https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eZWFRgZtro

“In the Craters on the Moon” builds to one explosive moment and then is willing to show you the explosion.

Track: “In the Craters on the Moon”
Album: Heretic Pride (2008)

The first Mountain Goats show I went to was at The Empty Bottle in Chicago in 2007. The good folks at the Mountain Goats wiki have a setlist here and you can even go to Archive.org can listen to it. The most memorable things, now almost fourteen years later, are the multiple versions of “We Bite” and the songs I’d never heard before. Heretic Pride came out a few months later. It was probably possible, through some means, to have heard it by then, but I hadn’t. It was a different time.

“In the Craters on the Moon” is a heavy song. It’s about people who hide from the world and reject help. It’s a common theme in a Goats song, but it usually comes through differently. This one rises until John Darnielle literally yells, as loud as he possibly can. This isn’t totally unheard of, but I think this is probably the go-to version for me. Seeing it live was something else. I don’t want to break the spell of this half-memory by listening to the real thing he said, but he had something at that show in Chicago about going somewhere else during the peak and how you can’t do that on stage.

The Empty Bottle is a weird place. I’ve never seen a show there where the audience was quiet, this one included, but it’s also a place you go to see something you’re passionate about. There are a few hundred live performances of this one and I’m sure most of them involve some form of “going somewhere else.” The lyrics are solid and the beat is great, but it’s all about that yell. It’s terrifying, because that’s how you’d react if someone broke into your stronghold through all your resistances.