In This Home on Ice: Two Mountain Goats Songs about Waking Up Alone

“Alpha Omega” (Protein Source of the Future…Now!, 1998)

“Woke Up New” (Get Lonely, 2006)

Recent Mountain Goats albums have made domestic decay their explicit focus, with songwriter John Darnielle’s own life as the subject. 2005’s The Sunset Tree was a straightforward chronicle of a childhood made waking nightmare by an abusive stepfather, while 2006’s Get Lonely detailed the bleak days following a recent breakup. But troubled homes have always been a fixture of Darnielle’s story-songs, even back in his no-fi days when the lyrics were less personal, more cryptic, and shrouded in tape hiss. “Alpha Omega” (from the 1998 compilation Protein Source of the Future…Now!), part of a long-running series about a once-happy couple’s descent into mutual bitterness, describes the morning when one of them finally picks up and leaves. The oblique lyrical style is quintessential of early-period Mountain Goats, crafting the scene by discussing its most mundane details, with barely any direct acknowledgment of the emotional devastation that is its true focus. Years later, when the doomed couple’s story became Darnielle’s own and Get Lonely was born, “Alpha Omega” was reincarnated as “Woke Up New.” The premise is exactly the same, but the fanciful treatment is gone—on his first morning alone, the songwriter is lonely and scared, and he tells us so in the most literal terms.