The experience of listening to and loving the Mountain Goats is all there in “Exegetic Chains.”

Track: “Exegetic Chains”
Album: Songs for Pierre Chuvin (2020)

“Exegetic Chains” drops all of the structure of the album. There are still references that make it feel “right” with the rest of Songs for Pierre Chuvin (Hercules, Cybele) but it’s about the Mountain Goats, John Darnielle, and the fans of both. Darnielle has said that any references are “there on purpose,” but you don’t really need to hear that to know it. “Make it through this year // if it kills you outright” is “This Year,” clearly, but it’s also directly about the experience of living in 2020. It hasn’t been two full years as of this writing since this album came out. These emotions, these situations, all still feel very real.

Darnielle almost whispers most of “Exegetic Chains.” It’s hard to explain the feeling, here. When you hear him tell the listener to “stay warm inside the ripple // of the Panasonic hum,” he is telling you that you should listen to Songs for Pierre Chuvin, here, in April of 2020, when everything feels uncertain. When you hear “the places where we met to share // our secrets now and then // we will see them again,” he is directly referencing a Mountain Goats concert. This one’s a guess, but I extend this even to “the songs you sing at Christmas time // the stories that you tell” to be about the band’s relationship to fans.

The entire song is intertextual, which explains the title, but it’s not really a puzzle to be solved. You’ll pick up on all this on the first listen. What’s more to the point is this is something people needed to hear, then, and still do, now. The album was a gift, but this, this is something more.