The sight of a simple fruit tree haunts a narrator in “Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums,” but the tree’s got nothing to do with it.

Track: “Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums”
Album: Zopilote Machine (1994)

More than twenty years passed between this performance at CBGB in New York and this performance at Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. At the first, John Darnielle mentioned after playing “Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums” that he had a bunch of copies of his zine to sell for two dollars each. At the second, an enormous crowd explodes and you can hear a few people get really animated after hearing “an old one.” I am probably too fascinated by the “arc” of the Mountain Goats and there really isn’t one, but I love these comparisons. Both versions are good, as is the studio version. You really can’t go wrong with this one.

There are a few other Quetzalcoatl songs. This one finds a narrator about to seek out someone but they just can’t do it. “I meant to leave the house this morning” is a simple statement, but it’s so much more. The forces that separated these two people originally separate them still, but they exist within this person’s head. Maybe there was a reason and maybe there wasn’t, but whatever led to this split is still on this person’s heart. They can’t even make a phone call without be consumed by the sight of the plum tree in their yard. It’s not the tree, it’s everything it represents. Maybe the tree isn’t even related, but just seeing it reminds this person nothing is as simple as it appears to people looking in from outside.