“Tidal Wave” finds the large things made up of small increments and prepares you for the flood.

Track: “Tidal Wave”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

I don’t know that this matters for a band like the Mountain Goats, but “Tidal Wave” is the point where people stop listening to Getting Into Knives on Spotify. John Darnielle has talked about album construction before and I’ve referenced it a lot in this series, but there’s an idea that people only listen to the first four songs on the record and you should frontload your material accordingly. The two “singles” are in the first four on this album and “Tidal Wave” marks a descent into more jammy, less approachable stuff. Even years in, there are songs with about 200,000 plays in the middle of Getting Into Knives, which may as well be a billion for the early Mountain Goats but is not true of the two albums that followed this one.

“Tidal Wave” clicked for me when I saw it live. I used to write a post a day here but I fell off because I really struggled to find things to say about Getting Into Knives. When I saw this song live, though, it floored me. It’s a song about how small moments become one big one, clearly, but I couldn’t, for whatever reason, tie that to my own moments. Matt Douglas is at his best on “Tidal Wave” and I encourage you to see him do his thing live. The bass groove is also a small, backing reminder that things continue and the bricks will pile up whether you’re ready for them or not. You should try to be ready.