“Something so personal so many people share.”

The Mountain Goats are an intensely personal band. Last year, I had the chance to spend a couple of days in Palm Desert with my wife. We set out in the evening at the end of a long, long week; I drove. She had a canned cocktail to celebrate. Then she reached for another. I made a comment about not getting smashed before we even got started. She was hurt; what was worse, she felt unfree. I was mad that she was hurt. And because people do perverse things when they’re mad, I pulled up The Mountain Goats’ Tallahassee on Spotify — an album that includes this lyric:

And I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing

On which our survival depends

People say friends don’t destroy one another

What do they know about friends?

At some point, my wife of 25 years asked me, “Are you playing this album because you don’t want to be married to me any more?” I think she was serious. As I say, The Mountain Goats are an intensely personal band. That made it both exhilarating and strange to see them at The Belly Up on October 2nd. Exhilarating, because here was a band whose songs get so far up into my headspace that they feel like an interior monologue set to music, and there they were, right up there on that little stage. What I scribbled on the back of the menu: “Explains your own life to you, saying what you wish you could.” Strange, because the place was packed with a whole bunch of other people who probably felt the exact same way. What I scribbled on the menu: “Something so personal so many people share.” What was being sung when I wrote that:

Our mother has been absent, ever since we founded Rome

But there’s gonna be a party when the wolf comes home.

At some point, lead singer John Darnielle made a joke about needing to produce “relatable content,” if only to “be respectful of our robot overlords.” It was a good joke, because yeah, he sings about weirdos, like genuine weirdos, the kind of people you might go out of your way to avoid in social settings, the kind who like H.P. Lovecraft a little too much and maybe have more guns and ammunition in their homes than is necessary for anything less than withstanding a siege from the Department of Homeland Security. But there was the crowd, packed into a cool venue in an affluent beach town in Southern California, relating like hell to the content the band had been producing for quite some time now. Content about the God who disappoints, for one thing.

The acrid smell of burning branches/ The relics all in ruin

Broken blades atop the altar/ Cheap substitutions

Talking of which: my daughter did not have a great college experience out there in the great Midwest, in part because God disappointed her. By the end, our phone conversations involved joking, in deadly serious fashion, about how she would find places where she could be alone and cry without being discovered. One of them was the crypt below the campus chapel, but eventually, one of the monks discovered her, and she had to resume her search. It should go without saying that I had her listen to “This Year,” the Mountain Goats song that includes the lyric “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” It’s their big triumphant show-closer, its verses telling a story of awful youthful disaster even as the chorus grits its teeth and presses on.

I told her that if she made it through and started a life, she could buy a motorcycle — a little flirtation with death, procured in the name of slipping through stalled traffic. Existential yet practical, that’s her all over. In the meantime, I bought her a lovely yellow sweatshirt from the merch table, one that featured the Kawasaki bike from the band’s song “Jenny.” Last week, it finally got cold enough for her to wear it.

And you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon

We were the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have his eyes on

900 ccs of raw, whining power…

I also bought a baseball cap, black with yellow block letters spelling simply, “Bleed Out.” That was the title of their last record, which told the story of a failed effort to resist the powers that be, and which I probably listened to enough times to get placed on a government watch list. I wore the hat home from the show like it was mine, but deep down, I knew it had to go to my brother. After it arrived in his mail, he texted me, “I’m sure I already told you that they kind of saved my life/sanity with ‘No Children’” — the breakup song that ends with the transcendently painful

I am drowning, there is no sign of land

You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand

And I hope you die, I hope we both die

His text’s conclusion: “In a word: seen.”