A lone character confronts what’s led them to this point as they picture a performance in “Duke Ellington.”

Track: “Duke Ellington”
Album: Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

There is not one theme to the Mountain Goats. It’s tempting to summarize John Darnielle as someone who writes about loss and sadness, but there are so many songs of hope and desperation. It’s more correct, in my mind, to say there is one mood through the Mountain Goats’ catalog. The characters differ and the desires those characters have differ, but they all exist in a world that is realized in one way. It’s a difficult world, to be sure, but it’s one that shows the residents of it great beauty in small things. This is true especially in the early days.

Before the re-release in 1999, “Duke Ellington” was originally part of a compilation, The Long Secret, released in 1995 by Harriet Records. Both the company and the compilation draw names from Harriet the Spy, which is interesting but neither here nor there. John Darnielle said he left it off Sweden deliberately and that it has a “mystical sadness” regarding the namesake musician Duke Ellington.

The narrator is in Sweden and pictures (or sees) Duke Ellington playing piano. “It utterly wasted me // in Sweden,” they say of the image. We know what they mean and we draw on our own memories of powerful music. John Darnielle speaks of the “aftermath,” a strong term for the moments after a song. It all builds to our character watching this performance and saying “I’d had just about enough of losing things” and telling us they are alone, away from the person to whom they hope to convey this message. This song is solitary, alone from the other albums, but the character is, as well, though they fit right in with so many other people we meet in John Darnielle’s world.