June 21 - Whon

This is a barely recorded song that seems to only exist online as a live taping complete with audience sound. It's like listening at a bedroom door to someone playing for themselves. When writing the book, John apparently thought there was no live version of this.

I'm glad there is. It's John in a mood of quiet tired whimsy, and some of the lines are absolute all timers. You will never quite escape last year. None of us will.

Because Mountain Goats are very much a taper's band, in the same way that Grateful Dead and Primus are, tiny gems like this are going to keep showing up. Ephemera that somehow has survived into the world years later.

It's interesting coming to it from the point of view of someone who was in a band in his teens and then very much not in a band in his twenties. I never got a tape of my band playing live, I don't know if I could bear to listen to it both because of the horrors of nostalgia and the particulars of how my time in this band ended, but there are several of our sings that are going to live in my head forever. perfected by the repetition of memory, lyrics that come to mind continually, even when I'm just alone in the car, of which as far as I know no recorded version exists. The only other place these songs even potentially exist is in the heads of five people I haven't talked to in between ten and twenty five years.

Escape last year? John, I'll never quite escape last century.