We are left to wonder what having one’s ears grabbed means in “I Will Grab You by the Ears.”

Track: “I Will Grab You by the Ears”
Album: Nothing for Juice (1996)

At an average of 20 shows a year, the Mountain Goats have played somewhere around 500 live shows at the time of this writing. It’s really impossible to say for sure, though you can begin to put together a catalog. The fan base for a group like this is obsessive and given to cataloging, but you can never be sure you’ve caught everything. There will be some benefit show that John Darnielle played last minute for 18 people or something from the early days when no one was keeping meticulous records and it will stop you from being absolutely sure about your history.

It is with those caveats that I say that “I Will Grab You by the Ears” has never been played live. I obviously can’t be 100% sure, but everything seems to support my claim. It’s a short song buried in the middle of a long album from 1996, with songs like “It Froze Me,” “Going to Kansas,” and “Going to Scotland.” There are some songs that John Darnielle seems to put out in the world and never revisit. Given the vastness of his work, that’s not surprising.

The main point of contention around “I Will Grab You by the Ears” seems to be the title. A narrator walks around a lake and tells someone “I will grab you by the ears // and you will know something.” John Darnielle snarls the lines a little bit, and combined with the deliberate, slow strumming it seems somewhat like a threat. It sounds to me like an idiom that John Darnielle created, but it might also be a physical threat. Either way, the narrator seems determined to get their point across, though we don’t find out what it is.