“Going to Spirit Lake” is a footnote in a much larger career, but it’s a beautiful, brief moment to live in.

Track: “Going to Spirit Lake”
Album: Unreleased

The only version of “Going to Spirit Lake” that is easy to find, and, by extension, maybe the only one to exist, is from a show in 1996 in Belgium. As near as I can tell, this was the midpoint for this venue, open from 1982 until 2007. There seems to be a book about the history of the venue you can read about on their website and a now-defunct Instagram account. If you were there, this specific Saturday night, you heard “Going to Spirit Lake” and twenty other songs that fit into the category of closing banter for this one. John Darnielle wraps this song and says “oh my goodness, it’s an old song!”

There is a real Spirit Lake in Washington that was heavily impacted by volcanic eruption and potentially lends a name to this song. It isn’t all that important, as it often isn’t for songs like this, because the feeling is what matters. For many songwriters you would be forced to groan at “you said the right thing // you fixed everything” but I love the earnestness of this era of Darnielle’s narrators. The Mountain Goats got huge off snarling, displaced people at the ends of respective ropes, but the early days are full of people like this who just don’t know how to express a suddenly very significant emotion. You’ve been there, haven’t you?