coast-5xf7v73</link>
                <description><![CDATA[One of the most wonderful things about music is that it&#039;s universal and regional at the same time. This is a delight of a sing about the different ways that people are goths in different places, combining influences, cargo culting success, and how surroundings make the local version of the scene. This is obviously true, and yet fascinating to see in real time. In the ever-present conversation about white rappers, for example, it&#039;s interesting to see what people say about Asian rappers, especiall...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-22-we-do-it-different-on-the-west-coast-5xf7v73</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:26:19 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 21 - Wear Black</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-21-wear-black-qckc9a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I&#039;ll confess that the orchestration of this isn&#039;t quite for me. it&#039;s too chaotic and robs itself of the clarity that I love from Mountain Goats songs. However, the theme is spot on. This to me is about identity and identification. The not quite correct thing that people say about the tendency of subcultures to adopt uniform Looks is that they do so in part so that the members of the group can identify each other. This is almost the case but misses the mark. What&#039;s far more true is that the unifo...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-21-wear-black-qckc9a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:13:01 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 20 - Rain in Soho</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-20-rain-in-soho-y3hbe17</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I feel unfair thinking of songs in this as The Real Shit, but every now and then a Mountain Goats song stuck with me hard and I can&#039;t stop going back to it. This song is a perfect encapsulation of the feeling if listening to miserable songs to escape your miserable town and it working for a bit but then leading to the crash of realising you are still fucking there. One of the purposes of music is to feel. It doesn&#039;t initiate feelings so much as remind you that you are not the first person to fee...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-20-rain-in-soho-y3hbe17</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:58:31 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 19 - Stench of the Unburied</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-19-stench-of-the-unburied-znuadj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Something weirdly suitable about my birthday song being an anthem to being fucked up and in trouble, but in a curiously good way. This is one of the things John does best, I think. Vignettes in miniature of perfectly realised moments in lives. Not good moments, not moments that anyone will point back to as the best of times, but sometimes what people will point to as the most of times. Every life is full of these. I remember lying on a broken bed in a tiny mill house in North Carolina in January...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-19-stench-of-the-unburied-znuadj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:46:51 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 18 - Unicorn Tolerance</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-18-unicorn-tolerance-9169s7z</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Sorry, I don&#039;t have much on this one. It does a good unsettling content with comfortable orchestration thing, I like the double tracked vocals, and beyond that... It&#039;s been a bad day. Someone crying too much to tell you why until you&#039;re back in the car is a bad thing on a bad day. Feeling angry and having nowhere to put it is a bad day. I would love to love this song, and I will have to come back to it. I might not come back to it.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-18-unicorn-tolerance-9169s7z</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:52:37 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 17 - The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-17-the-grey-king-and-the-silver-flame-attunement-6ymnkgj</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This song, in a delightful lounge jazz way, combines two of my favourite things in Mountain Goats songs: A feral gang, and a guy encountering a scene. And honestly we&#039;ve all had that moment where we&#039;re enough part of something to be able to recognise people who are much much further into it than we are. it&#039;s like looking down a few levels and seeing where you might have ended up had your life been different in every fundamentally important way. I&#039;ve lived enough of my life in the centre of the l...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-17-the-grey-king-and-the-silver-flame-attunement-6ymnkgj</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:41:51 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 16 - For The Portuguese Goth Metal Bands</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-16-for-the-portuguese-goth-metal-bands-1uyx8wv</link>
                <description><![CDATA[John is often at his best when he&#039;s making music about music, or about the people who make music and the culture they come from. This song is a hymn to and a celebration of those who make art that they know the world isn&#039;t going to be into because they themselves are into it. The market for goth metal in Portugal isn&#039;t huge, any more than the market for alt punk in Korea is, and yet you get dedicated bands in both of those scenes just working and slogging and creating their guts out, because you...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-16-for-the-portuguese-goth-metal-bands-1uyx8wv</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:17:12 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 15 - Blood Capsules</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-15-blood-capsules-tbnrqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This song arrives from a weird dimension of being both very funky and sounding like it&#039;s being played on the weirdest version of the Weather Channel ever made. And after I&#039;d only seen the title but not listened to the song, I was still in a Beat The Champ phase, because of the various everyone knows stories about wrestlers faking blood using special effects, when in reality it&#039;s much simpler and cheaper to use a small bit or a razor blade and create a circumstance where some of your inside blood...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-15-blood-capsules-tbnrqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:11:16 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 14 - Hair Match</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-14-hair-match-h28qt4e</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This song is gloriously mean and nasty sounding. Not in the instrumentation, which is this soft and meditative piece, but in everything about the vocal, both lyrics and how they&#039;re performed. It&#039;s a piece of teasing, needling, taunting of someone receiving one of the worst things that could happen to a territories wrestler. There&#039;s no consolation here, gentle though the voice is. There was a Lucha de Apuestas and you lost, buddy. For those who don&#039;t know, a Lucha de Apuestas is a match where the...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-14-hair-match-h28qt4e</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:28:01 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 12 - Song for Sasha Banks</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-12-song-for-sasha-banks-fdcfhyp</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I&#039;ve always loved the story behind this one. Mountain Goats finished Beat The Champ, and put it out. And then Sasha Banks, who was at the time by far the hottest women&#039;s wrestler in the United States and had just burned the entire house down with a series of matches with Bayley, posted on Twitter chiding John for not having written a song for her. And so he did. Because what else do you do? Especially when the story of Mercedes Varnado is such a tremendous one. A mixed race kid from a family who...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-12-song-for-sasha-banks-fdcfhyp</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:09:42 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 13 - Ballad of Bull Ramos</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-13-ballad-of-bull-ramos-4j7va1t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[The problem with writing songs about old wrestlers is that, well, there are less of them than there should be. Lou Thesz made it to 86, Red Bastien made it to 81, Vern Gagne nearly hit 90, but they were outliers, with the averages dragged down by people who should have lived longer lives. Andre The Giant was dead by 46, Kerry Von Erich didn&#039;t even hit his mid thirties, it&#039;s Andy Williams&#039; memorial episode of Dynamite tonight. So sometimes what you have to have to act the part of an old wrestler ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-13-ballad-of-bull-ramos-4j7va1t</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 12 Sep 2026 22:13:57 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 11 - Luna</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-11-luna-zncrdj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[If you were to do a song about every wrestler whose life had ended in tragedy, you&#039;d probably need more than a year&#039;s worth of songs. Even when lives don&#039;t end early, they often end badly, it is a pretty hard business that used to be an incredibly hard business, and the 80s and 90s in particular were a meat grinder for people who were given fame by the business and pain by the job, which is a tough combination wherever you are. Luna Vachon was a big deal who should have been a huge deal. The chi...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-11-luna-zncrdj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:10:25 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 10th - Werewolf Gimmick</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-10th-werewolf-gimmick-znbydj6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[One of the best double modes a song can have is: This is a story about a guy who plays a wolfman who is taking it too far, who has given up the kayfabe of it all and is going full method with his bullshit, and that&#039;s absolutely great. This is what happens when you figure out what your thing is and do it until you vanish into it. It&#039;s not healthy, it&#039;s not necessarily survivable, but you can&#039;t tell me it&#039;s not good.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-10th-werewolf-gimmick-znbydj6</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:56:23 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 9th - Stabbed To Death outside San Juan</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-9th-stabbed-to-death-outside-san-juan-h2qxt4e</link>
                <description><![CDATA[ah, this one fucking hurts. Great song, very theatrical, captures the horror of the moment. But let&#039;s talk for a moment about Bruiser Brody, a man probably more responsible for modern wrestling than any other performer. A wildman of the old school with a new school sensibility. The model for Cactus Jack, Brodie Lee, Eddie Kingston and a hundred others. A gentleman of the sport, a trusted gaijin on Japan who was enough a part of the business that he travelled with the Japanese wrestlers. And a ma...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-9th-stabbed-to-death-outside-san-juan-h2qxt4e</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:49:30 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 8th - Fire Editorial</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-8th-fire-editorial-u4uug9n</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Let&#039;s face it, if you were going to write a song about the breathless and shocked prose of the dirtsheets, it would probably be in the musical style of an early to mid 20th century musical, one of the ones about rugged machinery and the burly men who operate it. There may not be such musicals. There should be. I can imagine a procession of overalls and lunchpails. Anyway, Ed Farhat was a tremendous character. A wild man and one of the earliest progenitors of hardcore in wrestling, and the kayfab...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-8th-fire-editorial-u4uug9n</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 21:17:13 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 7 - Heel Turn 2</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-7-heel-turn-2-t2thqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[And here&#039;s the other half of yesterday. This is the turn to evil told in weakness and regret, and is an instructive lesson in evil, encapsulated by the line You found my breaking point... congratulations! A line with a shaking laugh in it. This isn&#039;t the breaking point of Choked Out, with the power that it unleashes. This is where someone collapses, not where they break free.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-7-heel-turn-2-t2thqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 21:06:51 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 6 - Heel Turn 1</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-6-heel-turn-1-t2fpqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[One of the joys of being a singer-songwriter is that it allows a creative soul to be their own commissioner, and that allows for occasional bouts of indulgence, such as writing a song about a subject, deciding that you prefer another approach to the same subject, and writing another song with many of the same parts. Without self-discipline this can become noodling. With self-discipline it becomes the paired versions of Heel Turn. This version is in many ways the most identifiably Mountain Goats ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-6-heel-turn-1-t2fpqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2026 21:38:08 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 5 - Choked Out</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-5-choked-out-s1qwz85</link>
                <description><![CDATA[As a rando on Yahoo Answers asked decades ago: Are you tired of being nice? Don&#039;t you just want to go ape shitt And this is a song about going ape shitt. Which is different from turning heel (more on that over the next couple of days). Going apeshit is about deciding that you aren&#039;t bound by decorum, that if nobody&#039;s obeying the rules you don&#039;t have to either. It&#039;s the core of vigilantism but there is a defining difference between this and a heel turn. It&#039;s the difference between the rules don&#039;t...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-5-choked-out-s1qwz85</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:59:45 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 4 - Animal Mask</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-4-animal-mask-6v8fkgj</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Not sure I have much on this one. I&#039;m kind of exhausted after a lot of week all at once. John says this one is an allegory for the birth of his son. It&#039;s very nice and I&#039;ll take him at his word.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-4-animal-mask-6v8fkgj</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:50:19 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 3 - Foreign Object</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-3-foreign-object-405wa1t</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Sometime songs revel in silliness to hide or ease something bleak. Mountain Goats are masters of the upbeat song with downbeat lyrics. Sometimes, as in yesterday&#039;s song, they&#039;re there to show that in times of darkness there is still light. The world might be bleak, but here is justice and triumph and fun. And sometimes the song is just a fucking laugh in itself. Everything about this song is just enjoyable violent silliness, delighting in the idea of the undefined and thus infinitely dangerous b...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-3-foreign-object-405wa1t</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:10:18 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 2 - The Legend Of Chavo Guerrero</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-2-the-legend-of-chavo-guerrero-ps72fky</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Quick content warning: the video for this song contains disgraced pro wrestler and abuser Joey Ryan. There&#039;s no nostalgia like bittersweet nostalgia, and John Darnielle is the source of some of the most bitter and some of the most sweet. The surface level of this song is a delightful romp through memory of Chavo Guerrero, a tremendous but relatively secondary figure in the days of the southwestern territories. These days he&#039;s largely known because of the tremendous success of his son (Chavo Jr) ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-2-the-legend-of-chavo-guerrero-ps72fky</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:23:04 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>September 1 - Southwestern Territory</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/september-1-southwestern-territory-psxdfky</link>
                <description><![CDATA[OK, so we might be getting Extremely Into my Shit now. A Mountain Goats album not just about wrestling but about territories wrestling, and in particular a song about a journeyman making towns. Exactly my combination of dirt, pathos, and soaring instrumentation, about a subject I deeply love. Pro wrestling is such an interesting combination of incredibly personable and incredibly lonely. Crowded locker rooms, loud venues, dark roads, driving at unsociable hours because you&#039;d rather make the driv...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">september-1-southwestern-territory-psxdfky</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:05:33 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 31 - Transcendental Youth</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-31-transcendental-youth-j9adpt6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Another month gone, and a fine song to end it on. There&#039;s this thing about the title tracks on albums when they have them. They become (whether they mean to or not) the overture of the album. Transcentental Youth the album is about growing up and growing past, and growing away, being the young people shedding things even if what replaces them is scary or dangerous and learning lessons from it. Transcendental Youth the sing is the tribal anthem of this theme. A song to leave behind when the young...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-31-transcendental-youth-j9adpt6</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:10:35 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 30 - Steal Smoked Fish</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-30-steal-smoked-fish-6v23kgj</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Some mountain goats songs are contemplative, some are frozen in horror, some are reminiscences. Some are celebrations, and not everything being celebrated is something that is traditionally thought of as being good. This song is an exultation of the joys of ferality, which is a different thing to wildness. A wild creature is born in the wild and lives there, and considers society to be entirely an external thing. A feral creature is one that lives in the civilised world without being part of it ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-30-steal-smoked-fish-6v23kgj</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:38:35 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 29 - Cry For Judas</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-29-cry-for-judas-w5zb64p</link>
                <description><![CDATA[If ever there was a platonic ideal of a Mountain Goats song it&#039;s this one. There are others that I go to first, but this has everything you need from a Mountain Goats song in its purest form. Absolutely flawless musicianship, a completely soaring vocal. Astonishingly clever lyrics. An absolute disconnect between song lyrics and musical style in the best way. This is a song about anger, frustration, knowing the world is broken, knowing this won&#039;t help, doing it anyway because that&#039;s what living i...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-29-cry-for-judas-w5zb64p</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 22:02:37 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 28 - In Memory Of Satan</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-28-in-memory-of-satan-j9espt6</link>
                <description><![CDATA[Sometimes a song hits you from an unexpected direction. This one is a song about, basically, losing it, letting the emotions out in ways that feel evilm, trying to come back together, not really managing it, but with only hald an hear on the lyrics it sounds like a song from an 80s TV show. Not the main theme, but perhaps what plays over the montage of the two friends who definitely aren&#039;t falling in love getting lunch at the restaurant in a department store.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-28-in-memory-of-satan-j9espt6</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:29:05 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 27 - Lakeside View Apartment Suite</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-27-lakeside-view-apartment-suite-fz46hyp</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This song is a bit of a time traveller. When I was listening to songs from We Shall All Be Healed, I kept waiting for this song as thematically it is such a song from that era. But actually it fits in just as well with these retrospective songs about youthful misery and growth. You can hear the tension of the bad situation in this song: the condition of the apartment, the guys in the crew who are going nowhere and serve as a crab bucket to drag you back. This remains one of my favourite Mountain...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-27-lakeside-view-apartment-suite-fz46hyp</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:09:17 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 26 - Until I Am Whole</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-26-until-i-am-whole-w59d64p</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This isn&#039;t the album about loneliness, but this is very much a song about being alone in the sense of not wanting to subject other people to yourself. I&#039;ve had that moment. When I first moved to Cambridge I was apart from my wife for several months, and I urgently wanted to be nowhere near anyone. Well, not anyone. I urgently wanted to be near someone who was thousands of miles away and I didn&#039;t want the rest of the world. It&#039;s not a great feeling, and sometimes the loneliness heals you, but som...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-26-until-i-am-whole-w59d64p</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:57:00 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 24 - Harlem Roulette</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-24-harlem-roulette-t24eqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[God, this song is an engine. From the jangly guitar to the description of the city, to the rapid pressing motion of the narrative and the lyrics. And god, what lyrics. The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you&#039;re never going to see again. This to me is a song about the indelibility of ephemeral content. These songs went out into the world and they lasted on wax and tape but most of all they lasted in people&#039;s heads.]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-24-harlem-roulette-t24eqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:50:19 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 23 - Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-23-amy-aka-spent-gladiator-1-t2e7qge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[It&#039;s Sunday night, I&#039;m tired, I&#039;ve felt vaguely ill all weekend, and now I have to contend with one of the most enormous sounds Mountain Goats ever did. I first heard this song 3 or 4 years ago and it&#039;s been a guiding force in my life since then. On a personal level, this is an anthem for me because good god have there been points where keeping moving forward - shit, keeping moving in any direction - felt fucking impossible. Just staying alive was the achievement. Doing the things that let that ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-23-amy-aka-spent-gladiator-1-t2e7qge</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 23 Aug 2026 22:01:57 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 22 - Sourdoire Valley Song</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-22-sourdoire-valley-song-y7bue17</link>
                <description><![CDATA[One of the hardest things in the world to fully accept, and one that&#039;s simultaneously deeply reassuring and deeply disturbing: we were always like this. And that&#039;s for a very broad definition of we and an only moderately broad definition of this. We like to think of people too far in the past as basically alien. This is especially true if you&#039;ve read literature from long enough ago that the story forms didn&#039;t quite work, where our shared cultural assumptions aren&#039;t shared. But it&#039;s still true th...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-22-sourdoire-valley-song-y7bue17</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 22 Aug 2026 22:08:51 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 20 - Birth of Serpents</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-20-birth-of-serpents-t25aqge</link>
                <description><![CDATA[One of the best things about Mountain Goats songs is sometimes you will come across a line so perfect you have to wonder if it came from somewhere else and then conclude that it&#039;s original. A young man dwelling inside his body like an uninvited guest is a perfect way of describing the awkward pain of existence for young people who haven&#039;t found their place, who worry that they might not have a place, and who may be right. A lot of counter culture songs don&#039;t work because they - understandably - ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-20-birth-of-serpents-t25aqge</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:46:06 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 19 - Age Of Kings</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-19-age-of-kings-9cvys7z</link>
                <description><![CDATA[There&#039;s something old school and epic and pulpy about this song. It&#039;s nostalgic and hopeful and sad and sweeping. I think it&#039;s the way it uses strings. They make it sound like we&#039;re watching a horizon while the silhouettes a caravan of furtive adventurers move towards destiny. I think Peter O&#039;Toole&#039;s there, but old Peter O&#039;Toole. This is romance in all its meanings. A love song and a song about love and also a song about the picaresque and romantic motions of heroism. It&#039;s proud and delightful a...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-19-age-of-kings-9cvys7z</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:49:10 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 18 - Liza Forever Minnelli</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-18-liza-forever-minnelli-qbgr9a9</link>
                <description><![CDATA[I&#039;m unfamiliar with Hollywood and LA in general except as a place to visit, and even there I didn&#039;t do the classic Hollywood shit. I&#039;ve spent more time in convenience stores in Hermosa Beach than within a mile of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet there is something in this song, of being stranded in the famous place, feeling the inability to escape. I only had one town I feared I&#039;d never leave, and I shot out of there like a bullet from a gun. I&#039;ve neither gone back nor felt the need to mental...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-18-liza-forever-minnelli-qbgr9a9</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:05:07 +0000</pubDate>
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                <title>August 17 - Beautiful Gas Mask</title>
                <link>https://miscellany.pckt.blog/august-17-beautiful-gas-mask-w53p64p</link>
                <description><![CDATA[This song is, interestingly, much more of what I think of as a 90s song than anything Mountain Goats released in the 1990s. It has a lot of the instrumental tics that I think of as being true of the kind of bands who would be opening for REM or putting out a double A side with Throwing Muses. Instrumental, interesting, and lyrically clever at a level that I&#039;m somewhat too tired to fully appreciate. The heat has broken here, I think. I hope. It will still be too warm in the day, and it only gets ...]]></description>
                <author>Miscellany</author>
                <guid isPermaLink="false">august-17-beautiful-gas-mask-w53p64p</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:19:41 +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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