“In 2 days & I play a song at Carnegie Hall. Two days before the show, Darnielle tweeted : In 2012 the Mountain Goats played at Carnegie Hall as part of a Rolling Stones tribute concert. Possums are gross, creepy, off-putting creatures, a raccoon with much worse personal branding, so it’s hard for me to explain why it is that this song made me cry at the show, and once, discreetly, at a coffee shop yesterday, and why I can’t stop listening to it. It describes a possum who waddles down to the trash cans near a parking lot on garbage night, climbing up to the top of the compost heap (“if I try,” goes lyric - the possum doesn’t always get to the top of the compost heap only when he really believes in himself) and watching over the long-haul truckers parked there, avoiding the nearby dogs and the garbage trucks’ intake vents. This song is about a possum, which is how John Darnielle introduced it at the show, and you know it’s about a possum because it’s called “Possum by Night” and because all the lyrics are about a possum.
“ Possum by Night ” ( In League with Dragons ) here’s an essay about a song about a possum. TL DR: Essays about Mountain Goats songs, now an occasional feature here but not the whole thing of the newsletter.Īnyway. If you do know and love this band and want to send me requests for this series, please do, I will absolutely take requests even if it takes me a while to get to them. If you don’t know this band but are interested in an introduction to their music, you can email me and I’ll send you a link to a (deeply imperfect, hastily made, non-comprehensive) Mountain Goats introduction playlist. If you don’t care about this band, you can ignore these, although of course I hope that they’ll offer something for every reader, even if you have no idea who the Mountain Goats are. There’ll be Mountain Goats essays, every so often, for a while.
I realize it might make more sense to do something like “Mountain Goats Mondays” and send one of these every Monday or whatever, but that sounds like something an organized person would do, so I’m not going to do that.
This won’t replace the normal essays, although from time to time it might be the week’s only essay (this week there will be two, because I still owe subscribers an extra one and because, well, I wrote a lot of this before I realized it wasn’t feasible as a single essay). I thought I’d write a kind of annotated playlist a bunch of my favorite songs and a mini-essay about each one, all of which might come together to express something about what it is exactly that this music does for me and maybe for a lot of its fans, what it is that makes it something of a category of its own.Īnyway, I tried to write that and it turned out every entry was like a thousand words long, so instead This Week’s Favorite Mountain Goats Song is now going to be an occasional feature on griefbacon, which seemed like a better option than sending you one incomprehensibly massive Mountain Goats dissertation-playlist. So, I went to see the Mountain Goats on Tuesday night, and had a great time, like a genuinely great, forgot-to-look-at-my-phone, happy-to-have-cried-in-public time, and I came home and wanted to write about this band whose music, whose whole thing I love so much.
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