“Shower” is a fierce, angry song from the perspective of someone who probably caused their own problems.

Track: “Shower”
Album: Unreleased (written for The Coroner’s Gambit, but not included)

The final lines of “Shower” recall wedding vows, though it’s clear we’ve gone beyond the realm of “for worse.” There are a lot of Mountain Goats narrators who only tell us their side of the story, but this one really wants us to know they don’t feel to blame. “You swore that you would stick around // when days like this started coming down” tells us definitively that the other person left, but the insistence and the delivery suggest to us that they might have been right to do so.

Getting into a shower with all of your clothes still on is a grand gesture. Just as there are a lot of songs about heartbroken people across the Goats’ catalog, there are a lot that show us that these grand gestures come from people who cannot do the emotional heavy lifting to do the little things that actually matter. I am reminded of “Korean Bird Paintings,” another song where someone tries to fill life with happy things to pave over some darkness we don’t get to see. Here is the reverse, where someone tries to enact the chaos they feel inside, outside.

This one never made The Coroner’s Gambit, but you can see from the scans of the notebooks that if it had it was more or less the same then as it is now. “Shower” seems to have never made the albums because it didn’t turn out exactly right, but you can hear in the fury behind it that there’s something there if you need it, should you ever find that you need it.