“The Recognition Scene” chooses an unlikely location to show us a familiar event in our lives.

Track: “The Recognition Scene”
Album: Sweden (1995)

Sweden opens with a couple stealing candy from a store. In “The Recognition Scene,” they grab huge quantities of garbage food and drive around eating it, unsure of what their actions mean. It’s an interesting crime, and the seemingly low stakes nature of it doesn’t tell us if these are hardened criminals or just normal junkies.

The key to “The Recognition Scene” is in the refrain: “I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone.” The narrator senses that an end is coming, even if it’s at least months away. They describe a “three-month ride” after the robbery, so we know as an audience that there is time to come. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will be happy time, of course, and continued presence of characters in Mountain Goats songs definitely doesn’t imply that it will always be a positive experience.

A “recognition scene” is a moment in film or literature where one or more characters has a sudden flash of understanding. It can mean a big reveal (he was dead the whole time) or a more subtle one (he’s not the man I thought he was). In this case, we don’t know what the characters learn about each other. They might not know themselves, as the narrator says “I saw something written in tall clear letters on your face // but I could not break the code.”

It is enough to know that this scene told the narrator it is going to be over, eventually. In bad stories characters explode and yell at each other to signify the end, but more often it is like this. They both know, from this moment filled with illegal Snickers and Skittles, it is not going to last, but there’s still three-plus months to go.