With a simple, but strange, description, “Downtown Seoul” offers a brief look at love that’s better than any pop song.

Track: “Downtown Seoul”
Album: Sweden (1995)

Is Sweden the best Mountain Goats record? A lot of fans contend that it is, and I think they’ve got a good case. The album opens with the extremely brutal “The Recognition Scene” and follows up with “Downtown Seoul.” Songs like “The Mess Inside” and “Half Dead” might be rougher, but there is no harder one-two punch in the catalog than the two songs that open up Sweden.

Every song on Sweden has a Swedish sentence written next to it in the liner notes. For “Downtown Seoul” it is very simple: “He is younger than me.” The meaning of some of the Swedish sentences is tough to decipher, but this one seems to suggest that the song may be about John Darnielle himself. It predates the autobiographical records like The Sunset Tree, but it’s easy to see how Darnielle sympathizes with his narrator here. In the first verse their beloved walks across a square in Seoul. They are consumed by the moment. “As the rest of my life went by,” they say.

What makes this song so wonderful is the specificity. Most love songs talk about generic love, but the Mountain Goats offer you a moment where a person takes another’s finger in their mouth and rests it lightly on their tongue. It sounds strange, but you know what it means. We are all different and we cannot totally explain the best moments of our lives to other people, because they were not there. “I remember your eyelids,” they say, and we also remember something extremely exact and indescribable about someone we loved in a place far away from our present.