Waylon Jennings has no idea what’s happening in one audience member’s mind and what might await them in “Waylon Jennings Live!”

Track: “Waylon Jennings Live!”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

John Darnielle likes to open live shows with a song the crowd won’t know. This show in San Francisco opened with “Any Available Surface” and then was almost entirely in alphabetical order. That song is excellent, but it’s about as obscure as Mountain Goats songs come. This show in Chicago opened with “Waylon Jennings Live!” This is the earliest performance of it I can find and it predates the album, so no one in the audience had ever heard it. You can hear people laugh at lines like “before I got myself this drunk” and you can tell it’s not just new to most of them, but to all of them.

The studio version is excellent, but the live versions make this one shine. I think it’s the best song the Goats have written in many years. That’s not an insult to any other song, this one just really works for me. It feels like a bridge between the characters in early Mountain Goats songs and the instrumentation of the modern band.

I was at that show at the Old Town School of Folk Music in 2018. It’s a really special venue and the person who taped this show really captures that. At the time, this was “Unreleased Waylon Jennings Song” on most of the blogs. A friend of mine got in a heated discussion with someone on Genius about what the name of the Iowa casino in the first line was. It’s Meskwaki and it’s halfway between Des Moines and Iowa City.

Our narrator is at a show and about to take a big risk. The story is easy to follow in the song, but it leaves just enough out to make you wonder. What, exactly, is on these flash drives? Even beyond that, what’s in the suitcase?