Leaving town is a metaphor and an actual plan in “Flashing Lights.”

Track: “Flashing Lights”
Album: Sweden (1995)

There are very few songs in the Mountain Goats catalog that describe uncomplicated, positive love. Usually, characters feel great, powerful, drawing force towards each other that sometimes resembles love, but it usually comes with months or years of creeping contempt and dread. That’s just how narrators are in John Darnielle’s world, though that is becoming less and less true in the “modern era” of the Mountain Goats.

Just as these folks are rarely purely in love, they are rarely directly antagonistic. It’s not uncommon for a song to show us a relationship on the downswing, but we generally don’t see it too far along that curve. “Flashing Lights” is a rare song in that way. “You swear you’re leaving town,” one says to the other, but “empty promises // empty promises,” they amend.

Every song on Sweden has a Swedish “subtitle” in the liner notes. The line for “Flashing Lights” is simply “the coldest winter.” There are other songs where people physically fight or songs where people hurl crueler barbs than this one, but it really is powerful to hear one person tell another that they swore they’d leave but they didn’t. It’s very much within John Darnielle’s wheelhouse to have that character stay as long as the other does, however. Our narrator asks the other one why they haven’t left, but we infer from that they also aren’t leaving. “Why haven’t you left” is a question that reflects back on the speaker, telling us this story isn’t over even if they say it is.