“Carmen Cicero” asks you in the lyrics to sing along, but I doubt that’s going to be a problem by the time you get to the end.

Track: “Carmen Cicero”
Album: Unreleased

There are some more “modern” ones that usurp this throne, but other than “You’re in Maya,” I think “Carmen Cicero” was the unreleased song I wanted to hear the most at shows when I started going to Mountain Goats concerts. At some point that feeling gave way to my favorite thing to hear a crowd yell: “just play what you wanna play!” I certainly, in my time, have yelled for some songs, but generally you get what you get, and that’s great, and it especially is true of the live-only stuff that only comes out when the band feels they can do it justice and the mood is right.

There are many versions of “Carmen Cicero” online, but the definitive one for me is this one, from October of 2000. The YouTube video cuts off the opening where John Darnielle demands the crowd sing when the time comes. The lyrics further demand your participation, directly, over and over. “And this is a song for your young men to sing when they run out of options” is the kind of thing that you hear in a certain mood, at a certain age, and you feel like you’ve never heard anything else.

Darnielle introduces the song sometimes with jokes about how much people want to hear this on a real release, but that you’d lose something. The final verse comments directly again that the song doesn’t have a chorus, but then ends in a devolution of “yeah” from the crowd. As he says at that performance, “every last one of you right now.” You need that room and those people who will do it with you. It’s something, still, without it, but it’s everything, there, with it.