The youths of California put their own spin on things in “We Do It Different on the West Coast.”

Track: “We Do It Different on the West Coast”
Album: Goths (2017)

I have always liked that “We Do It Different on the West Coast” serves as a sort of mission statement for why Goths exists. It’s a song about how everyone, everywhere, can discover something. “Trellis modulation for the children // there’s a whole new world just up around the corner” describes a time that feels almost unthinkable now, where people in the proto-online days where just learning how to connect with people about very small things that made those worlds suddenly, and forever, bigger.

The title refers to Darnielle’s youth in California, where he learned to love the goth subculture before he had the term “goth” to call it. He describes a time where you would hear unverifiable things from far away and you could pick and choose what to believe. The world of “We Do It Different on the West Coast” allows not just for regional pride, but for any truths that break your beliefs to not necessarily need to be strictly true. Whatever the best story is, why not have that be the story?

The two-minute breakdown here is great, but has always struck me as a little out of place. The chorus is the title repeated four times and the verses tell a rapid, but tight story. At a live show, even a song like “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” can explode into a full-band thing, but this is a rare instance of that being the “official” version. It’s a sign of shifting style, and not unwelcome, but it does always surprise me when I go back to this one.