May 12 - Cut Off Their Thumbs

So, no song yesterday, or rather no song with a recording yesterday.

This is a small delight and a curiosity, a song recorded just after Tallahassee but not released until it was posted on the Mountain Goats website a few years later. It's a rolling ballad about being in great danger and having to decide if, when people get hurt, you're one of them. Or one of the people doing the hurting.

It's also a very nice sign of how far John has come as a single guitar and single voice guy that everything about this from the production to the playing to the singing to the musicality of the song as lyrics is deeply accomplished at a level beyond earlier work. I hate saying that an artist has "evolved" because that's usually taken to mean just that they have got better (rather than that they have adapted) but in this case this really feels like John is able to fit into the space he now occupies better.