The best song on the first album, “Going to Alaska” calls a harsh environment “perfect” and opens up some grim questions.

Track: “Going to Alaska”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

The most enduring song from the first album is “Going to Alaska.” It’s also the first in the collection of 40+ “Going to…” songs that discuss the experience of going to places that include a small city in England, the southernmost city in Texas, and Maine.

The studio recording is rough, but that’s par for the course on the first album. “Going to Alaska” has bookends of samples from an episode of Hawaii Five-O, but it also sounds the most like the things that came after it. John Darnielle’s delivery is intense. That’s an easy word to use for him at any stage of his career, but it’s really the only word for a song that ends with a narrator insisting they are going to Alaska because it is “perfect for my purposes.”

It was a poem first. Bits like “up, yes” to start the second verse and the extended metaphor of heat as paint still carry a poetic quality. What makes it a Mountain Goats song is the delivery, with a building sense of nervousness. “You can go blind just by looking at the ground,” our narrator tells us, and we wonder why this person would say such a thing. These details about Alaska are true, such as I know, but it’s all akin to someone talking about how easy it would be to push someone off a building when they are both on top of it. It may be true, but why are you looking at me like that?