The first Alpha Couple song, “One Winter at Point Alpha Privative,” introduces us to two people experiencing new feelings for each other.

Track: “One Winter at Point Alpha Privative”
Album: Taboo VI: The Homecoming (1992)

John Darnielle has written dozens of songs about “The Alpha Couple,” a married-and-divorced couple that travel to Florida in Tallahassee, ultimately, and experience a particularly destructive relationship. There’s a lot of connective mythology through Mountain Goats songs, but nothing is more critical than these two. Many songs are explicitly Alpha songs given their title, but even songs with standard titles often appear to be about these two.

John Darnielle started writing poems before he wrote songs. “Going to Alaska” from Taboo VI: The Homecoming was one of the first, but the first Alpha song was “One Winter at Point Alpha Privative.” He has said that no one wanted to read his poems, so he put them to music and made them rhyme. Each verse of this one rhymes internally, which makes for a droning effect when sung aloud. The guitar builds on that and it will make you nervous to listen to, like an argument you aren’t involved in and shouldn’t be hearing.

Much of the band’s best work builds on these characters and it’s impossible to not add some mystique to the song as “the first Alpha song.” The lyrics are intense, with the narrator asking “is there something eating you // will it leave a single trace” of their partner. John Darnielle has said that he started the Alpha idea to explore his own feelings about divorce. While the characters have become more solidified and seemingly grown beyond his personal experience, this first look lets us see how John Darnielle began thinking about the end of love between two people and what they felt about each other after that gave way to something new.