http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DTtO-pUxng

“Wait for You” closes an EP on a quiet, hopeless note as a character waits for someone who likely isn’t coming back.

Track: “Wait for You”
Album: Babylon Springs EP (2006)

The Babylon Springs EP covers all the emotions the Mountain Goats love to cover. “Ox Baker Triumphant” and “Alibi” open the album with rousing, screaming fury. Both characters make bad decisions that they feel they have to make to stay true to themselves. We can judge their intentions because we’re separate people, but in their minds they’re doing what must be done. “Sail Babylon Springs” and “Sometimes I Still Feel the Bruise” look inward at sad relationships past their prime (well past, in the latter’s case).

After you’ve made those two parallel journeys over four songs you’re left with “Wait for You.” It would seem impossible that a song could step down in mood from the crushing blows of “Sometimes I Still Feel the Bruise,” but leave it to John Darnielle to find the sadness in a rainbow.

In the second verse the character waits for a loved one that may be coming and may not. They see a rainbow in the distance and imagine that it “wrapped its coils around the earth like a serpent” to choke them. There are a handful of examples of this in Goats songs, but this is one of the best ones. Often normally hopeful or sweet imagery is twisted in the minds of Goats narrators, but it takes a special kind of darkness to see a portent in a rainbow.

By the end of the song the narrator has decided that the person they’re waiting for isn’t coming. That much is to be expected, but they do say that the waiting still serves a purpose. “But I waited all the same,” Darnielle says softly, and you appreciate the perspective of waiting for waiting’s sake on someone that is totally gone.