“Terminal Grain” gives you something to nod your head to and something to wonder about for a very brief two minutes.

Track: “Terminal Grain”
Album: Martial Arts Weekend (2002)

I am forced to use the video of a live performance for this post about “Terminal Grain,” which Spotify tells me is the least-played song from the 2002 The Extra Glenns release Martial Arts Weekend. There are no studio versions on YouTube, and the only other video at all is someone who appears to have recorded a garbled version of this live version by accident and uploaded it as a joke. Weird, huh?

I don’t know that play counts on Spotify matter much, but this is the first time in nearly 400 of these that I wasn’t able to find any version of a video of the studio version of this song. Just what to make of that is up to you, but it’s definitely a weird song. John Darnielle says at the end of the video above that he picked Sioux City, Iowa as a reference for the song because it sounded like a faraway place. At the time of that performance he lived in Iowa and it was no longer all that far away. Location seems to be about specificity and about hoping to imagine yourself somewhere else in a lot of Mountain Goats songs, so it’s not a stretch to apply that here.

I’ve always loved the studio version of this one but I am of the mind that there’s not much to unpack. It’s one of the explosion ones, over in under two minutes, and it’s as much about the feeling as the meaning. I’m overly fascinated by a lot of Mountain Goats (and Extra Glenns/Lens) details, but this one’s just a good time.