https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5O77UXNFOk

“Golden Jackal Song” describes a scene where two old lovers meet up again, to ambiguous ends.

Track: “Golden Jackal Song”
Album: New Asian Cinema (1998)

So many Mountain Goats songs are about the interactions between two people. “Golden Jackal Song” accompanies “Korean Bird Paintings” on New Asian Cinema and fits right in as a comparative love song about the challenges two people face. In “Korean Bird Paintings” we only see the narrator as we watch them fill a room with meaningless gifts to create a grand gesture. In “Golden Jackal Song” we get to see more.

The “plot” of “Golden Jackal Song” follows one character who comes into town and feels “wicked impulses” about calling an old friend but “couldn’t let them die.” The power of the Mountain Goats is in both the vastness of the catalog and the specificity of the language. You might never have had the exact experience in this song, but as these two characters move into the kitchen you are very likely to remember something. “When I saw your kitchen // glistening like the old country // all your cups and glasses // lined up in front of me” is just scene setting. It isn’t meant to make you feel anything, but it is meant to make you remember.

Golden jackals will eat dead animals. Our character refers to themselves as eating carrion as they revisit the home of these old memories. The characters kiss at the end of the song, but they do so during a description of eating “rich, raw carrion, until I couldn’t think right.” Depending on how you feel about the memory that revisiting an old space, going to a kitchen, and seeing an old friend conjures up for you, maybe carrion is nourishing or maybe it’s disgusting. The guitar and the light tone John Darnielle uses doesn’t tilt it one way or the other, which means this can be a song just for you.