This Year 365 songs: January 17th
Jan. 17th, 2026 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
js_thrill Today's song is Billy The Kid's Dream Of The Magic Shoes
In some of the earlier annotations, Darnielle talked about his early reluctance to print lyrics on album sleeves. The annotations for this song are really about that reluctance, and his (continued?) conflict about whether lyrics live in the performance or whether they can be written down. There is a bit in Plato's Phaedrus that examines similar themes about rhetoric and writing, but I think a lot of it is mooted by the extensive work done by his fan-base to document things irrespective of what has been written on album sleeves.
More interesting is the way the title of the song provides necessary context for the song. This was, in some ways, also true for "Song for Cleomenes", and not especially true for "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life". The former has no internal explicit reference to Cleomenes, but you can sort of figure out who he is in the song if you know a bit about the history (or look it up), and the latter just includes the title entirely in the song. This song, however, is contextualized by the title. If you don't know have the information that it is about Billy the Kid, it's just not the same song. I haven't really reflected on how common this is a theme for his songs in general, but I guess I'll be keeping an eye out moving forward.
This is a nice simple song, but it does feel like we are starting to hear some of the Mountain Goats I am more familiar with, which is nice.
In some of the earlier annotations, Darnielle talked about his early reluctance to print lyrics on album sleeves. The annotations for this song are really about that reluctance, and his (continued?) conflict about whether lyrics live in the performance or whether they can be written down. There is a bit in Plato's Phaedrus that examines similar themes about rhetoric and writing, but I think a lot of it is mooted by the extensive work done by his fan-base to document things irrespective of what has been written on album sleeves.
More interesting is the way the title of the song provides necessary context for the song. This was, in some ways, also true for "Song for Cleomenes", and not especially true for "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life". The former has no internal explicit reference to Cleomenes, but you can sort of figure out who he is in the song if you know a bit about the history (or look it up), and the latter just includes the title entirely in the song. This song, however, is contextualized by the title. If you don't know have the information that it is about Billy the Kid, it's just not the same song. I haven't really reflected on how common this is a theme for his songs in general, but I guess I'll be keeping an eye out moving forward.
This is a nice simple song, but it does feel like we are starting to hear some of the Mountain Goats I am more familiar with, which is nice.
