In an early morning fit of activity and stress, two characters cling to each other in “Chanson du Bon Chose.”

Track: “Chanson du Bon Chose”
Album: Nine Black Poppies (1995)

I don’t have exact figures on this, but hundreds of Mountain Goats songs are in first person even though they aren’t about John Darnielle. This seems to be a difficult point to grasp, and it is easy to assume that the “I” in a song is the person singing. The narrator in “Chanson du Bon Chose,” translated (confusingly, though we lack the space to get into it) as “Song of the Good Thing,” is not John Darnielle. At a show in 2014 in Arizona, John Darnielle mused about the person he was when he wrote this song and what darkness was within that songwriter. You could ask that about so many of the early songs, but it’s especially appropriate in this case.

The characters in “Chanson du Bon Chose” are in a complex situation. The narrator says they are “waiting for something” and identifies their lover as sleeping in the living room. It’s 5:16 a.m., though we don’t know if that means today is starting early or continuing late for this character, and they ominously say “something was changing // there was something here entirely new.” The lyrics contain quotidian details, with water boiling on a stove as a classic representation of forward momentum. There’s an anxiety behind all of this. It’s a weird time to be awake, there are normal things happening but all at once, and these people are both troubled and hanging on to something.

There are so many songs frozen in this moment between two people, but what makes this one special is the performance. John Darnielle is not this character, but he sells them as someone fully realized in just a few minutes. “I am digging graves,” they nearly scream, and we feel the hairs on our arms prick up.