“Get High and Listen to The Cure” provides you a playlist to execute on the title’s command.

Track: “Get High and Listen to The Cure”
Album: Welcome to Passaic (2019)

If I had to pick one word for the Mountain Goats it would be “specific.” From the early days, John Darnielle’s songwriting has been focused on specificity. You aren’t going to “the city,” you are going to Port Washington. It doesn’t matter, basically at all, what is in Port Washington or why that’s where you’re going. It does matter, however, that you’re going to a specific place and that you are envisioning yourself as different because you’re going there.

This specificity has manifested differently in the more modern era of the Mountain Goats. John Darnielle challenges himself now to create more complex and more ambitious music. It’s very different, very often. This is what led a bartender with a sleeve tattoo inspired by the band to tell me that he doesn’t like the new stuff as much. This is to be expected with all bands and John Darnielle has commented in the past on the phenomenon of people resisting change in a band. Peter Hughes is on the same page, often saying that growth in the band doesn’t invalidate the roots and that you should try to appreciate all of it.

This is a long road to talking about “Get High and Listen to The Cure,” a song that almost entirely that title and about a dozen titles of songs by The Cure. This is a specific experiment, it seems, where John Darnielle wanted to write a song that is only titles of songs. You can listen to a playlist of them here, but you don’t necessarily need to do that. Even if you don’t know anything about The Cure, you can appreciate that John Darnielle appreciates them.