The Mountain Goats owe as much to what’s in “My Favorite Things” as they do to a tossed off response to it.

Track: “My Favorite Things”
Album: Unreleased

If you want to hear something unexpected at a Mountain Goats show, your best chance seems to be in California or North Carolina, the two primary “homes” of the band over the years. Sure, John Darnielle lived in Portland and Chicago, and sure, he and his wife lived in Colo, Iowa during some of the most critical years for the band, but it’s undeniable they have their roots in California and they live these days on the other coast. San Francisco shows especially have a tendency to bring out the early, early stuff and the stories on stage that make up the mythology we all love to turn over.

“My Favorite Things” is one of the “early, funny” ones and often if Darnielle chooses to play it, it’s because he suspects someone in the crowd might have heard it when it was a staple of his performance back at Pitzer. At a show in San Francisco in 2002 he told a story I think of every time I hear something like “Beach House” where he says it took people identifying him as a person who writes funny songs to force him into the grim, divorce territory that, honestly, made him famous.

“My Favorite Things” is a silly little song about passion and, tangentially, listening to My Favorite Things by John Coltrane. It’s a fun one, but it’s extra fun when contrasting it with the trajectory of the eventual Mountain Goats catalog. You can hear “No Children” in here, sure, but there’s so much more that came out of a rebellion against it.