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This Year 365 songs: January 22nd
Jan. 22nd, 2026 11:21 am Today's song is Love Cuts the Strings
It turns out we have hit a song where I have heard this song before, many times, much sooner than March. During the early part of the pandemic, the Mountain Goats released a two volume (later four volume, and later still five volume) live session recording of the band playing (they had also live-streamed the performance over the internet so people could watch at a time when concerts and tours had been canceled and live music was a real rarity). I've listened to Jordan Lake Volumes 1 and 2 hundreds of times, maybe more than a thousand, and Love Cuts The Strings is right between two of my favorite tracks on volume 2: My Little Panda and International Small Arms Traffic Blues. The former is a touching song about a parent's love for their child (I had a vague memory that it was about Darnielle's son, specifically, but couldn't confirm this), and the latter is part of the Alpha couple series.
And yet, despite being sandwiched between two songs that I listened to a huge number of times, this song hasn't stuck with me. Darnielle says in the annotations that it is his favorite of the songs off the 7" record that it was first on, and that at the time, his faster songs were his better songs. As you can tell from my preference for My Little Panda and International Small Arms Traffic Blues, I don't necessarily feel that way (though he also says that he doesn't think the faster = better correlation continued for long after that particular 7" album).
It turns out we have hit a song where I have heard this song before, many times, much sooner than March. During the early part of the pandemic, the Mountain Goats released a two volume (later four volume, and later still five volume) live session recording of the band playing (they had also live-streamed the performance over the internet so people could watch at a time when concerts and tours had been canceled and live music was a real rarity). I've listened to Jordan Lake Volumes 1 and 2 hundreds of times, maybe more than a thousand, and Love Cuts The Strings is right between two of my favorite tracks on volume 2: My Little Panda and International Small Arms Traffic Blues. The former is a touching song about a parent's love for their child (I had a vague memory that it was about Darnielle's son, specifically, but couldn't confirm this), and the latter is part of the Alpha couple series.
And yet, despite being sandwiched between two songs that I listened to a huge number of times, this song hasn't stuck with me. Darnielle says in the annotations that it is his favorite of the songs off the 7" record that it was first on, and that at the time, his faster songs were his better songs. As you can tell from my preference for My Little Panda and International Small Arms Traffic Blues, I don't necessarily feel that way (though he also says that he doesn't think the faster = better correlation continued for long after that particular 7" album).
