“Foreign Object” is a “funny” song that shows how John Darnielle has grown up from the time when he wrote “funny songs.”

Track: “Foreign Object”
Album: Beat the Champ (2015)

“Foreign Object” is not, at first, a challenging song. It’s literally about a guy with a foreign object. John Darnielle makes light of it at live shows by talking about how obvious it is and how the song is exactly what you think. All of Beat the Champ talks about wrestling, but “Foreign Object” takes the subject matter and lives in it completely.

Our narrator is angry and trying to stir up some anger in his opponent. Bravado is central to professional wrestling and our hero here wants his opponent to know they’re going to come at them with something fierce, outside the rules, and violent. They mention an “astrolabe” which wouldn’t work very well in a fight, but it conjures up an image. The aim here is to get under your opponent’s skin and to incite the crowd, and what better than ancient, bizarre tools and threats to bite someone’s flesh?

John Darnielle wrote “funny” songs for years and sometimes talks about how he doesn’t want to be the “funny song guy” anymore. “The Monkey Song” and “The Anglo-Saxons” don’t make sense at a show where you might look deep inside your soul and consider “Wild Sage” and “In Corolla,” so it makes sense why he wants to escape his former self. However, “Foreign Object” stands proud on Beat the Champ as testimony to the fact that the man can still write something silly. The bebop chorus of excited “bap bap bap!” noises after a verse about maiming a man only makes sense on a Mountain Goats record, but it’s a fine example of how the band can express multiple ideas but still have a core identity.