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This Year 365 songs: January 4th
Jan. 4th, 2026 09:37 amThe song for today is One Winter at Alpha Point Privative.
What's that? Another track I had not previously heard? (I am sure we will eventually hit some songs I am familiar with! Probably!)
I don't mind the lo-fi sound, and this song is catchy. Nevertheless, would I have become a huge mountain goats fan during this era? Probably not. There is a reason that The Sunset Tree is the album that caught my attention, and that All Hail West Texas is the part of the lo-fi era that has the most enduring appeal. But, this song is both catchy, and the point at which the lore in the annotations is starting to open up a bit more.
We learned earlier that songs with "alpha" in the title derive from an early attempt at poetry "Songs from the Alpha Privative", and unsurprisingly the annotations tell us that this song, which not only has "alpha" but "alpha privative" in the name, is confirmed to come from that set of poems. Darnielle tells us that the poems are derived from the enduring trauma of divorce (something he is autobiographically familiar with from his own childhood). Intellectually, I know that divorce can be hard and traumatic; but I've generally always had the perspective that situations which end in divorce would, in general, be harder and more traumatic to persist as marriages full of strife and conflict, so I always find it odd to locate the trauma in the divorce itself. At any rate, the couple in this song appear in other songs, and they are referred to as the alpha couple (I don't think all the songs in which they occur have alpha in the title, as the couple from, e.g. No Children is the alpha couple
The other thing that sort of sticks with me about this song (and the structure of the book, tbh) is Darnielle's relationship to religion. To my reckoning, Darnielle is a Christian in a way similar to someone like Sufjan Stevens. Both are artists whose music would be principally classified by the musical stylings (indie/folk rock, or what have you), but who take their religious views seriously and have a non-trivial number of songs that are explicitly and with specificity about and infused by their Christian faith. This is in contrast to "Christian Rock" where it is a major component of the categorization of the artist in general, and presumably virtually all of their music, and in contrast to artists who essentially don't bring any substantive religious content into their music. The structure of this book ("a book of days"), and the lyrics of this song ("can you feel the spirit moving? can you feel god's grace?") have me thinking about this in particular (even though this one line isn't on the level of, say Life of The World to Come, where every track is named for a bible verse).
Do I have a point by going into this? I mean, I guess I don't know who is reading these posts, so partially i am giving context for folks who don't know about the mountain goats. But also, as I am reading, listening, and reflecting on the mountain goats every day for a year, I'm probably just going to digress about random aspects of the band and the music that jump out at me, and Darnielle's faith as well as his fascination with the historical/classical rituals and practices (an overlapping but distinct interest) is something that has been waiting to jump out at me (a very non-christian listener) since I pre-ordered the book.
What's that? Another track I had not previously heard? (I am sure we will eventually hit some songs I am familiar with! Probably!)
I don't mind the lo-fi sound, and this song is catchy. Nevertheless, would I have become a huge mountain goats fan during this era? Probably not. There is a reason that The Sunset Tree is the album that caught my attention, and that All Hail West Texas is the part of the lo-fi era that has the most enduring appeal. But, this song is both catchy, and the point at which the lore in the annotations is starting to open up a bit more.
We learned earlier that songs with "alpha" in the title derive from an early attempt at poetry "Songs from the Alpha Privative", and unsurprisingly the annotations tell us that this song, which not only has "alpha" but "alpha privative" in the name, is confirmed to come from that set of poems. Darnielle tells us that the poems are derived from the enduring trauma of divorce (something he is autobiographically familiar with from his own childhood). Intellectually, I know that divorce can be hard and traumatic; but I've generally always had the perspective that situations which end in divorce would, in general, be harder and more traumatic to persist as marriages full of strife and conflict, so I always find it odd to locate the trauma in the divorce itself. At any rate, the couple in this song appear in other songs, and they are referred to as the alpha couple (I don't think all the songs in which they occur have alpha in the title, as the couple from, e.g. No Children is the alpha couple
The other thing that sort of sticks with me about this song (and the structure of the book, tbh) is Darnielle's relationship to religion. To my reckoning, Darnielle is a Christian in a way similar to someone like Sufjan Stevens. Both are artists whose music would be principally classified by the musical stylings (indie/folk rock, or what have you), but who take their religious views seriously and have a non-trivial number of songs that are explicitly and with specificity about and infused by their Christian faith. This is in contrast to "Christian Rock" where it is a major component of the categorization of the artist in general, and presumably virtually all of their music, and in contrast to artists who essentially don't bring any substantive religious content into their music. The structure of this book ("a book of days"), and the lyrics of this song ("can you feel the spirit moving? can you feel god's grace?") have me thinking about this in particular (even though this one line isn't on the level of, say Life of The World to Come, where every track is named for a bible verse).
Do I have a point by going into this? I mean, I guess I don't know who is reading these posts, so partially i am giving context for folks who don't know about the mountain goats. But also, as I am reading, listening, and reflecting on the mountain goats every day for a year, I'm probably just going to digress about random aspects of the band and the music that jump out at me, and Darnielle's faith as well as his fascination with the historical/classical rituals and practices (an overlapping but distinct interest) is something that has been waiting to jump out at me (a very non-christian listener) since I pre-ordered the book.
