“Treetop Song” is a rare bit of positive thinking in the world of the Mountain Goats.

Track: “Treetop Song”
Album: New Asian Cinema (1998)

At this show on April 9th, 2009 in Bloomington, Indiana, John Darnielle played some of Moon Colony Bloodbath with John Vanderslice. He played the never-released “For TG&Y” and the old classic “Cobscook Bay.” At the end, he came out and played a three-song encore that many Mountain Goats fans would swoon over: “Treetop Song,” “Cutter,” and of course, “No Children.”

This performance is the only live recording of “Treetop Song” that I can find. John Darnielle stumbles over a line towards the end and the crowd has to help him. This happens sometimes when he tries to play a very old, very rare song. It’s endearing, because it shows that even the man himself can’t keep a 500+ song catalog in his head at once. It’s always a fun moment when one voice calls out the missing lyric to a weird song in the middle of a concert, even if that might sound like a weird thing to like.

You won’t hear this live very often because the harmonica is important and that’s John Darnielle playing it. Aside from the harmonica, it’s almost a slight song. Both Darnielle’s delivery and strumming seem calm. It’s a great album-ending track in that way. The characters in New Asian Cinema are all struggling, but we see most of them right before the bubble bursts. The narrator of “Treetop Song” makes a decision to jump from one tree to another, but they also assure us that this choice means good things. Darnielle emphasizes the “be” in “And I knew that I would be all right.” In other songs this kind of statement might make you wonder if they were trying to convince themselves, but here it sounds like a fact.