The lovers in “Weekend in Western Illinois” admire happy dogs as they experience sweeping events all around them.

Track: “Weekend in Western Illinois”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

You may be the sort of person who likes the quiet of “Masher” or “Ontario” or you may be the sort of person who likes to speculate about the characters in “Minnesota” or “Evening in Stalingrad.” Full Force Galesburg is varied and excellent and it will support you, no matter what you’re looking for in a Mountain Goats record. Sometimes you’re just looking for a song for a windows-down drive. “Weekend in Western Illinois” is about as “rocking” as John Darnielle and company were capable of being in the days before the drums. If you can listen to it without tapping your foot or snapping along, I would question if your blood is indeed red.

Like the best version of “Going to Kansas,” the song’s instrumentation really evokes the apocalypse. The strumming is intense, but it’s the organ that really brings the house down. All of the lyrics also describe huge, sweeping events. Take your pick from “the sky’s opening up like an old wound,” “the ground underneath us shakes in the cracking thunder,” and “we are watching the sky unwinding.” The dogs out there in Galesburg even “howl as though the world were ending,” as if you couldn’t feel that in every tense second.

While the world’s figuratively (or literally, given the narrator’s insistence) ending around them, the characters go through their own turmoil. “We are burning up all of our choices” is a nice summation of the couple that’s falling apart across the album, and Darnielle mentions blood twice, which is high even for a Goats song. There’s much more to unpack, but you can find everything you need to know about these lovers in the way John belts out “some of our promises were binding up here where our dreams take form” over the final tense strums.