“The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedi and Eats Their Bones” is about what you think it’s about.

Track: “The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedi and Eats Their Bones”
Album: Unreleased (Released on Soundcloud by Rian Johnson in 2017)

The Mountain Goats song “The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedi and Eats Their Bones” is about a Jedi who eats everyone else’s bones. There’s a powerful urge in me to make this entire entry just that sentence, but there is more to say.

The title really does tell you what you’re dealing with, but it’s worth explaining the story. When The Last Jedi was announced, John Darnielle joked that his song “The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedi and Eats Their Bones” wasn’t accepted as part of the movie. The title was pretty clearly a joke, but director Rian Johnson told him he had to write it and because John Darnielle is who he is, he did.

I don’t think the content of “The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedi and Eats Their Bones” needs much discussion. It’s in the same vein as “Foreign Object” and “Beach House” as a “funny” song, but one that’s mostly funny because you don’t expect it to be delivered the way it is. “Specifically just their bones,” the narrator insists, and says over and over that this Jedi is going to eat their bones. It’s hard to miss, but the repetitions of something you already know is part of the joke of so many Mountain Goats songs.

He’s played it twice, that I can find, since releasing it himself and it seems safe to say those two might be the only two performances. In one he joked that he hoped someone would delete the recording, but conceded that he knows people don’t operate like that. The other performance tells the whole story of how Rian Johnson and John Darnielle got to know each other, and if you’re interested in such things you should check it out.