The nervous moments compound by the end of “In the Cane Fields.”

Track: “In the Cane Fields”
Album: Unreleased

You have two options if you want to hear “In the Cane Fields” today. You can listen to this one, from 1992, which may very well be the oldest Mountain Goats recording available, or you can listen to the one from 2019 which includes video and the story behind the song. The older version ends with a few jokes about the song and the newer version includes a lot more detail about the original construction. I encourage you to do both because the song is very short.

Part of the fun of the unreleased stuff is it all just exists out there, usually without any context. What little we get here doesn’t really dampen that fun. The early Mountain Goats songs were poems that John Darnielle put to music and this is one of those. The first verse ends with some interesting repetition, but the real meat of this one is the tense moment this couple finds themselves in by the end. It opens with a sugary kiss and closes with a bombshell. It’s not going to be anyone’s favorite Mountain Goats song, but you can hear a lot of what came later being unpacked in this one.