“Dutch Orchestra Blues” sees a relationship potentially end but also draws attention away with a trick.

Track: “Dutch Orchestra Blues”
Album: Isopanisad Radio Hour (2000)

There are about a dozen performances of “Dutch Orchestra Blues” across the hundreds of live shows that Mountain Goats fans have taped and uploaded online. In Holland, John Darnielle told the audience that he was picturing a particular street when he wrote the song. In many performances, he joked about it being a “middle period Mountain Goats song” and said it was one of his favorites.

As far as “explanations” go, there’s a conclusive one for this song. At a show in Arizona in 2018, John Darnielle told the audience he thought of “Dutch Orchestra Blues” as a song that builds towards an explanation and doesn’t deliver on it. It’s a joke, in a way, and one that a lot of the best songs of this era execute well. Other songs tell us the Easter Bunny is coming or water is going to destroy all things or wild dogs are coming down from the mountain and we’re left to wonder what that means for us. “Dutch Orchestra Blues” follows a similar trajectory but doesn’t even get to that point. Our narrator even says that they might not walk by and someone else might not even notice.

As far as that concept goes, this may be the best example. Our narrator sets the stakes with “you may love me // or you may not love me at all anymore” but immediately follows that with a description of the titular Dutch orchestra and the sun shining in Holland in the spring. You are certainly welcome to believe it to be something representative, but I think the sudden turn is the point. The possible end of this love is supposed to be so grand a moment, and yet something else veers us away from that and leaves us considering what just happened.