“Ice Blue” does a whole lot with very little language.

Track: “Ice Blue”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

It is not strictly correct to say that the Mountain Goats don’t write love songs, but your definition of a love song must bend a little bit for a lot of them. John Darnielle has a habit of saying “this is a love song” before playing something that may or may not be a love song as I understand the term. You can’t really be right or wrong about this sort of thing, but it’s all part of the game. This becomes less true the further back you go, with “Ice Blue” as a prime example.

There are 40 words in “Ice Blue” and that includes a repeated line. My word counter tool estimates the speaking time at 14 seconds. I don’t have the stats on this because even I’m not this crazy, but this might be the least amount of words in a Mountain Goats song. Up against “Going to Japan” from the same album, it sounds like an entirely different band wrote this one. Even with those limitations, you have the perfect choice of a line, the fourth line’s “ha ha ha // ha ha ha.” You might call that lazy, but an extreme pivot to mania in a love song is pretty appropriate, I’d say.

It all culminates in an expression of pure love: “thought that I knew what colors were // before I saw you // ice blue.” It’s simple, really, but when you’re in that moment looking into someone’s eyes, this is how you feel. The songs become much more complex than “Ice Blue” but the thing is, I don’t think you can improve on this if you want someone to picture this exact moment.