“Nine Black Poppies” is the moment between the good times that are over and the explosion still to come.

Track: “Nine Black Poppies”
Album: Nine Black Poppies (1995)

It is easy to make broad statements about the Mountain Goats. This is a band that put out a shirt that just said “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats” on it because they knew the way their audience processes their work. No one “likes” the Mountain Goats, they feel something more than that.

That said, I will lean into that impulse and say I don’t think there is a better thesis statement for the “early’ period than these two lines from “Nine Black Poppies:”

And I tried to remember how nice it had been a long, long time ago
But I couldn’t remember, I honestly could not remember

The song opens with one character saying they intended a nice gesture but then was overcome by this emotion. They grow increasingly uncomfortable and get closer and closer to the moment of confrontation. John Darnielle has said that it’s about characters that don’t trust each other, which is really clear as the situation escalates. In typical fashion, we don’t get enough specifics to fill in the gaps. The characters reference “a half-remembered conversation” and “the traces of an old song,” and we’re left to wonder what really happened here.

It doesn’t matter. The power of “Nine Black Poppies” is in the way John Darnielle’s voice cracks over “someone was changing // someone was changing from the inside out” and the panic that we feel as we consider our own version of this situation. A package from a specific part of China is all we get as a clue, but we don’t need to know. We’ve been there before and we’re back there again as this character turns around, somewhere after this song ends.