Few Mountain Goats characters let themselves soak in the darkness as much as the narrator in “Maybe Sprout Wings.”

Track: “Maybe Sprout Wings”
Album: Get Lonely (2006)

Get Lonely is undeniably a “breakup record,” but that tends to diminish the fullness of what it also is. Just as “Wild Sage” isn’t necessarily about someone who is just out of a relationship, “Maybe Sprout Wings” is about a larger loneliness than just losing a loved one in some way. This is about a more cosmic sense of being alone, removed from humanity rather than just one particular human. There are dozens of songs about quiet loneliness, but few dare to tread the space of “Maybe Sprout Wings.” The lines “I thought of old friends // the ones who’d gone missing” stare directly at the abyss with no metaphor to cloak them. This is about the tough times and how they never end, once they happen. If it was bad, it will always be bad in the past, with ghosts and clouds and “nameless things” to haunt you when you go back to those moments.

I don’t know if all of Get Lonely has the same narrator or not. John Darnielle has both emphatically said that it is and isn’t a “breakup record,” but he’s also said that interpretations of his music are open-ended. Other than the obvious The Sunset Tree where the narrator is usually John Darnielle himself, I think this is the album most likely to all come from the same perspective. If we assume that, we’re at the lowest point of the journey during “Maybe Sprout Wings.” It starts with introspection in “Wild Sage” and ends with an emphatic rejection of hope in “In Corolla,” but this is the moment that foretells that ending. It is the right song for some moments, but may your life have few of them.