The title is silly, but there’s something big happening in “Going to Some Damned English City.”

Track: “Going to Some Damned English City”
Album: Unreleased

On one day in January in 1996, John Darnielle played “Going to Some Damned English City” on WNUR, Northwestern’s radio station. At this moment, that radio station is playing some modern blues and you can listen to it on a page that spells the name of the university wrong. Just before playing it, Darnielle says the name of the song and that he can’t remember the name of this city but that it is in the north of England. It’s a fun little moment, but, as always, I am more fascinated that this artifact exists at all. It is a wondrous thing.

This specific song is more memorable than a lot of the early one-offs. You still have a little bit of borderline filler in a chorus of “there was a cold wind coming off the ocean” but the actual thing that happens in this one is surprisingly concrete. A lot of early Mountain Goats songs show us two characters who experience a fleeting emotion that they may or may not be ready to talk about. Here we get much more than that. If nothing else, that title is something, but I will always love this one for the line “you said something really important.” What a gift to know that in the moment, but what a telling thing that it’s explained that way.