March 7 - Cheshire County

So we're very much into the era of Mountain Goats songs being delightful little bops. This is a magical pastoral number, with spells under the surface and a strong fundamental presence of nature.

Actually, that's wrong. What's present here isn't nature. it's rural domesticity. And in an increasingly urban world it's worth bearing the difference in mind. It's easy to think that the natural world is the outside worksite of agriculture, simply because it does its industrial work through machines that grow in the ground, when the truth is that a ploughed field is every bit as much a human occupied landscape as an asphalted highway.

We don't go out into the fully wild much. Most of the time what we consider wilderness is actually just wasteland, the curious corners of human abandonment. True wilds aren't common. There was a forest that covered everything, and almost all of it is gone. This song isn't set in it.