A rare combination of a travel song and an Alpha Couple song, “Going to Dade County” offers little hope.

Track: “Going to Dade County”
Album: Unreleased

There are so many songs about the Alpha Couple. If you listen to every Mountain Goats song you’ll hear dozens and dozens of versions of their trek across the country and their miserable end in Florida. As a younger guy, “a much younger man who had the same Social Security number” as John Darnielle once described it, I found their story romantic. I understood the people who Darnielle said would ask him to play “No Children” at their wedding. There is a certain ability to sneer at the worst fears of the future that comes with being in your young twenties and it paints how you view these songs.

I’m older and married now and I still love the Alpha Couple, but for different reasons. I hear a song like “Going to Dade County” where one of them tells outrageous, supernatural stories about the other and I hear someone who cannot process what has become of their life. They insist they are not cracking up and they envision a salvation in Miami, a place different enough from Tallahassee but not somewhere they will actually be a different person. We’re outside the story and we know they aren’t going to Miami, but also that they wouldn’t really find anything if they did.