“The Doll Song” is funny, but it’s reductive to lump it in and call it just a “funny song.”

Track: “The Doll Song”
Album: Unreleased

It is easy to get a little too grand when talking about the unreleased world of the Mountain Goats. You could be an enormous, committed fan of the band who goes to shows and buys merch and loves them to death and it would not be weird that you don’t know an obscure song that was played live a few times twenty five years ago. In fact, the opposite is true. Nevertheless, let’s talk about “The Doll Song.”

There are two versions you can hear online, both with a little bit of context. The one that’s been going around YouTube and was on music sharing programs before that (ask a trusted adult what those were if you were born after 1990) is from 1992 and features some form of the Bright Mountain Choir and the other one is this one, from 1998 in St. Louis. Both of them are pretty intense and the performance and the commentary drive home this is one of the “funny” songs from the early days, but it’s one of the good ones. 

I’ve always been fond of the image of this narrator telling the dolls “you have no compassion” and the central idea, that this person is taking their troubles out on dolls and not dealing with some kind of actual relationship, is a proto version of so many Mountain Goats narrator coping mechanisms. Sure, this one’s not a deep investigation of human relationships that anyone’s getting tattooed on themselves, but I think it’s legitimately funny without that being the only redeeming quality.