“Like a Bullet” finds someone on the side of a road somewhere out there, much like you have been somewhere out there.

Track: “Like a Bullet”
Album: Unreleased

There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs about walking around specific geography. Over the years I’ve made this point a lot and I don’t really know why I keep coming back to it. The narrator of “Like a Bullet” says they “headed out Arrow towards Western Rock” and I have no doubt a more diligent person than I could find that exact place. It feels like an intersection to me, but Western Rock could be anything. I’ll repeat myself yet again to say that it doesn’t matter so much where that is, precisely, as it does matter that it is one precise place. You don’t need to picture the motel in West Texas or the neighborhood in California or the house in Florida. You just see someone walking around and imagining a tractor telling them things.

“Like a Bullet” only exists because someone who goes by doctorsinatra on YouTube uploaded it in 2011 from a tape they had. Someone asked John Darnielle about the song on Twitter and he said he didn’t remember the history but it was from when he was sending songs out for compilations. To return to another oft-mentioned concept from this series, both of these details really do work as representations of a different world of musical discovery. Part of why I wanted to do this in the first place is some of my absolute favorite Mountain Goats songs are just out there on YouTube channels that also upload Final Fantasy VII videos and I want those people to be celebrated.