“From the Lake Trials” is unique in a lot of ways, but it serves as an example of what the earliest songs might have become.

Track: “From the Lake Trials”
Album: From the Lake Trials (2017)

The story goes that the company behind this series asked the Mountain Goats if they had a song they wanted to record live. John Darnielle found some old lyrics and asked Matt Douglas to join him. When they showed up and saw the piano, he pivoted from the song being on guitar to something entirely different. The result is something that doesn’t quite sound like anything else he’s ever done, but that does feel familiar, somehow.

The beat is more polished, obviously, but it does feel like what John Darnielle was trying to do with the very early, very weird ones. The sax is the bridge to the modern Mountain Goats, with Douglas adding even more depth and a melancholia that the lyrics suggest but don’t fully embrace. Darnielle bounces between optimism and something else in “From the Lake Trials,” which feels like an empty statement but is what I mean to say. The narrator isn’t clear here but doesn’t need to be, this song seems to be in conversation with so many other songs it would be impossible to pick one. “Make a list of things to beat the dreams back” is something so many of them would say, but “follow through, follow through” is not always the logical next step.

The beat makes this feel like something that has to come from the last few years, but think of the construction strategy. What could be more John Darnielle, and really, more Mountain Goats, than showing up and knocking it out, that day? It’s a good song, but it’s a great story.