Punk’s Reviews > This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days > Status Update
Punk
is on page 13 of 539
"Pure Milk" is the first of these earlier songs where I can see the same things that draw me to Darnielle's songwriting today–the intense narrator, the weird circumstances, a whiff of the apocalyptic–and it's clearly a song rather than a poem. Wonderfully, he says it's one of his absolute favorites among his earlier songs because it's still opaque to him and he wants to know more about the story.
— Jan 11, 2026 01:45PM
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Punk’s Previous Updates
Punk
is on page 20 of 539
On "New Star Song": "This, again, is the working ethos of the early lyrics. Set a scene and put some ghosts in it, then get excited about the ghosts."
— Jan 12, 2026 01:31PM
Punk
is on page 20 of 539
So far none of these songs are familiar to me—the furthest back my Mountain Goats collection goes is 2002* and we're in the early 1990s here—but I'm loving the near rhyme of forgetting/Redding in "New Star Song."
* Which was basically yesterday, I feel. Not very long ago at all. However, basic math reveals it was nearly 30 years ago.
— Jan 12, 2026 01:28PM
* Which was basically yesterday, I feel. Not very long ago at all. However, basic math reveals it was nearly 30 years ago.
Punk
is on page 17 of 539
Darnielle includes Miron Białoszewski's poem "And Even, Even if They Take Away the Stove / My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy, which he cites as formative for him, reading it at seventeen, and it just explains so much about what he's trying to do with the Mountain Goats.
— Jan 12, 2026 01:12PM
Punk
is starting
John Darnielle: "What more fortunate situation could there be, for a person, than to be glad of having been wrong?"
— Jan 08, 2026 09:15PM
