“Abandoning My Father Talking Blues” recalls a few specific moments in John Darnielle’s childhood and freezes us in our own youth.

Track: “Abandoning My Father Talking Blues”
Album: Unreleased

“Abandoning My Father Talking Blues” is unlike any other Mountain Goats song in the sense that it’s a traditional style blues song that sounds like other things you’ve heard, but not from John Darnielle. By the end it freezes on an image of dryers in a shared laundry room that “keep the home fires burning,” so we definitely get to familiar territory, but there just aren’t other songs like this. “We had never lived in an apartment before // it was weird,” Darnielle sings/says as part of this true story from his life.

The entirety of The Sunset Tree aside, the personal songs about Darnielle’s young childhood often feel like you’re intruding as a listener. These aren’t general images and these aren’t tangentially relatable elements, these are specific memories, described to a crowd. Darnielle has made a world that’s meant so much to so many people, but very rarely does it go to this level of personal detail. The phrase I always hang on is “I’ll probably never know what it was like that night // for my dad, but I’d wager it was pretty bad.” Darnielle’s father passed away just a few weeks before this performance and the “probably” in that line makes me think of my own father’s passing and the things you feel like you know, but can no longer ask.