The Mountain Goats
College Street Music Hall
New Haven
Oct. 17, 2026
I am a pretty big music fan, with the “pretty” doing a lot work. If I were a “big” music fan, I’d know more than most everybody; if I were just a “fan,” maybe I’d still be listening to my Freedom Rock CDs from high school. What being a pretty big music fan means, as I see it, is that whenever I am in a conversation about music, the person I am talking to either knows way less about the current scene than I do, or way more. Knowledge-wise, I’m the guy in the middle.
For the guy in the middle, it’s an open question how much I should know about The Mountain Goats. The longtime, mighty prolific musical project of erstwhile novelist John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats are a literate, guitar-driven act that has generally lacked widespread radio (or streaming) success but has, I would bet, more fans who have seen 20 of their shows than all but a few other acts anywhere. If you love The Mountain Goats, you love them immoderately; but it’s not terribly hard to have entirely missed the memo.
I’m one of the guys who missed the memo. Oh, sure, I knew about their 2005 song “This Year,” a rollicking bit of power-pop that no fewer than four people have told me “got [them] through COVID.” It’s one of the best songs ever (yeah, I said that), and, unsurprisingly, famous people love to sit in with them to do a verse or two: guest singers on “This Year” have included Stephen Colbert and The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, and each version is splendid in its own, joyful, “You go, girl!” way. I can’t say exactly what the song is about—a Times critic seemed equally flummoxed, noting merely that the song is “grounded in [Darnielle’s] own teenage experience”—but I suspect it has vasty deeps, not least because its closing battle cry, “There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year,” seems a direct allusion to the Jewish wedding vows (check out the seventh vow), an alluring, baffling fact about a writer who identifies as a Christian and has a love for Magic: The Gathering.
As I entered College Street Music Hall on Sunday night to hear The Mountain Goats play, I could not have named a second song of theirs. I had had a taste, a little sniff, and now I was hoping to be made into an addict.
I’m still sober. The concert was a tight, efficient affair, 20 songs in just under two hours. It was clearly Darnielle’s show, as he made clear by taking the stage a minute or so after his three backing musicians took their places and began vamping. Darnielle, on guitar and vocals, is a charismatic presence, and he leads his four-piece group with aplomb; most of the night it was a two-guitar, bass-and-drums affair, a Beatles-style classic lineup served just right. For my money, Jon Wurster, stage left on the drums, was the star of the show, his symphonic fills delivered with flair and whimsy and great hair. It’s nice to see the drummer given his own sight lines, not hidden away or placed on a riser, which always strikes me as a faux-honorific — visibility at the cost of apartness.
To a tyro like me, the songs sounded alike, although I realize that that’s the weakest of critiques: all rap sounds alike to the non-fan, all Jeff Buckley sounds alike to the non-fan, etc. If all of X sounds the same to you, then you just need to listen to more X. In my own defense, I’ll say that even The Mountain Goats fans I know will generally concede that Darnielle’s genius is, mostly, in his lyrics, and if you don’t know the lyrics—if you haven’t memorized them, as about half the fans in the house Sunday night seem to have—then the show loses something. That’s not a knock against The Mountain Goats, just a fact. Go see The Avett Brothers, or HAIM, or The Heavy Heavy—to pick three bands that have passed through the region lately—and you’ll get more melodic variation, and more genres: ballads for the ballad-lovers, some nods to Laurel Canyon acoustics, some jazzy chords, some crunch guitars for people who want to rock out, a little something for everyone. With The Mountain Goats, the up-tempo major-chord music is the vehicle for Darnielle’s stories, delivered in his passable voice, loveable if you love being reminded of The Mountain Goats.
I mean, the stories are good. As Darnielle explains in his between-songs banter, sometimes he is drawing from his own life, sometimes from as far afield as urban legend. “Charlie Sheen Reaches out to the Feds,” the fourth song of the night, was based on some barely plausible true story, allegedly told about a coked-up Sheen watching a Japanese horror movie, thinking it was really a woman getting murdered, and calling the FBI. True or not? Who cares? The song reaches Jonathan Richman levels of absurdity, a good time for all. “Will you lie still while I reapply your bandage?” Darnielle asked on “Your Bandage,” from Through this Fire Across from Peter Balkan, the band’s 2025 album. It was a poignant expression of love, an epic tale in one line. The band is irreverent and clever without silly.
I have seldom seen a band more in tune with its audience, more eager to please. If I left thinking that the show wasn’t for me, well, that’s how I feel a lot these days. My world is filled with stuff that isn’t for me—Taylor Swift, acai bowls, Labubus—but is the cause of great joy in others. And that’s how it should be, and how could it be otherwise?
