“The Moon Song” feels like a love song’s mirror, where people exist in the space of a love song that isn’t happening.

Track: “The Moon Song”
Album: Unreleased

“I want to tell you that you look so pretty // but the words come out wrong and the rage gets in the way” is an all-time duo of lines for an early Mountain Goats narrator. Here, after writing more than 600 of these, it becomes impossible to not see the minor evolution of these narrators from frustrated, alienated people into a more complex version of the same set of emotions. What, truly, separates that idea from “Autoclave?” Obviously some more advanced songwriting for that second one, but the narrators here just get better at expressing themselves more often than they actually grow.

“The Moon Song” is very much of that very early Mountain Goats style. Certainly they aren’t autobiographical and we shouldn’t fall into that trap of analysis or discussion, but one can see how a lived experience with people like this would build into this moment’s immortalization. This is a moment where something truly profound and memorable could happen, or, maybe, you could let that moment pass and miss it. This is about that second version happening.