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This Year 365 songs: January 12th
Jan. 12th, 2026 02:50 pm Today we have Song for Cleomenes
This song sort of illustrates what I meant when I said that the minimalism and talking-then-singing can come together for a good effect. Were I doing this in like weekly batches instead of daily, I would have just compared these two tracks directly, instead of saying some stuff about how it didn't work so well two days ago, gesturing at sort of very different things going on in Tom Waits and Bright Eyes, and then, two days later, pointing to this as an example of what I meant. And it's off the same EP as the other one, so it isn't some later evolution; it's just a hit, rather than a miss.
The other thing that is going on here is appreciating Darnielle's fascination with Classics. The annotations mention that he wrote this while taking classes in English and Classical Studies, and apart from autobiographical themes, faith and travel, I think his affection for history and classics is probably one of the other things that comes through most clearly in his work.
Two other brief reflections at this juncture: 1) I find it increasingly odd that Darnielle suggested the book could be tackled in any order. It is, so far, very much a chronological memoir of the development of the writing style and approach to the Mountain Goats, and while the entries don't explicitly reference each other, the material is clearly building up over time. 2) Every time I load up a youtube video to listen to the song for that day, the comments have people referencing the "book club" of all the folks who are likewise going through the book day by day and reading each entry as prescribed by the dates associated in the book, but none of them are really discussing the book or its contents with each other (even if their comments do engage with material from the book). They are not really a book club in the sense of conversing about the book, even if there is a "club" relating to the book that they could all be said to belong to.
This song sort of illustrates what I meant when I said that the minimalism and talking-then-singing can come together for a good effect. Were I doing this in like weekly batches instead of daily, I would have just compared these two tracks directly, instead of saying some stuff about how it didn't work so well two days ago, gesturing at sort of very different things going on in Tom Waits and Bright Eyes, and then, two days later, pointing to this as an example of what I meant. And it's off the same EP as the other one, so it isn't some later evolution; it's just a hit, rather than a miss.
The other thing that is going on here is appreciating Darnielle's fascination with Classics. The annotations mention that he wrote this while taking classes in English and Classical Studies, and apart from autobiographical themes, faith and travel, I think his affection for history and classics is probably one of the other things that comes through most clearly in his work.
Two other brief reflections at this juncture: 1) I find it increasingly odd that Darnielle suggested the book could be tackled in any order. It is, so far, very much a chronological memoir of the development of the writing style and approach to the Mountain Goats, and while the entries don't explicitly reference each other, the material is clearly building up over time. 2) Every time I load up a youtube video to listen to the song for that day, the comments have people referencing the "book club" of all the folks who are likewise going through the book day by day and reading each entry as prescribed by the dates associated in the book, but none of them are really discussing the book or its contents with each other (even if their comments do engage with material from the book). They are not really a book club in the sense of conversing about the book, even if there is a "club" relating to the book that they could all be said to belong to.
