Wild Sage Growing In The Weeds

We're coming up on the 2 year anniversary of this blog pretty quick here and I have written at least 3 posts about seeing The Mountain Goats. Well, thanks to Mo Money Mandy and some grandparent babysitting, we went and saw them again.

I'm not going to go into a huge MG love fest again, there's only so many ways that I can describe how much I love what this man does, and honestly words end up failing me miserably. If you need some reminders and want to read some gushing and drooling words about previous shows, please see here, or even here.

Friday night’s show was a bit of an odd venue. It was a fairly swanky dinner theater situation. We sat in curving and high backed booths, eating tasty but overpriced pan-Asian concoctions and drinking ourselves silly. To be sitting at a table with wine glasses while this feller, who can throw out more fire than a backwoods southern Baptist preacher, came on stage to do his thing, it didn't feel right.

Which maybe what put me in such a contemplative mood...

At one point, John put down his acoustic and picked up an electric guitar. This doesn't mean anything to you if you haven't seen a dozen or so Mountain Goats shows, but he never plays electric guitar. I began thinking of Bob Dylan moving away from acoustic shows and playing electric, and what a mad mess that became for his hard core fans - people used to come to his shows just to boo him, an audience member famously called him Judas.

I think we who count ourselves as Mountain Goats fans are willing to follow him down whatever paths he wants to lead us down. Bif has stated before that he is one of the only artists who can play a brand new song and she gets just as excited about it as hearing one of her favorites. I think that as long as he puts as much of himself into it as he does with every show I have ever seen, he could do an hour of Jimmy Buffet and Journey covers and I would eat it up with a great big loving spoon.

I have some minor fanboy complaints (more pre-4AD songs), but ultimately I just dig seeing people moved for varying reasons, by different songs. This go 'round, Lion's Teeth had me in tears, and Mandy was sweetly overcome by This Year. Ultimately, minor complaints or no, a Mountain Goats show is going to beat the living hell out of most other shows I see, and do it with a wide smile and fey little swirl of the hand.

It was a good time. Thanks Mandy for falling so wholly in, and for the tickets. Thanks Jason, I feel really bad about the wine thing - I will try to make it up. Thanks John, for again coming through my part of the world and rocking it so consistently.