The simplest of scenes provides the setting for a connection in “Chino Love Song 1979.”

Track: “Chino Love Song 1979”
Album: Taking the Dative (1994), Ghana (1999)

As far as I can tell, one of the only live performances of “Chino Love Song 1979” was in California in 2014, where the Mountain Goats played all of Taking the Dative in order. The crowd erupts during every local mention and the performance is worth hearing just to hear the blown out, sped up version complete with bass. In the fury of the moment, John Darnielle quadruples the closing refrain. The crowd yells along with him through every version of “I saw you // against the soda machine // I saw you leaning there.” It’s a really simple set of lines, but it says so much with such a straightforward image. You can see it, can’t you? There is no suggestion of how it should make you feel, but it does make you feel something.

The song is 20 years old at the time of that live show. John Darnielle misses or specifically removes a few lines, which really drives home how important that closing image is. The rest of the song is mundane, especially with descriptions of everyday life like “the traffic on Riverside Drive was thin // but by no means nonexistent.” The cars don’t matter and the sunflower that consumes the second verse doesn’t matter. These images and surrounding details are just there to get us to the moment where one character sees another one.

If it’s autobiographical, John Darnielle was twelve years old in 1979. It doesn’t need to be about him, but one wonders what late-twenties John Darnielle thought about himself as a younger man if so. It requires two steps outside of our own existence to imagine another person imagining another version of themselves. Whoever it is, it’s astounding how much we get out of simple images and a casual setting.