In the early days of the Mountain Goats, you could hear the start of it all in “Chilean Fire Barrel.”

Track: “Chilean Fire Barrel”
Album: Unreleased

KSPC was originally Pomona College’s radio station and is now part of the larger Claremont Colleges system. As of the moment I’m writing this, they are broadcasting some Mozart. The recording booth is photographed rather lovingly on the station’s wiki. If you’ve spent any time in any sort of college or community radio setting, it will look familiar. In December of 1992, John Darnielle played “Chilean Fire Barrel” in, presumably, that room and that is, as far as I can tell, that.

He introduced the song on that broadcast by saying that he almost forgot this one, and that it took him “twenty minutes to remember something that you won’t remember ten minutes from now.” He laughs off his own comment and says “that doesn’t mean anything” and plays the song. The song itself is lovely, but simple, and in typical fashion with Mountain Goats songs, disconnected from the title enough to make it difficult to remember which one this is. I am, as ever, fascinated all the same, by that story. Picture that moment, so early in the idea of the Mountain Goats, where that comment is both a joke and very much not one at the same time.