John Darnielle delivers “Going to Wisconsin” through bared teeth, telling us this person is at the end of their rope.

Track: “Going to Wisconsin”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“You say you need me in California, but no thanks,” John Darnielle says in “Going to Wisconsin.” I can’t think of a simpler distillation of the early Mountain Goats narrator ethos. John Darnielle bites the lyrics and sounds furious, lending this narrator a sense of unhinged anger. Early Mountain Goats songs started as poems, and I don’t know if that’s true of this one or not but the alliteration in phrases like “the bottom of the boat” really pops either way.

The delivery is the point of this one. You can imagine this narrator telling everyone to go to hell and how they feel stuck on this idea. Persistence in the face of all opposition is a common idea in the early ones. “Everyone said just to sit still,” they even say, but we know you can’t stop someone like this. The chorus is an insistence that they’re headed to Wisconsin. California represents going home in a lot of Mountain Goats songs, but we don’t find out what Wisconsin means to this narrator. Is it Wisconsin just because the second verse mentions cheese? Surely not, but that’s one idea.

You can hear a live version of “Going to Wisconsin” played at Franklin Bruno’s house in 1992 on this recording, which may be the earliest Mountain Goats recording available. The anger comes through and it works just as well live as not, but it’s worth hearing both versions even though they’re similar. There may not be much to dig out of this one; sometimes it’s just about the snarl.