The Mountain Goats ask us to think beyond the headlines in “Tyler Lambert’s Grave.”

Track: “Tyler Lambert’s Grave”
Album: Unreleased (released by John Darnielle on Twitter)

Tyler Lambert was the son of Dana Plato, the former child star and subject of “Song for Dana Plato,” another Mountain Goats song. Dana Plato passed just a few years after that song was written and the band played it live a few times after her passing. The message is similar, though the tone obviously isn’t, and the sequence of events explains that. “Tyler Lambert’s Grave” was written, obviously, with the title, after his passing. Even with that difference and with the obvious differences in how the songs sound, these are more or less about the same thing.

A common thread through the real people that feature in Mountain Goats songs is that many of them appear to have simple stories but aren’t necessarily just what you know. Dana Plato and Tyler Lambert both died by suicide. There are dozens of songs that tie back to this idea of seeing yourself in someone else’s tragedy and variations of asking the listener to go one step beyond a cause of death. In the case of Tyler Lambert’s mother, maybe you know she was a child star and something about a robbery. Maybe that doesn’t naturally lead you to the hunger that causes you to risk everything for what seems to be very little. Maybe that doesn’t ask you to “step outside the shadow // of your great catastrophe,” but let it.

The Seattle News article where John Darnielle talked about this song is a dead link now. The People article sourced for the photo in the song is a dead link. The Tweet where this was released will, odds are, be a dead link soon. It all boils down to the simple pieces when the context is gone, so you have to take those steps yourself.