“Picture of My Dress” is a small part of a big story, but also illustrates how John Darnielle thinks about small moments.

Track: “Picture of My Dress”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

You don’t need to wonder about “Picture of My Dress” at all. The poet Maggie Smith tweeted this in December of 2018. A few weeks later, John Darnielle replied with a screenshot showing he had written a song inspired by it. I’m sure there are other songs with some degree of primary text, but I can’t think of one where you can go independently see the inspiration, with a timestamp, and the resulting song in progress. We may have lost the era where you could find a random cut on Napster, but we’ve gained something else.

The songwriting here is the apotheosis of John Darnielle’s style. For my money, aside from maybe the extra-long line in “Distant Stations,” there is absolutely no song I’d single out to explain to someone what John Darnielle’s writing is like beyond this one. The concept is a simple, but grand one, as a woman drives across the country with a wedding dress. She engages in the mundane, including what could be a frustrating experience enduring an overwrought pop love song that instead is absurd. She orders an extremely specific Burger King order. What do we get out of knowing she gets extra mayonnaise, and why are there three full lines about a fast food sandwich?

If I have a thesis to this whole thing, it’s that specificity is what defines the Mountain Goats. It doesn’t matter that she gets this sandwich, it matters that she stops in the middle of a crushing confrontation of her own life to do something else, something small. Her life, like your life, is very big. But it’s also rolling your eyes in a Burger King, trying to find more napkins, even on one of the biggest trips you can imagine.