March 31 - Horseradish Road

I'm going to say something odd about this one. Some background first.

I'm a later Mountain Goats fan. Didn't listen to them until probably 2019. First album was The Sunset Tree. I think that sets the scene as to how this band first grounded with me, as a fairly mature and developed musical combination. One of the things I have most enjoyed about going back through their catalogue for the last three months is seeing all the places where they began, the bits that didn't work, the interesting experimentation that was later used differently. The big swings that missed, the big swings that hit.

All of this is to say that this is the first Mountain Goats song in this book of days that sounded fully like a Mountain Goats song as I understood them at the start. The assuredness of the vocals, the gentle tricks of the lyrics, the creation of thematic spaces. This whole journey has been about looking at early Mountain Goats knowing what they would become, and this was the first time they were fully who I knew they were.

The centre of the song is a guttering flame of a relationship, where someone knows it's over and someone else doesn't, which is not exactly unknown territory for John Darnielle, but the way it's explored here is with a certainty that it felt like John had been reaching for and finally grasped.

I'm in the car now, let's see where the road turns.