#365songs (128 / 365)

Have I mentioned I spent like a whole year listening to almost nothing but the Mountain Goats? Sometimes I am such a caricature of a person. They literally have a piece of merchandise that just says "I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats" and I was literally that guy for pretty much a calendar year.

Anyway this is all to say I have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Mountain Goats' back catalog, and I haven't leaned into it as part of this project... until now. "Waving at You" is song 15 of 18 on one of the Mountain Goats' probably least-celebrated albums, Nothing for Juice, and it's an understated but devastating little divorce song: unlike in a lot of early tMG songs it's pretty clear what's going on in it, but like in a lot of early tMG songs the singer is not doing great. In two and a half short minutes he cycles through combativeness, resignation, disorientation and possibly self-deceptive determination as he refers to a marriage the loss of which is clearly fucking him up pretty badly as an "old habit." Sure, bud. Whatever you gotta tell yourself.