A mix of cacophony and desperation, “Going to Kansas” deals with the end of the world and the end of love at the same time.

Track: “Going to Kansas”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992) and Nothing for Juice (1996)

There are two versions of “Going to Kansas.” The one from The Hound Chronicles is very slow and seems almost pleading, while the one from Nothing for Juice is frenetic and insistent. The Nothing for Juice version is the one that gets played live — even in the early 90s, before Nothing for Juice— so it can be said to be the “standard” version of “Going to Kansas.”

The slower one has its charms. There’s a partial repetition of the line “you know what I mean” where you can really hear John Darnielle getting into the song and he belts out the essential “when my head was resting on your breastbone // I could hear your beating heart” in a satisfying way, but damn does it sound strange when compared to the quicker one. In a great live performance in 2006 with original Goats bassist Rachel Ware, John describes it as a song written “by a crude guitar player, for the crude guitar.” On Nothing for Juice, it opens with a seventeen-second screech, and “crude” seems about right for the insane, end-of-the-world effect the song maintains for the entire four minutes.

Whether you can get into the dissonance of “Going to Kansas” or not, you can definitely appreciate the connection of the end of days and the tenuous way two people are often tied together. Rachel chimes in to end a few lines, and the presence of another narrator makes the song full-on heartbreaking. They’re standing on some precipice, both literal and figurative, and one can’t stop noticing basic things about another (hair, green clothes) to try to delay the inevitable. In the Goats-go-electric version, the original, or any live recording, you can always hear the stalling and the hope, and the scene never gets any easier to think about.