May 3 - Tallahassee

In retrospect this song is a thumping great mission statement. It's the first track on one of the two most pivotal Mountain Goats albums, with All Hail West Texas being the perfection of the "Guitar and buzzing tape recorder" era, and Tallahassee being the start of the "full band and instrumentation" era.

And, let's be entirely clear about this, it's gorgeous. It's a quiet overture to an album about two people poisoning each other's lives. There's a tension in the soft bassline that gives the whole song a feeling of a storm that's slowly building but will one day wipe out the whole town.