Crucial Track for January 10, 2026

"No Children" by The Mountain Goats

#365songs (10 / 365)

One of the top 3 iconic Mountain Goats songs, to be sure, the others being "This Year" and... well, I don't know the 3rd but it's a distant 3rd. Probably either "Going to Georgia" or "Up the Wolves." Anyway, though, if you know the Mountain Goats, which I most assuredly did after I spent basically all of 2008 on a dive into their absurdly deep back catalogue, you know "No Children." It's sort of the culmination of the arc of two characters John Darnielle invented, a couple in a mutually-assured-destruction love-hate relationship, and it swings the needle way over to the "hate" side of that scale, so much so that it straddles the line between genuine loathing and a fit of melodramatic pique. It's a richer song in the context of its parent album Tallahassee — the last hurrah for "The Alpha Couple," as they're known — which also contains moments of genuine tenderness and affection, but on its own it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Chipper-sounding songs with morose lyrics have been done by everyone from They Might Be Giants to Taylor Swift but "No Children" really nails the formula. The piano line is jaunty, the tempo is brisk, the guitar strumming is vigorous, it's in 6/8. Tallahassee is a transitional album, the first one the Mountain Goats recorded entirely in a studio rather than into a boombox, and it shows in the tentative approach to production: there aren't even any drums, because Darnielle's percussive strumming has been filling that role for like almost 10 years at this point. But it doesn't need a lot of window dressing in order to hit, honestly. All it needs is "I hope you die / I hope we both die!"

2026-01-09 Karaoke Edition: I sang this song at karaoke on Jan 9, after looking for it in vain in every karaoke session I've participated in since I started doing karaoke occasionally in about 2018 or so. I attribute its suddenly showing up in the last couple years on its having "gone viral" on TikTok in 2021. Vibes in the room were split roughly halfway between people singing along and people laughing in slightly uncomfortable amusement.