There are seeds of “No Children” in “Wishing the House Would Crash.”

Track: “Wishing the House Would Crash”
Album: Unreleased

Someone with three subscribers on YouTube (as of this writing) posted a video of John Darnielle playing “Wishing the House Would Crash” in September of 2019 here. Darnielle tells a joke at the end and says that a strength of early Mountain Goats songs is to deliver a “curse” or “verse” and then to be gone. Either works, here, and both are funny in a different way. I’m almost positive it’s “curse” but it’s just neat that it works both ways.

“Wishing the House Would Crash” is, as the man himself says at that show, an Alpha Couple song. It’s short, obviously, but it really does work with that central image. One Alpha is outside and they hope the house that symbolizes their failure collapses on them. They then wish the house would collapse on them, and on their partner, and then on them. We’ll hear this messaging again about a decade later in a much more memorable format, but the vibes are the same. The two of them are sometimes more eloquent in expressing their frustrations, but the image of the house just finally actually falling down on top of the two of them, and mixing that with the car accident language of “crashing,” really does the heavy lifting that additional verses and curses would normally do.