Our narrator in “Going to Buffalo” has a lot to say about their partner, but it feels like an incomplete picture.

Track: “Going to Buffalo”
Album: Unreleased

At an Extra Glenns show in 1995 at The Empty Bottle, Franklin Bruno asked John Darnielle if he wanted to play a song that Bruno had just heard for the first time a few hours earlier. You can hear that here. The only other version of “Going to Buffalo” is part of a leak that someone found through a music sharing site. If it hadn’t been played live I would probably leave it off this list and honestly, it gets really murky here as we get into the final fifty songs.

The Empty Bottle is the first place I ever saw the Mountain Goats (though not that show) and it’s a really great venue, still. The Goats are playing bigger venues these days, but I encourage you to stop in for a beer at least if you’re ever in the area. The Goats played there more than a few times and while this was technically an Extra Glenns show, it’s the same vibe.

The two versions are slightly different and some lyrics get transposed but both versions find a typical Goats/Glenns narrator bitterly commenting about a partner, but, notably, also saying they plan to nuzzle up against them. We don’t have the whole story here, as we often don’t, but I imagine they protest too much.