The simple pleasure of delicious jam offers a brief respite from — what else — Tampa in “Jam Eater Blues.”

Track: “Jam Eater Blues”
Album: Jam Eater Blues (2001)

The difference between jam and jelly is that jam has more pieces of actual fruit, so it’s chunkier. That’s why it’s easy to picture the narrator in “Jam Eater Blues” pawing jam out of a jar with just their hands as they ponder the world and their place in it.

“Life is too short to refrain from eating jam out of the jar” is a fine summary of the Mountain Goats’ mentality. Even the darker moments of the catalog affirm the need to act quickly and the importance of living without reservations. It’s the kind of statement you can see John Darnielle making and writing down in a notebook, wondering what he’ll end up using it for later. Then it shows up perfectly as the refrain in “Jam Eater Blues” and leads surprisingly into a song about the challenges of love.

Our narrator says they won’t stay up waiting for someone to come home, but they will eat jam. They won’t leave the windows open to take part in the world, but they will eat jam. They won’t live out their days in Tampa, a common symbol of dead ends in Mountain Goats songs, but they will eat jam. “Life is too short to let it go to waste like this,” they tell us, “but I never tasted jam before that tasted like this.” We can forgive the this/this rhyme because it explains the character so well. The vagueness of who is coming home and what Tampa and open windows mean to the narrator are in stark contrast with the pleasure of jam out of a jar. We don’t know what these problems mean, but we know what pigging out in joy to escape them feels like.