Status Updates From This Year: 365 Songs Annota...

I still haven't heard any of these early songs out in the wild (i.e. without looking for them), and I haven't heard Horseradish Road at all, but on the page it very much sounds like a Mountain Goats song.

"Financial ruin is an almost irresistible theme for me; as soon as I feel tempted to drain a character’s bank account, I do it, whether owing to bank error or poor money management skills on their part, it does me no force, I must have their money, the better to flush it down the toilet for them."

February 9 ("Some Swedish Trees").

i love this song. i love the intense and kind of frightening narrative hidden beneath the surface of a song about cutting down a peach treee to provide firewood.

Guys, I just really enjoy John Darnielle's whole thing. On "Commandante": "There is a tradition, from the earliest folk musics, of songs in which the speaker boasts of his talents, or his successes, or his sexual prowess. There is a tradition in Mountain Goats songs of boasting about having, e.g., “a storage locker full of cow figurines.” This song is as firmly inside that tradition as you can get."

"One longstanding aesthetic goal of mine is to be writing in poetic language that comes out sounding like speech—there are a lot of ways to think about poetry, and about how it relates to speech, and still more ways to think about how song does or doesn’t differ from poetry in how it does or doesn’t resemble speech."

February 7 & 8 ("Snow Crush Killing Song" & "Sept 19 Triple X Love! Love!").