Tallahassee Turns 20

At first, it looked like numbers without context. The Spotify rankings of Mountain Goats songs were changing, and John Darnielle didn’t know why. Since the moment that streaming services had made fan-favorite metrics possible to monitor, “This Year,” the anthemic blast of determination from the Mountain Goats’ 2005 album The Sunset Tree, had been most popular song from Darnielle’s band. Over a short period of time, though, another song surged in the rankings, ultimately unseating and then drubbing “This Year.” In the fall of 2021, “No Children,” a splenetic burst of rancor that was 19 years old at the time, had always been a big favorite, a classic singalong at the Mountain Goats shows where they deigned to play it, but that song had suddenly become an out-and-out hit. In a Variety interview last year, Darnielle talked about the fun puzzlement of the phenomenon: “Wow, 137,000 new people listened to ‘No Children’ today.”