Just like the road the song is named for, what exists in “Bell Swamp Connection” is more than what you see.

Track: “Bell Swamp Connection”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

Years ago now, I put on some Mountain Goats as I drove through Mississippi with my mom. We were driving back from a funeral home with the remains of her husband and my dad. We had a long drive and we traded off music. Her primary commentary on the Mountain Goats was to ask why John Darnielle doesn’t sing. This was a decade before “Bell Swamp Connection” was written, but she may as well have been talking about this one. It’s closer to prose than lyrics at times and the performance may be what’s fueling that opinion.

Bell Swamp Connection is a real road in North Carolina. If you go on Google Street View you can “drive” down it. At the time of this writing, the captured footage is from the last ten years or so, all jumbled together but as a result creating a feeling that not much has changed on Bell Swamp Connection in the last decade. This part of North Carolina looks a lot like that part of Mississippi. Despite the lyric “see what there is to see before it’s gone,” some parts of both seem like they’re going to look more or less like this for some time to come.

The story of what happens in “Bell Swamp Connection” is what you hear, but for me it’s about what happened before. What series of actions leads you to wander through the clearing and find a mysterious (or not mysterious) slab? What are the messages people tried to tell us, even if they boil down to the shouts of “get out” that we hear? There’s (usually) nothing out there in the woods, but we are out there. We bring all that stuff with us.