![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
John Darnielle released a book with lyrics and details about 365 songs (take that leap years!), and I guess we'll see how long I go at reading one of them a day. We will also reveal the narrowness of my Mountain Goats fandom, as I discover many songs I have never before heard, such as the song for January 1st:
Alphabetizing:
Sometimes Mountain Goats song titles are extremely literal, but this song is not about alphabetizing anything. The annotations clarify that the seeds for the song came from what had been a working collection of poems called "Songs from the Alpha Privative" and many of the songs that derive from those poems have "alpha" in the title somewhere as a sort of easter egg. It will be interesting to see if the choice of songs is generally chronological (I did @ Darnielle on bluesky when I had thought about starting this project before the new year, and ask whether you had to read the book in order, and he said there was no particular reason to do so, though).
I am not super surprised I haven't heard this before, knowing that it comes from before Zopilote Machine, but it is very much the sort of lo fi sound that is familiar from the very earliest stuff by them I have heard. I prefer this sound to some of the bigger/fuller things he has been doing on more recent albums (but I also like some of the recent albums quite a bit). I haven't been finding myself drawn to listen to Through this Fire Across from Peter Balkan the way I listened to Bleed Out or Jenny from Thebes, and the last one I had one repeat endlessly was probably Beat the Champ (my entry into Goats fandom was when Transcendental Youth had been released and shortly before Beat the Champ came out, so those two have an unfair advantage, for me).
Alphabetizing:
Sometimes Mountain Goats song titles are extremely literal, but this song is not about alphabetizing anything. The annotations clarify that the seeds for the song came from what had been a working collection of poems called "Songs from the Alpha Privative" and many of the songs that derive from those poems have "alpha" in the title somewhere as a sort of easter egg. It will be interesting to see if the choice of songs is generally chronological (I did @ Darnielle on bluesky when I had thought about starting this project before the new year, and ask whether you had to read the book in order, and he said there was no particular reason to do so, though).
I am not super surprised I haven't heard this before, knowing that it comes from before Zopilote Machine, but it is very much the sort of lo fi sound that is familiar from the very earliest stuff by them I have heard. I prefer this sound to some of the bigger/fuller things he has been doing on more recent albums (but I also like some of the recent albums quite a bit). I haven't been finding myself drawn to listen to Through this Fire Across from Peter Balkan the way I listened to Bleed Out or Jenny from Thebes, and the last one I had one repeat endlessly was probably Beat the Champ (my entry into Goats fandom was when Transcendental Youth had been released and shortly before Beat the Champ came out, so those two have an unfair advantage, for me).
