We hear from a familiar style of narrator in a vulnerable moment in “I Love You. Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire.”

Track: “I Love You. Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

Of course, there’s the title. What Mountain Goats fan could read “I Love You. Let’s Light Ourselves on Fire” and not need to hear it? If that person exists, they look a lot different than the dozens of people I’ve met over the years at shows and other chance meetings. This title is entrapment, if we are to assume that a “true fan” would avoid listening to Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg, as it isn’t intended to actually exist. Even further, sources disagree on if it has a period or a comma in the middle of the title, which is an interesting, if possibly unimportant, distinction. The song has been played live once, as far as I can find, in 2009 as an introduction in the spot where Darnielle has said he traditionally plays songs that few people are likely to know. That show, where Darnielle described the songs as “fairly obscure,” is worth hearing, though that description tells you that better than I can.

Title aside, this is a special one. The third verse should be the payoff, but it ends in a typical early John Darnielle style with “I saw everyone.” There are certain phrases that John Darnielle loves and a better scholar than I could interrogate their uses over time. He once “apologized” for the extensive use of rhymes like hair / there and while that was a joke, you do see the same things again and again in the early stuff. This doesn’t detract, as it gives the narrators a sense that many of them have the same emotions if not the same Social Security numbers. It’s this part that kills me: “What’s making me take it all too far // you are // you are.”