“Before I Got There” finds the scene of a dramatic event just after the drama unfolds.

Track: “Before I Got There”
Album: Dark in Here (2021)

A lot of Mountain Goats songs are about what happens right before the explosion. Especially in the early days, you get the sense that many of these narrators are experiencing the dread of anticipation and they see the train coming but cannot get out of the way. In “Before I Got There” we see the aftermath. This person was involved, in some sense, because they said that they have “failed you, sweet young men” and they show up just in time to smell the burning and to see the bodies.

Just as anticipation lets the audience imagine what comes next, here we have to fill in the blanks. We get so many physical details, down to the specificity of “heavy tracks up to the lip // just to prove that they were crawling,” but we do not know what happened or why. We can imagine a conflict and we have multiple references to an altar to tell us this is a holy place to some (and thus not to others) but we do not know exactly what this narrator missed. We don’t need to, of course, and the wail of Darnielle’s delivery drives home what this narrator tells us directly.