“Balance” finds two characters in the late stages of something we usually don’t want to consider.

Track: “Balance”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

You really should listen to I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, a podcast that didn’t exist when I started doing this but is essential listening now that it exists. John Darnielle talks to Joseph Fink in each episode about a Mountain Goats song and the conversation spirals out into connected (and not connected) topics. I can’t imagine the audience of people who will read about Goats songs but doesn’t listen to this podcast is a big one, but if you’re in that group, you have some homework to do.

In the episode about “Balance,” the pair say it’s song about a moment that doesn’t look at the causes that got you to that moment or what comes next for you after that moment. There are a ton of songs that fit this description, but it’s a great way to approach this one. The content is all miserable topics like “the interest on delinquent loans” but the connective tissue ends both verses on a specific note: “not too far gone to care.”

We almost never find out what happens to people in these songs. It’s simplistic to say that, because that’s true of almost all narrative. You always have to fill in the blanks yourself, whether it’s a great novel or a story song about lovers drinking sweet tea and falling out of love. The cover of All Hail West Texas says the album has seven characters, however, and you can do the work to try to figure out where else we learn about these two. I don’t think you need to do that to appreciate “Balance,” which is what John Darnielle is getting at in that podcast episode. You know what happens next because you know what generally happens next when you look at someone like this.