“Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” eventually got a horn section and some intense drums, but it was always great.

Track: “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

There is enough time between 1997 and when I’m writing this that people have had time to come up with thoughts about “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood.” One such person seems to have tweeted something and deleted it, but we still have John Darnielle’s reply to them. In case that, too, sometime is gone, he said “MSDB is not about a romantic relationship, I hate to say, but that’s all right.” So there you go, not a love song. That only leaves all other things.

This is one of the songs that has had a resurgence recently as the Mountain Goats now have a drummer and a horn player. The full band revisits some of the older songs and really blows them out. The best version of these I’ve seen is this one, with a rocking, long outro that goes on and on, blessedly. The studio version on Full Force Galesburg takes a similar path, but the sax really adds something that just wasn’t what John Darnielle and company were doing in 1997.

1997 was just before the “modern era,” which isn’t really the right way to put it, but I guess it’ll have to do. The songs were getting more complicated, to the point where no one seems to agree what “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” even means, at least as a title if not as a whole song. The music was changing, too, but it’s only now that you can see how much more room there was in songs like these. It doesn’t diminish the originals, it just makes them hum even more.