Love and devotion can’t conquer addiction in the Mountain Goats’ “Full Flower.”

Track: “Full Flower”
Album: Nothing for Juice (1996)

On an album like Nothing for Juice, a lot of songs can get lost. John has said in interviews that his most brutal song (a trait many fans would ascribe to something like “No Children” or “Baboon”) is “Waving at You.” “Going to Scotland” is on many fans’ top 10 lists. It’s easy, in a quick pass through the early years of the Mountain Goats, to miss so much.

Nothing for Juice is the last album with Rachel Ware in the group. While most people would insert the divide between “early Goats” and “the new stuff” somewhere later down the line, this is as good a place as any to say the “early stuff” ends. “Going to Kansas” opens with a full five-second alarm, essentially. Songs like “Orange Ball of Pain” and “It Froze Me,” while holy to long-time fans, are tough sells to folks without deep love for John Darnielle’s craft. It’s not a starter album, and “Full Flower” is right at home on “not a starter album.”

At a running time of 2:10, it’s over quickly. You focus on the driving electric guitar in the background and the haunting, distant vocals. The guitar builds over the refrain into the loud, angry beat that covers John’s repeated “I would give anything in the world up for you // but I will not stop.”

Every single line in “Full Flower” features the word “I.” The entire song is the narrator simply stating facts. They give a benign description of their world, but the titular flower shows up in the second verse, and it’s clear that this is a person consumed. They care for the recipient of the song, but like so many characters in the world of the Mountain Goats, wanting to stop and stopping are very different beasts.