“Fresh Cherries in Trinidad” may not be coming to a live show near you, but it’s an interesting sign of the times.

Track: “Fresh Cherries in Trinidad”
Album: Hot Garden Stomp (1993)

A few years ago, John Darnielle stopped posting on Tumblr. I get the sense that most people did at about the same time. I was never a heavy user, I used it for a writing project for a year and abandoned mine. It’s a quirky platform, with timestamps stored on the archive page but not available on individual pages. This is a long introduction just for one word, but I encourage everyone with an interest in the band to dig through more than this page, where John Darnielle said a little bit about every song on Hot Garden Stomp and if he’d play them again. About “Fresh Cherries in Trinidad” he just said “nope.”

The arc of the Mountain Goats is long at this point. You can trace the emotional intensity from the very first songs to the most recent ones but the music itself is radically different. I think you could find a way to say “Fresh Cherries in Trinidad” is the logical predecessor, but I think you’d be reaching. The early keyboard preset songs are part of the journey, to be sure, but they’re out of place even sometimes on the old albums.

John Darnielle dismissed it with one word, but that’s just in reference to if he would play it at a live show. I don’t think you could do this one justice outside of the style it’s presented it, but there are elements that would work. I like the phrasing of “I feel things occasionally like this.” You can see the songwriter that would emerge, but you should also enjoy what he was doing at the time.