In one of the best unreleased Mountain Goats songs, we hear snippets of lives in “Stack Em Up.”

Track: “Stack Em Up”
Album: Unreleased

“Stack Em Up,” which doesn’t really have a name but may as well be called that, was played a handful of times a few years ago as of this writing. It’s one of the best of the unreleased Mountain Goats songs, for my money, and it’s one that you very easily could miss. It feels like a triumphant answer to a lot of Mountain Goats songs about people in California and Portland who are going through hard times. We hear a lot about those people and while we don’t often hear about what happened next, we can make some assumptions.

“Stack Em Up” refers to the people who become bodies and memories after those hard times get as hard as they’re going to get. “Some you lose track of,” John Darnielle says, and “some you have to bury.” These are not isolated messages or themes in the Goats catalog, but I am especially partial to this particular version. Specificity is what makes a Mountain Goats song a Mountain Goats song and “no one riding shotgun for seven years at least” is part of that. What’s really part of that, though, is that there’s enough here that you know these are not fictional people. May they all be as well as it is possible for them to be, if they made it out.