About 140 results
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-13-rescue-breathing-16zw8wv · 13 Jun 2026
John's ephemera (and this sat in a notebook for twenty years before being recorded) are often the places where he is at his most playful. And by playful I definitely don't mean unserious or lighthearted. Often the sweetest smallest song is the most direct ...
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-12-from-tgy-8kzhnwy · 12 Jun 2026
This is an anthem of helplessness. Not despair, at least not overt despair, but a song about the impossibility of changing what is happening without changing who you are, and how the attempt to keep things together can just mean destroying them more slowly...
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-10-dilaudid-tz73qge · 10 Jun 2026
Everything about listening to this makes me tense in the best way. The staccato strings and the urgent nature of the lyrics add up to the feeling of something constrained, desperate, vulnerable, and passionate. This song has some of John's best lyrical con...
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-9-scavenger-babies-bnt4cy2 · 9 Jun 2026
It's never not going to be a good time when you have a rolling guitar, John in trembling voice, and a list of things to do. A good John List Song feels like a properly conducted ritual. These are the things that make you good or pure or proper or maybe jus...
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-8-broom-people-923ps7z · 8 Jun 2026
I mean, shit. I have coherent things to say about this song, but friends who don't have a clue, well meaning teachers is a fucking novel in a line. Solace in a chaotic life, beauty in the wild and the cold, rage and despair turning into power through press...
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-7th-hast-thou-considered-the-tetrapod-rvb3uz7 · 7 Jun 2026
If Song For My Stepfather is John's pain at its most naked, this is perhaps John's pain at its most transubstantiated. Both songs describe blunt and unforgivable violence upon a child, but the points of view and the way the reality of it are processed coul...
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-6-magpie-hsajt4e · 6 Jun 2026
The most consciously folksy song on a not-very-folksy album, and one of the only ones to fit the Mountain Goats trope of list of things you must do which is one of my favourite tropes. Remember what we had here when there was something left to save is the ...
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-5-song-for-my-stepfather-9275s7z · 5 Jun 2026
This small beautiful song, a simple chard structure, a voice and a guitar, is the purest distillation of everything that John elaborates and explores in The Sunset Tree. It's quite shockingly painful, a story of smallness, helplessness, and the places peop...
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-4-dance-music-va8my0t · 4 Jun 2026
This gorgeous song is two vignettes of two different types of trauma. Both told in the same stream of consciousness moment-of life style, as if jumping straight into a memory already in progress. The first and simplest is about the fear of physical harm: h...
https://miscellany.pckt.blog/june-2-you-or-your-memory-8kt0nwy · 2 Jun 2026
God, this is going to be a month. The first thing to note about this song is that by the standards of the Mountain Goats it's incredibly simple. A narrative without allusion, without hiding. The events of a young man in pain contemplating something. The re...