The Mountain Goats (August 10, 2019)

The Mountain Goats were playing a free show as part of the CityParks SummerStage series, over at East River Park in New York City. Tip: do not have a cab drop you off at the FDR entrance for this park, it is hell and gone from the actual amphitheater. There's a walkway that crosses the FDR just at the amphitheater; that dumps into a park that's bordered by Cherry and Jackson.

Despite having to walk way further than expected, we made it to the concert just as it was starting (no opening act, which I'd kind of assumed there would be) and managed to find a couple of seats on the benches, too. The location is quite nice, very shady at 7 p.m., obviously good views over the river. I have a couple of pictures over at Google Photos.

I was kind of the wrong adult in Chateau Steelypips to go to this concert; I can identify half-a-dozen Mountain Goats songs by name, and have been in the room for a whole lot more. Chad is the one playing those songs, but this was a solo trip for me. (He has seen them before, at least.) But I still enjoyed it; it was pretty much exactly what I expected from having seen the occasional video of a live performance. Here's the setlist, which has a bunch of stuff from the new album, of course, but some deep cuts too. They did a blistering version of a song that was released as a dirge, "The Coroner's Gambit," which was great; it was based on the original take, which is the second of the three unlabeled tracks at the bottom of this page. And there was a fun bit at the end of John Darnielle's solo set, which he comes up with about five minutes before the show, when he pulled out a very old one called "The River Song," and Peter Hughes (the principal other guitarist) quietly came out from backstage and started singing the chorus along with him.

In conclusion, I feel it is maximally Mountain Goats to have an encore that starts with a song about possums (no, literally), goes into the two barn-burner singalongs that everyone knows ("No Children" and "This Year"), and ends with a slow anthem about burning it all down.

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