Tap your toe to “The Alphonse Mambo” and ponder the energy it takes to have the conversation you need (but don’t want) to have.

Track: “The Alphonse Mambo”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

The Mountain Goats Wiki is an amazing resource of live shows. This list makes a fair case that “The Alphonse Mambo” might be the most played song from the early Goats era. There are a lot of good reasons for that, but chief among them has to be that it bridges the beginning and the current day of the Mountain Goats. John Darnielle often describes himself in the early years as one guy stomping his foot with a guitar. These days his live shows combine huge, loud performances with a full band and quiet, uneasy piano songs that highlight the beauty in the strange and lonely people of our world.

“The Alphonse Mambo” is a stomper, for sure, but it’s also about a couple in distress. The song endures because it’s thematically appropriate around whatever other song he’s playing. There are often people in distress at the center of a Goats song, but Darnielle’s confirmed that this one only features the narrator. He’s working up the courage to have a tough conversation with someone else in this 16th floor room in Tampa Bay, but he’s going to need some more painkillers and some more courage to do it.

The live versions (especially the two at Farm Sanctuary, which you should seek out) highlight the song an all-timer, but the studio version has nearly as much of the fervor. You can hear John Darnielle shake as he sings the “waiting for the other shoe to drop in Tampa Bay” ending, and that teeth-clenched delivery sells the tension our narrator is feeling. They want to believe that they can get this whole thing done, but that period of “waiting for the other shoe to drop in Tampa Bay” might be a long one.