January 1 - Alphabetizing

One of the first things I notice about this song, and I'll confess it's not one I'd heard before now, is something very familiar. An old friend from countless other places: the soft musical drone of John Darnielle's tape recorder.

This is early Mountain Goats, before the band was more than just John, and bears all the hallmarks of that, albeit in a much cleaner form. One of those hallmarks is the simplicity of a rolling chord sequence being a delivery system for the vocals and lyrics. And these vocals and lyrics are pure early Mountain Goats: simple thoughts made complicated and given character by repetition and iteration. The line "For all the good it did me, for all the measurable good it did me" leapt out at me at first listen with its combination of simple emotion and then subversion through elaboration. It's a start point that has hints of a lot of what is to come.

I'm about to make a comparison that I'm probably going to come back to time and again: John Darnielle experienced an expansion of his palette when he moved from simple cassette recording to more elaborate production numbers similar to the changes one sees between early and even mid career Leonard Cohen, but much like Leonard Cohen everything that John would become is in tracks like this in miniature.

Start your year by listening to this, for all the good it does you. For all the measurable good it does you.