Virtually Home

 Last Wednesday night, the Mountain Goats played a show in Oklahoma City at the UCO Performance Lab on their way down to Austin. I anticipated getting to see them at the festival -- this was destined to end in heartbreak. However, I had the good sense to buy a ticket for the OKC show anyway, and I was rewarded with a brilliant set of my old favorites. John Darnielle puts on an amazing show. I was worried that it would be a low-energy set, since most of his songs are written for the acoustic guitar. I was pleased to be wrong. He's accompanied by a bassist and a drummer, neither of whom do any talking, but appear to be into it. John's stage banter is pretty fabulous -- stories about inadvertently inviting a troop of tweakers into one's small apartment and having them destroy your antique maple-top desk by imprinting it with their tweaker poetry, for example. You can tell he loves his work -- he smiles while he plays, in that uncontainable way, and he plays barefoot. At...