being a bit behind on my blogroll reading during the last busy week or so, i didn’t realize the music blog community was so abuzz about the last few live mountain goats shows, with one point of particular excitement being the serendipitously sublime sing-along version of ‘no children’ that everyone got to be a part of. since he was ill, he couldn’t sing it; but it’s such a spectacular song you can hardly leave it off the set list out of fairness to the audience.

largehearted boy has a recording from the show in san francisco, and hearing it again reminds me how fun a moment that was. i think only with a song that great and a singer that well-liked by his fans can you get a room full of hip indie kids to drop all pretensions and sing their hearts out like that. not to mention the impressive percentage of people who know the lyrics backward and forward (myself included). it was pretty inspiring. his reaction on this recording says it all.

nearly as exciting though is having stumbled upon marathonpacks, who’d posted a studio version of one of the songs of the goats’ upcoming new album get lonely that appears on some pitchfork comp or other. those details don’t interest me nearly as much as having an mp3 of a new track to listen to probably more than i should. and lucky for me, it was the one of i think three songs he played last week off the new album where right in the middle i thought to myself, “oooo, this is GOOD.”

i promise someday soon to write about something other than music, too, but it’s just so easy!