“There Will Be No Divorce” is the only Mountain Goats song that uses the word “divorce” in the title, and not how you’d expect.

Track: “There Will Be No Divorce”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

“There Will Be No Divorce” is a love song for John Darnielle wrote for his wife. He introduces it as such at live shows, though the specific dedication changes a little bit each time. There’s something wonderful about a love song in the Mountain Goats catalog where you often have to stretch the definition a little bit to make it work, but here you do not. This is a beautiful series of images and the delivery and mood firmly tell you this narrator loves this recipient. You could leave it there. That’s really all you need.

To go deeper, this is the only Mountain Goats song with the word “divorce” in the title. It’s a joke, of sorts, and I take it to be one on the rest of John Darnielle’s songs. What better joke could there be from the man that eventually wrote “No Children” than to write a love song that seemingly calls out that it’s a surprise that two Mountain Goats characters aren’t facing down the end of a relationship?

All that said, a lot of fans interpret this differently. I was surprised in reading about this to see that people seem to view this as another unreliable narrator and read the title’s joke in a much darker way. I don’t see it, but I don’t want to rob anyone of their take on a great song. If you think John Darnielle is being coy here, who am I to stop you? I just think “like God was going to catch you by the ponytail” is a lyric you deserve to hear, regardless of what you think it means.