Formalities abound in “Sept 19th Triple X Love! Love!” as a character tries to remember a long-past time of love.

Track: “Sept 19th Triple X Love! Love!”
Album: Sweden (1995)

“Sept 19th Triple X Love! Love!” seems to me to be an indecipherable title. I’m sure it means something and it’s possible that it means something obvious that people have figured out and it’s just me. John Darnielle once said, before playing it live, that he couldn’t even pronounce the title. My best guess is that John Darnielle saw it on a sign somewhere and couldn’t determine the meaning, making it perfect for a strange song in the middle of an album called Sweden.

This is supposedly a sort of sister song to “The Recognition Scene,” the best (or second-best) song on Sweden. The title of the sister song is direct and has been frequently explained as the moment in a story that everyone realizes what is going to happen. “The Recognition Scene” imagines a moment where the ending is clear but has not yet arrived, which is a very familiar scene for Mountain Goats characters. “Sept 19th Triple X Love! Love!” finds a similar moment, but less directly clear. One character cuts down a tree at the command of another, but they think back to another time and a memory. “When you touched me I felt fire come through,” they say, but this is about another day. Here, in the present, we are performing necessary tasks and following directions. We only realize this as a sadness when contrasted with another moment.