A familiar narrator fails to comfort their fellow man in “Tucson Fog.”

Track: “Tucson Fog”
Album: Hex of Infinite Binding EP (2018)

When he released Hex of Infinite Binding as an EP in 2018, John Darnielle said on Bandcamp that he used to release a lot of these and that he planned on doing it again. He did release a few, but nothing like the volume from his older days. That’s not a bad thing, and in fact the period directly following these EPs led to even more full-length albums than anyone could have anticipated. The result has been a ton of music from the Mountain Goats, just not in these short, one-off blasts.

“Tucson Fog” closes the EP on a dark note. Darnielle adds on the liner notes that he recorded it himself in his bedroom in December and that “things can get a little dark in December.” It’s especially dark considering the time that followed it, as it sets up a world where a speaker is locked in their house and hears only from “distant outposts.” This is too far in advance of the lockdowns and the quarantines to draw too much of a connection, but especially placing it in time really makes that stand out.

The song stands as a counterpoint to hope, but in a different way than much of the Get Lonely songs from a similar point of view offer a counterpoint. The narrator still wanders their house and speaks vaguely of dark rituals that leave a stench, but mostly they try to discover what their normal life is trying to tell them. To me this speaks of much older narrators who boiled water or made breakfast and tried to figure out why that moment was speaking to them and what they should draw from it.