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The Mountain Goats, Live In Concert: Newport Folk 2013

Members of the Mountain Goats perform live at the 2013 Newport Folk Festival.
Adam Kissick
/
NPR
Members of the Mountain Goats perform live at the 2013 Newport Folk Festival.

The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle spent the 1990s recording his songs — just a voice, an acoustic guitar and bracingly articulate lyrics about catastrophe and survival — on low-fidelity equipment like boom boxes. It got to the point where the tape hiss felt like another instrument, but in the last decade, the Mountain Goats' music has become ever more polished. Darnielle now leads a full, versatile band, but his songwriting retains the capacity to stun: His songs can be gracefully poetic, painfully visceral and warmly empathetic, all at once.

Live, Darnielle is often wryly funny — and versatile enough to follow a somber ballad about death with a thunderous anthem. Hear The Mountain Goats perform as part of the 2013 Newport Folk Festival, recorded live on Friday, July 26 in Newport, R.I.

Set List

  • "Love Love Love"
  • "Amy AKA Spent Gladiator"
  • "Southwood Plantation Road"
  • "Up The Wolves"
  • "Animal Mask"
  • "Lion's Teeth"
  • "Woke Up New"
  • "You Were Cool"
  • "White Cedar"
  • "Cubs In Five"
  • "Cry For Judas"
  • "The Mess Inside"
  • "First Few Desperate Hours"
  • "Psalms 40:2"
  • Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)