One lover tries to keep another one by warning them that the way out of their love is on fire in “Pure Gold.”

Track: “Pure Gold”
Album: Songs About Fire (1995) and Ghana (1999)

There are many “pure” songs and they are not strictly connected. They may not share exact characters or locations like the Alpha songs do, but they are similar in that they all feature exactly two people talking about exactly one thing.

John Darnielle is on the record about his characters being interchangeable by nature of having no stated gender. It’s easy to describe a Mountain Goats narrator as “he” because John Darnielle sings in first person and is male, but by design he almost never tells you that the speaker is a man or the recipient of the message is a woman or anything of the sort. Most characters could be anywhere across the spectrum of gender and could be speaking to anyone.

It’s often ambiguous if the characters are lovers or friends. In “Pure Gold” we can assume because one character says they often hold the other one, but sometimes we don’t even get that much. Rachel Ware adds vocals to a few lines and reinforces that it is two people communicating, but really it’s just the narrator asking someone not to leave. “Hey, don’t touch the door, because the door will surely kill you” is a striking opening line, but it’s also a look into this narrator’s situation. It’s a love song, kinda, but it’s a close-to-the-end-of-love song.

Relationships across the Goats catalog are often in states of disarray. It’s no surprise that the “Pure Gold” couple struggles, but it’s interesting as a look into unreliable narrators. John Darnielle often uses song structure to point out that we only get one side of the story. We know from the lyrics that the other lover here doesn’t see the exit as such a dangerous thing, no matter how many times they’re told that the door is literally on fire.