For John Darnielle, “Leaving Home” is a way to process the sad feeling of moving away from somewhere you love.

Track: “Leaving Home”
Album: Ghana (1999)

“Leaving Home” was originally released in 1996 as part of a compilation called Cyanide Guilt Trip. It was re-released on Ghana three years later with several other oddities and early tracks. Ghana is an essential album because it covers so much ground, but it’s odd to listen to in one sitting. It has some funny, light songs like “Anti Music Song” and “The Anglo-Saxons” and some emotional, quiet songs like “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life” and “Raja Vocative.” It’s not that one type of song is better than the other, it’s just that they don’t necessarily flow into one another. You thus need to listen to Ghana the way you’d read a history textbook. It has all the details, though the story may not always feel linear.

“Leaving Home” belongs in the second group. In the liner notes on Ghana, John Darnielle says that he wrote it while he lived in Chicago for six months in 1995 and that he missed his home in California. It’s rare for John Darnielle to be this forthcoming: “It seems maudlin to say things out loud, so I made up a whole different set of circumstances with which to surround the feeling.” Everyone can remember a time they moved and felt like they were in the wrong place, even briefly.

John Darnielle replaces his situation with a couple with a young child. They’re in love. The speaker remarks on China, their home, as it shrinks into the distance. They share longing glances, but they also comment on how they’re deeply in love and might just need each other. It’s rare for a Mountain Goats song to discuss such uncomplicated love, and it feels like John Darnielle needed to imagine what would justify the choice to leave somewhere you don’t want to leave.