March 23 - Cobscook Bay

I don't know if this is the first time I've heard an electric guitar in a Mountain Goats song, but it's certainly one of the earliest examples to leap out at me, an electric sound with vibrato buit no distortion, in a full background of instrumentation.

This song is a kind of Walden-by-the-sea for me, a semi-pastoral of life away from life, with occasional visitors, beautiful mornings, and a world shrunk down small to the point where you can hear the waves break and the trees grow.

There's misery in the world of this song, but it's far from the lonely, solitary safe point where the day is breaking and the cow 's giving birth.