#man I've spent so much time listening to Goats stuff that's not on Spotify this year

[tornadotorrie]

[notquiteaghost]

Hi! I was wondering if you had any recommendations for where to start getting into the mountain goats? What little I've listened to by them was incredibly good and made me feel things I can't put into words, so I want to listen to more, I just don't really know where to start. They've got so many songs! Which is a good thing, I love listening to music, it just also means that working out which songs to listen to next is hard.

i wld say, if you remember which songs you've heard & liked, then listen to the albums they're on. and, also, the jordan lake sessions were recorded when they couldn't tour cuz of the pandemic, and are recordings of gigs except the only actual audience of those gigs was the recording equipment. from my memory, they've more newer stuff than older, but they're a good discography grab bag imo

my personal Absolute Favourite songs, if you want a very simple starting point: heel turn 2, amy a.k.a spent gladiator, golden boy, deuteronomy 2:10, rain in soho, almost every door, until olympius returns, dark in here, bleed out

okay that was the tl;dr. now i am gonna infodump a bit

you can split tmg into (rough) stylistic eras: songs for patronius through to all hail west texas is the boombox era, and the majority of these songs are just john darnielle with a guitar; tallahassee through to transcendental youth is early full band, and include more instruments and actual studio recordings; beat the champ to now is later full band/the post-matt douglas era, and Holy Shit There's Woodwind Now

an important thing to note is very early tmg was all cassettes and EPs (as in actual extended play 7" vinyls), and they were then gathered into CD compilations, and only the CD compilations are on spotify (and i assume other streaming services). not all earliest tmg is on those compilations; some early tmg is just not on streaming services. if you really, really dig early tmg and want as much as you can get, you will probably need to do a small crime. this is okay; it's your only option, tmg are aware it's your only option.

another important thing to note is all tmg albums are somewhere on the concept album scale. probably the most concept album is tallahassee, which is about the alpha couple, two fucked up people who should get divorced and very much do not get divorced. but if you are into Songs With Narrative, i v much recommend looking up liner notes (tmg wiki has them) and also the annotated mountain goats (this only covers up to 2017).

also! people record tmg gigs and post those recordings online! some of those people have such good recording equipment their recordings are indistinguishable from a professional live album; best way to find these is to sort that collection by all-time views. there's a decent chunk of tours recorded. these are also a good discog grab bag

and, finally, my Official Album Recommendations:

tallahassee, as mentioned, is about two people in a deeply toxic relationship. there are more alpha couple songs than just this album (annotated tmg has a list under 'series'), but if you've heard 'no children' and liked it then you shld listen to all of tallahassee

transcendental youth is about suicidal ideation and the kinds of people who live with it; the sunset tree is about growing up with an angry man in your house; beat the champ is also about growing up with an angry man in your house but now using professional wrestling as an allegory/framing device; bleed out is about violent desperation and desperate violence, with 70s & 80s action movies as an allegory/framing device; all eternals deck is about a fictional tarot deck and, again, surviving terrible things.