An actual love song told with Mountain Goats lyrics is a powerful thing in “Twin Human Highway Flares.”

Track: “Twin Human Highway Flares”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

It is easy to make a mistake with the Mountain Goats and assume every song is about John Darnielle. Most of it, especially the early stuff, is written in first person. It’s easy to imagine a lot of it coming from the same person. It’s really tidy to say that it’s all one person and that person is John Darnielle and to build a mythos from there. Most of it isn’t, though, and most of it isn’t even gendered. With very rare exceptions, most Mountain Goats songs are deliberate in their ambiguity. Most of them find one person telling one other person something, but you can’t quite tell what.

“Twin Human Highway Flares” is a love song John Darnielle wrote for the woman that would become his wife. It’s extreme in the way that a lot of Mountain Goats songs are, with “I hope my heart explodes” as a finisher and a declaration of love. That violence is what makes it stick in your mind. “I will burn all the calendars that counted the years down to such a worthless day” is pure Darnielle, in a way that you know exactly what I mean if you’ve heard a single other Mountain Goats song. You need the quotes around “love song” for most Mountain Goats “love songs,” but this one is brutal and honest and straightforward. The guitar leads you to expect something sad and distant and the language is destructive, but this is John Darnielle at his clearest and most hopeful. This is a song about telling someone that this moment signifies a future with both of you in it, which very few Mountain Goats narrators would recognize.