Two oddly romantic images in “Minnesota” briefly obscure a tale about how we can forget how to love each other.

Track: “Minnesota”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

“A little angrier and a little less easy to sympathize with.” – John Darnielle, comparing the couple in Full Force Galesburg to people on other Mountain Goats albums.

For an album that ends with a repetition of “it’s all coming apart again,” there’s a lot of sweet-sounding stuff on Full Force Galesburg. It’s a tough album to break down in a lot of respects. John Darnielle mostly describes it as an album about two desperate people who aren’t in a healthy relationship with each other anymore, but that can very loosely be layered onto many, many Goats albums. These two specifically are going through something else.

“Minnesota” stretches the definition of “love song.” One character surrounds their house with Dutch seeds while the other sings an old song. While those are nice images, they are surrounded by suggestions of something very grisly. Both verses talk about an unrelenting heat, and in the heat our guide through this romance is drinking and staring at his wife. He’s only drinking and staring at her.

If you are given to hope, it may be difficult to pull out the darkness in a song that’s this sweet on the surface. Full Force Galesburg has much angrier guitar on it elsewhere and the lyrics of “Chinese House Flowers” speak much more directly to the end of love (“I want you the way you were”), but “Minnesota” is just as grim about the chances of these two working out. These two are sharing some strangely intimate moments, but they aren’t really communicating. This is not The Alpha Couple, but it’s certainly people who could appreciate their method of “dealing” with problems.