In what was supposed to be the start of something new, “Song for an Old Friend” is all strong visuals and one emotion.

Track: “Song for an Old Friend”
Album: Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

The story goes that John Darnielle wrote “Song for an Old Friend” believing it would launch a new band. They were to be The Orange Trees and they would write more accessible pop music. They played one show in Evanston, Illinois, to five people and then died that night as John Darnielle realized he was, for better or worse, the Mountain Goats.

It appeared on a compilation called The Wheel Method which apparently had individually different covers for each copy. You can buy some of them online for $12 now. The song made it to Bitter Melon Farm four years later and some time after that John Darnielle played it solo in 2006 as part of some sort of online concert for AOL. That version is really worth watching. It’s not fundamentally different from the studio version, but it’s just so passionate.

John Darnielle wrote this song right after Rachel Ware left the Mountain Goats, so people hypothesize that it’s about her. I don’t really know if that’s true and it doesn’t make much sense to me given the romantic overtones, but that depends on what kind of love you think the song is talking about. It’s funny to imagine this as a song for a more accessible band given the violence of “the day your love came screaming through me.” That line is pure Mountain Goats and I think we all owe something to the people of Evanston who didn’t go out to that Orange Trees show. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, but just for that one night, the universe told John Darnielle that he had something, it just was what he was already doing.