The fierce “Chinese House Flowers” is suspiciously absent from live shows, but the one instance is magical. 

Track: “Chinese House Flowers”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

On September 11, 1996, John Darnielle played “Chinese House Flowers” at a concert venue called The Argo in Denton, Texas. It’s probably not the only time, but it’s the only time the good people at the Mountain Goats wiki list.

In various cars, apartments, backyards, and stranger venues I’ve played just about every song in the catalog for different people over the last decade. Just about everything — even the strangest of the strange — works for someone. “Chinese House Flowers” seems to work differently on me. People like it, but it doesn’t seem to get the same love as other fierce songs about love.

Chinese houses are purple and native to California. You can imagine mid-90s John Darnielle thinking of those flowers and home as he wrote Full Force Galesburg in Iowa. The album version features some trademark frantic strumming, but the selling point is the wavering, almost-terrified vocal track. His voice cracks over and over again and it drives home that this narrator is terrified. “I used to love you so much that I was sure it would kill me” could be a corny line in less deft hands, but it fits perfectly after “And just then the gleam in your eye // made my blood freeze” and other such expressions of fear.

Darnielle’s thoughts on the song aren’t obvious, though we can infer some things from the possible 20-year absence at live shows. If you’re like me and it works for you, I urge you to go check out that Denton recording. That venue’s long gone and Denton became immortalized far more famously by the Goats a few years later, but you should still go hear John Darnielle lose his mind over the chorus of “I want you more than I want anything // I want you the way you were.”