Whether you think “Dogs of Clinic 17” is about real dogs or not, it is undeniably a song about how far hope can take you.

Track: “Dogs of Clinic 17”
Album: Undercard (2010)

The good folks at the Mountain Goats Wiki excerpted some stage banter between Franklin Bruno and John Darnielle during a performance of “Dogs of Clinic 17” in New York in 2010. John Darnielle says he doesn’t know how to introduce it and then both members of the Extra Lens explicitly say it is actually about the dogs in the title. After some discussion about how that could be true, given the back-and-forth between a dog and a scientist about how many dogs you need for this experiment, John Darnielle says “Franklin, to that I would ask you, what is reality?” I mention all of this not to elucidate what is going on here, because I think you really have to take this one at face value, but to make a case for you to go see John Darnielle live whenever you can. What is reality, indeed.

Undercard closes with “Dogs of Clinic 17,” which we have to assume is really about a group of the five remaining dogs from a group of twenty. The language is more powerful individually than it is when you try to construct a narrative for this one. You really focus in on that lyric that led to the stage banter there and the somewhat chilling notion of a scientist responding to a dog that notices that three-fourths of them are gone by saying “five is plenty.” That said, the verses don’t necessarily connect the way they do on a lot of the rest of Undercard. I don’t think that’s a problem, especially because it allows for the powerful offramp of the last verse. It feels positive and rising, but the final words tell a true tale of what’s coming next.