“Cut Off Their Thumbs #1” is a brutal song about brutal feelings, with a chorus that hammers that home.

Track: “Cut Off Their Thumbs #1”
Album: Unreleased (released by John Darnielle online as a holiday gift in 2005)

John Darnielle once told an audience that “Cut Off Their Thumbs #1” was his version of the moment in Fight Club where the narrator fugues out and punches someone to destroy them and make them hideous and someone comments on the fact that they went somewhere else, mentally. Darnielle has made this comparison before, I think, but it was for a different song. It’s one of those details that doesn’t really matter and so I don’t want to go look it up and confirm it, but in my memory it was just after “In the Craters on the Moon” at the first show I ever saw in Chicago. Checking my work here, I told the same story there, on that post, so it’s probably for the best that we’re very close to the end of this project.

This one is similarly intense and finds a character imagining the destruction they’d like to exact on “everybody in this room.” There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs that one could describe as “intense” but it’s often paired with a distant, unknowable menace. Here, it’s right in the room. We don’t have to wonder what happened, even though we don’t get the exact, specific story, and Darnielle even lampshades how these stories play out with a line asking the audience to raise their hands if they don’t know “how this story goes.” When you feel this way, you feel only this way.