The most important moment in “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker” is slight enough that you might miss it in your real life.

Track: “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker”
Album: Sweden (1995)

As far as the usual sources are aware, “Tahitian Ambrosia Maker” has never been played live and John Darnielle isn’t on the record about it. It’s on Sweden, which many fans count among the greatest records the band has produced, but Sweden has nineteen tracks.

The liner notes on Sweden contain, appropriately, Swedish subtitles for each song. Some of them are cryptic with lines like “the coldest winter” and “those who escaped were innocent,” but the subtitle for this song is just “he’s recognized you.” That might imply that the characters are pursued by someone they’re trying to lose or it might mean something else entirely. It might even refer to the speaker, from the perspective of the other character. It deepens the mystery of what’s going on here without expressly revealing it, which is fitting for a Swedish subtitle on a Mountain Goats record.

With a lack of primary and secondary sources, we are left with the text itself. Two characters are hungry and one offers bread to the other. John Darnielle’s “moments of grace like this being wholly unmerited” is beautiful, but it also says something about the state of these two. The final verse is all about a familiar moment in a Goats song: one character touches the other one gently and the recipient imbues it with powerful meaning. It happens in a number of Goats songs, but it’s a useful device because we’ve all had that experience. The speaker devolves and screams “pure gold, nothing but gold” and is driven to promise a coconut cream pie, but the reasoning is open to interpretation. “Because I saw the sky coming down to meet you,” like any good Goats lyric, is malleable enough to be sweet or foreboding, depending on your current feelings towards love.