A familiar moment between familiar characters sparks an unfamiliar emotion in “Acceptable Damages Sutra.”

Track: “Acceptable Damages Sutra”
Album: Unreleased

When the Mountain Goats had to cancel an Australian tour, John Darnielle released a few songs on the band’s forum as a make-good. You can find that post archived here, which makes me feel a certain way on this January morning in the distant future where the archive that site exists on feels especially imperiled. We’ve talked a lot in this space about the act of archiving and what it means to lose something forever (or never have it) and if that archive does eventually go away, I personally feel it’ll be a tremendous loss for us all.

One of those songs was “Acceptable Damages Sutra,” which Darnielle notes based on the guitar has to be from January 2003 or later. This puts it post-Tallahassee but likely pre-We Shall All Be Healed, especially based on the subject matter. Here in the first week of a new year (though one two decades later) we can really relate to this narrator. They have “high hopes // for the coming year” but, of course, “nothing ever really changes here.” We’re pretty firmly in “The Mess Inside” territory here if we view this as a romantic relationship, though here we are confronted with the fact that there could be a solution, if these two had the strength to solve it. They don’t, though, and we get a rare instance where someone approaches, at least, confronting their own involvement in their situation. At that point, we’re back at the title and we realize this person knows what they’re getting into, just the same as all the other Goats narrators.