“The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” muses on he meaning of big things for other people versus small things for ourselves.

Track: “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life”
Album: Ghana (1999)

So many Mountain Goats songs suggest an interpretation but stop short of insisting upon one. It’s easy to infer what songs about the folly of insurance fraud or the risks of selling drugs are supposed to make us feel, but rarely does John Darnielle directly say “this song is about this thing.”

Darnielle himself responded to a comment on his Tumblr and told a fan that “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” is “essentially a riff on ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’,” which is a poem by W. H. Auden. The fan asked why the song ends before it discusses Jimi Hendrix’s death, but Darnielle insists that’s the whole idea. He said that it would “lose whatever power it has” if it devolved into drugs and death.

The song is quiet, even for an early Goats song. You can picture Jimi Hendrix waking up and performing the basic tasks described in the lyrics. Darnielle highlights relatable things for a reason. His Jimi Hendrix is about to die, but today he’s just having a normal morning. If you’re lucky, you’ll have thousands and thousands of mornings like this and the last one you have will look a lot like the others.

Auden’s poem examines a classic painting: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Icarus is shown in the sea after burning his wings, but none of the other people seem to care. They have their own lives, so even the remarkable story of the fall of Icarus means very little. Darnielle doesn’t tell us how to feel about it, but he echoes Auden’s notion that we must be who we are and live in our experiences, even when circumstances seem like they deserve more attention and pause.