The unofficially titled “Birthday Song: This Time Has Gone” is another snapshot that reveals a lot of what we don’t see.

Track: “Birthday Song: This Time Has Gone”
Album: Unreleased

There’s no real title for “Birthday Song: This Time Has Gone,” which I did not realize and hadn’t really thought about. I’ve talked before in this series about a phenomenon that’s related to the unreleased songs in that a lot of them don’t really have any “secondary texts.” Phenomenon might be too strong a word, but I started this series because I couldn’t find anyone who had ever written one word about one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs and I wanted to talk about what I thought it meant because it seemed very much in doubt. You do not need to do that with this one.

The narrator of “Birthday Song: This Time Has Gone,” or whatever you decide to call it in your head, goes downstairs and eats cake. We get a few details about this person that fit in with other narrators in the world of the Goats, most notably that they have to check their ID to know which birthday this is, and mostly we’re in familiar territory. Maybe your backstory differs from mine, but it’s hard to argue with the forced nature of the narrator saying they thought about them “a little.” It seems unlikely and it definitely is related to the idea that this relationship once was so strong it consumed from within. We’re in and out of this song, but there’s enough here for two whole lives.