“How to Embrace a Swamp Creature” is a very relatable song, but you have to be willing to admit that.

Track: “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature”
Album: Heretic Pride (2008)

The full quote from this show in San Francisco in 2008 is too long to quote here, but I encourage you to go read it in full on the Mountain Goats Wiki or listen to the show. In summary, John Darnielle says that “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature” is about going to see someone you used to know on some sort of spurious claim when really you just want to see them again and you probably want one exact thing that you hope you both want. It’s an adolescent emotion, one would hope, but maybe it’s one you remember in your own life. Maybe you’re more honest with yourself, I don’t know. The live show banter discusses going to get an album from someone but then being honest on the idea that “you could go get that song off the internet like the rest of us.” I mention it both because it’s such a great discussion of the idea and because you can hear the crowd reacting and imagining their own version from their past.

There are a few biblical references in “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature,” which is not unheard of in a Mountain Goats song about secrecy and human relationships. The true narrative is right there in the text, though. You don’t need to track anything outside of what you’re hearing. You just need to cleave out the parts that are the narrator pretending to avoid what they’ve decided is inevitable. We often think of our impulses as immediate things, but I love this song because it chases the feeling from the first moment of your day up until you have to decide what you’re willing to tell this person who used to be someone else to you.