I haven been hesitant to write about The Mountain Goats for a few reasons:

• They are one of (if not my all time) favorite band
• They have a lot of albums. I have 22 in this analysis and this is not even close to all of them. As an avid fan, I have listened to a lot of their music. However, there is no way I have heard, or even found, all their songs. Some estimate they have over 500 songs!
• John Darnielle is evolving as an artists and already shares a lot on the podcast I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats
• The Mountain Goat's fans are dedicated. They even put on a burlesque show and have a subreddit.

Analyzing Music

As alluded to on the Math & Music homepage, Spotify has a great way to approach this problem. For each song we can look at various qualities which can then be rolled up to an album level. Some dates had to be estimated. Some albums had release and re-release dates. I included some deluxe editions where I could. Some albums and EPs are missing (blame Spotify, not me). However, we have a pretty good sample:

Albums have gotten longer. More songs are in major keys. John always refrains from cursing. Also, songs have gotten longer. Sweden and Nothing for juice have nearly 20 songs in 45 minutes, where the current album only puts ~12 songs in that same space.

Song Characteristics

Many things are very hard to quantify in music, but Spotify does its best. They provide the additional detail by track:

• Danceability
• Energy
• Liveness
• Loudness
• Valence (Think happiness/sadness)
• Speechiness
• Acousticness
• Tempo

*Spotify does have more, but this is where I will focus most my analysis. For more information on these metrics please see the Spotify page.

On the below graphs, each point is an album, with the horizontal position reflecting when the album was released.

This is a bit harder to read than normal (due to the number of albums), so let me provide the underlying data below. Full Force Galesburg hit a danceability low. Overall, the band is getting sadder but fluctuates a bit. They are getting less acoustic. There is a lot you can say here...

So looking at everything:

Oh my... This is why I knew this would be hard. Each album is pretty different. You can see the frequency of albums has gone down. Given the increasing complexity in newer albums, this makes sense.

All Hail West Texas is an all time favorite. Comparing it to other albums, it is very loud, live, sad, and energetic - exactly what I want when I listen to The Mountain Goats. Beautiful Rat Sunset looks similar to that and is another favorite. Ghana, an album I am less familiar with, is also similar. Maybe that should be my next Mountain Goats fix...

I am going to leave it to the reader to analyze what they will from the graph above.

Final Thoughts on The Mountain Goats

There is too much here to be concise. I love the Mountain Goats and hope this will fuel your love for them too!