The beautiful “The Mess Inside” refuses to let us down easy as it insists on a sad end.

Track: “The Mess Inside”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Mountain Goats songs about specific places. All of these songs seem to suggest that if a person could just get to another place they could be another person. If not happy, they say, at least different. “The Mess Inside” pays off all of these songs to tell you that is not the case. You’re you, wherever you are, and a change of scenery will not fix it.

“Tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things,” is both an all-time lyric and a summation of this idea. “Most of the time I guess I felt all right,” our narrator follows up, and maybe they did. “The Mess Inside” is very clear about the message. This is the story of two people trying four locations to improve their mood and to run from “the mess” of their love. It works until it doesn’t. That’s the story of, conservatively, a hundred Mountain Goats songs.

What makes “The Mess Inside” different is where it falls in the timeline. “I wanted you // to love me like you used to do” is a simple idea, plainly stated. In contrast to “a weekend in Utah won’t fix what’s wrong with us,” however, it becomes a horror story. The die is cast for these two. It’s over, and they know it, and they know this a futile process. That’s not unique for a Mountain Goats couple, but it’s rarely this much of a done deal. This isn’t maybe, this is definite, and you can hear John Darnielle lose hope for his lovers as the story builds to the only conclusion it could ever hope to find.