Through brief images we get a snapshot of an evening in “Going to Palestine.”

Track: “Going to Palestine”
Album: Unreleased

There’s no further connection, I guess, but the Ingmar Bergman film Persona includes a scene where one of the characters watches a series of hard-to-watch images on television. Another watches a self-immolation during the Vietnam War. The film is about duality and how we view ourselves and, beyond that, who we even are, when we really get down to it. “Going to Palestine” opens with a character similarly hearing about a self-immolation that lights up the sky, poetically, generally, but brutally, here. “I could not stand to hear them say so,” our narrator says. They then describe some orange trees, which is certainly not a reference to anything but may call to mind that once upon a time, if they weren’t going to be the Mountain Goats, John Darnielle’s band was going to be called the Orange Trees. One imagines we wouldn’t be talking about this in that timeline, but maybe?

“Going to Palestine” is a live-only song that follows a template a lot of the Goats songs from the early 90s followed. One person tells us a shocking or surprising detail and then tells us what they see and hear. I tend to think about what might have inspired the imagery when I hear a song like this. Likely there was never someone with an actual orange blossom in their hair, but can’t you see it? What I love most about a short song like this is picturing the temperature on that night and trying to see this person. In the right mood, listening to this one, you can do it.