We are left to hope for the best for this small family in “The Black Ice Cream Song.”

Track: “The Black Ice Cream Song”
Album: Zopilote Machine (1994)

I’ve become somewhat obsessed with a few live shows over the course of this project. Among my short list is this show from 1994 in Ohio at a place called Stache’s that was, I believe, named for the owner’s mustache. John Darnielle plays “The Black Ice Cream Song” and introduces it as “a new one.” There’s nothing necessarily fascinating about that, it’s just how time works. In 1994, this was “a new one.” The performance isn’t notably different than the album, but that’s also to be expected. There is not a reason to mention this except that it grounds Zopilote Machine in another time.

At the time of this writing, the Mountain Goats sound very little like the band that played Stache’s that night. They aren’t writing ten-line songs with mysterious titles anymore. You have to cast back to Stache’s to understand the band that offhandedly mentioned a child in the middle of a song and what it meant to do that at the time. The stories now are more complicated, but then so many of them were two people, maybe lovers and maybe not, who came to a particular moment and soaked in it. Most of them, most of the time, should not have had children. It’s a small mention here, but it wakes you up. Also of note is the specific date in 1957. I had to check, but go karts indeed existed in 1957, but just barely. So much to wonder about in this song, though the biggest legacy has to be the rhyme of “go kart” and “devil’s heart.”