“Hand of Death” is a brutal name for a song that’s actually about a lot of hope.

Track: “Hand of Death”
Album: Unreleased

It feels weird to call a Mountain Goats album “personal” because of the kind of guy John Darnielle is. You could just as easily flip that comment and wonder what the least “personal” album is, right? That said, In League with Dragons is a personal one no matter your scale and thus it is of special interest that “Hand of Death” was the first song written for the album and did not ultimately make the cut.

You can still watch the Facebook Live performance from a hotel room that appears to have an iPod alarm clock in 2018 where Matt Douglass and John Darnielle perform “Hand of Death” and say it has never been played “live or anywhere, by anybody.” At a concert later, Darnielle says John Vanderslice was running the Facebook at the time and was shocked by the positive response that was so immediate. This feels especially fascinating given the proximity to the years of Jordan Lake sessions and pandemic streams and lack of live interaction that no one could see coming at the time but would define the band’s output for a few years to come.

The song itself is potentially about the early years of Darnielle’s songwriting and the title seems to me to be a reference to a Magic: The Gathering card that can destroy (almost) any one living thing. I don’t want to dig too far into that (or most titles) but you can imagine the gusto of the moment that would become what it all became.