“Horseradish Road” features two lovers who can’t quite end their story without a last moment of reflection.

Track: “Horseradish Road”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

The Coroner’s Gambit is aptly named. It’s one of the heaviest Mountain Goats albums, even though that feels like a big claim to lay on it. Songs like “Baboon” and “Family Happiness” are contenders for the angriest moments in Goats history and “Shadow Song” and “Elijah” speak directly with death. Even the love song references darkness in its title: “There Will Be No Divorce.” On such an album, what would you expect John Darnielle to say in his song about two lovers?

“Horseradish Road” is complex. I’ll confess that I had to look up both pop culture references in the song: the beleaguered, depressed opera singer Maria Callas and the musical cryptogram Enigma Variations. You can go down a big information hole and read about them online, but their use in this song is very simple. Callas had an impossible life and was driven to be the greatest of her time and Variations contains an unsolvable puzzle. They are both beautiful and impossible. The couple in “Horseradish Road” is surrounding themselves with lovely things that they deliberately can’t fix.

“You’ve done something awful // I’ve done something worse” is a solid Goats lyric, and it largely sums up the ethos of John Darnielle’s lovers who are past the point of no return. It’s rare that lovers assign blame in both directions, but the Goats are always careful to mention that neither person can be fully blamed for any demise. It’s always a joint decision, and despite the beautiful violin and the high-minded cultural references, “Horseradish Road” boils down to one seething person looking at another reprehensible one. They aren’t quite finished, but every Goats song is about that very long moment where it’s too late, but it’s not quite over.