John Darnielle says “Real Good Girlfriend” is sappy and maybe it is, but can’t we accept some sap?
Track: “Real Good Girlfriend”
Album: Unreleased
There are two versions of “Real Good Girlfriend.” There’s the live one linked above and there’s this performance at a German radio station in 1996. He sounds so young and is pitched so high, but part of that has to be that he’s singing a true song about a woman he’d marry and spend his life with. I should say it’s an assumption this is about her, but that feels like a safe one. It’s pretty insane to hear the man who wrote “No Children” sing “I had enough loose ends to get a brand new sweater // but in the whole Midwest, there ain’t a single woman better,” but I think that’s an easy take. John Darnielle is not the Alpha Couple and never was. The early Mountain Goats songs often feature tales of woe, but they’re generally from narrators we can imagine pieces of ourselves in rather than entire portraits. Even in those stories, there is love, and in John Darnielle’s life at that time and now, there is love.
Darnielle calls “Real Good Girlfriend” both “a fairly new song” and “really sappy, but all true” during that performance. I said similar things when I wrote about “02-75,” another love song directed at the same very real woman. It is sappy, sure, but it’s a song about the #66 in Chicago and waiting in the cold with someone you love. It’s easily as relatable as “I hope you die // I hope we both die.” At least, for your sake, I hope it is.