One of the earliest Mountain Goats songs, “The Garden Song,” presents a narrator it’s impossible to sympathize with.

Track: “The Garden Song”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

John Darnielle famously does not play “Going to Georgia” anymore primarily because having a narrator who threatens violence is not something he wants to triumph. His choice to stop playing it really made me think about why I liked it and what I was getting out of it. People still yell for it at shows, but that’s just how that goes. I think it’s a pretty powerful stance to take about a song that could always burn the house down and it’s part of what makes John Darnielle such an interesting songwriter. It’s said of a lot of creative people that they “evolve” but John Darnielle was always plenty progressive and a force for good. He just also was a young man writing about young men, so he told the story how it really was. It’s often not a good story.

“The Garden Song” is another song in this vein. It’s about a stalker, which is obvious from the text but reinforced from his performance in 2006 at Pitzer College. It’s the only live performance that is easily available to find, but it’s also the only one you’d need. John Darnielle introduces the song as a song he used to play when he did open mics there and says it’s about a young man stalking someone. He’s able to laugh about it and it’s obviously not as direct and intense as “Going to Georgia,” but it feels even then like a song from a much different John Darnielle. Now, over a decade after that performance, it’s even more so just an oddity from the early days.