https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5xWFaTdkvo

An intense metaphor consumes “Magpie,” a story about something bad on the horizon.

Track: “Magpie”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

I must thank the people at the Mountain Goats Wiki, who I thank often but should thank even more, for finding this article from Willamette Week. The conceit is that the interview asks questions about every song on The Sunset Tree in haiku form and John Darnielle was asked to respond. The questions find romance in “You or Your Memory” and John Darnielle asks, essentially, how they got that out of that song. In response to a question about if the narrator of “Lion’s Teeth” really pulled the tooth, John Darnielle tells them he learned to drive stick in a parking lot. The responses are genuine, but they are very John Darnielle. They also show how difficult it is to get off of “your” version of a song, which always reminds me of an old friend’s insistence that the cannibalism in “Golden Jackal Song” was literal. Maybe it is!

For “Magpie,” the question asks directly what the meaning of the magpie is, and John Darnielle says “only a traitor // undresses his metaphors // as if they were whores.” This speaks to a few things, but mostly it suggests to me that the point is that you figure it out yourself. Magpies, as far as I’ve ever heard, supposedly like shiny things and are easily distracted into thievery. I doubt that’s true, but it suggests a reference to someone that steals indiscriminately. There are some jumping off points there for The Sunset Tree that make sense to me, but I refer you back to the songwriter on this one.