The Mountain Goats Share “Get High and Listen to The Cure”

There seems to be no end to the trickle of music released by The Mountain Goats. The prolific folk-rock group, hot off this year’s release of In League with Dragons, have shared their second pair of 2019 singles, titled Welcome to Passaic, on streaming platforms. The release contains an A-side of “Passaic 1975,” a track from their last album, and a previously unreleased song, “Get High and Listen to The Cure.”

The singles were originally released by the band as a limited-edition 7-inch vinyl in August and sold as merch along their tour. Since then, the tracks have been given a wide release on streaming platforms.

The wonderfully named B-side,“Get High and Listen to The Cure,” comes from The Mountain Goats’ 2017 sessions for Goths and has the unfinished demo sound reminiscent of John Darnielle’s early Mountain Goats projects. Over a drum machine and piano, he lists off Cure songs with the repeated line, “I wanna get high / and listen to The Cure all night.”

Darnielle writes on The Mountain Goats’ website that their bassist Peter Hughes originally saw this unreleased Goths song as a potential hit:

Speaking of singles, Peter Hughes, on hearing “Get High and Listen to the Cure”—written for Goths, attempted in the studio sessions in versions that lacked the snap of this demo—felt certain this was the song that would make us a household name. I’m fond of the song, though I don’t share his conviction that it’s the Mountain Goats song the whole world has been waiting to hear. Should this release prove Peter right, I will be quite content to concede the point.