The Hot Garden Stomp

The Hot Garden Stomp
Album	Hot Garden Stomp
Released	1993
Artist	the Mountain Goats
Length	2:48
Previous track	"Are You Cleaning Off the Stone?"
Next track	"Love Hymn to Aphrodite"

The Hot Garden Stomp is the seventh song on The Mountain Goats' fourth cassette, Hot Garden Stomp.

Lyrics

The room was unbearably hot
Flowering plant that hung from the radiator pipe
It was dripping sweat from its rapidly fading petals
And to the humming world in which I was living

A crescendoing stepping sound came in
I heard you stepping over three weeks' worth of newspapers 
Piled up outside the door

I hear you knocking
Come in
Turn on the radio
Turn up the volume

You sat down in the same place where you used to sit
It brought back a memory or two
I may not know much any more, but I remember you

You were quiet for a while and that was nice
Then you came along with your questions, always questions
I don't have any answers to those particular questions

I hear you talking
Shut up
Turn on the radio
Turn up the volume

Comments by John Darnielle About this Song

• "It's of the genre I call 'tortured emo dude song', right. Like, I wrote my fair share of them and I really was into them at the time. And then one day I got a letter from somebody calling me out. I will forever be grateful for this letter, because it pointed out that I had the tortured emo dude who blames all of his problems on the absence of a woman who, you know, could fix his life by coming and just sort of standing there in the radiant sheen of his self-effulgent narcissistic light. Uh, I thought, feminist writer from Missouri, you are right, and I'm not going to have that dude in my songs anymore, 'cause he's kind of an entertaining dude to contemplate when you're seventeen, but if you're twenty-one and you're still doing the sort of thing where it's like, 'my life would be better if a nameless faceless woman would come and fix it,' son, then you need to grow out of that, because that's not even what it's all about. But that said, those songs are not without their occasional charms." -- 2011-06-26 - Rhino's Youth Media Center & All-Ages Club - Plan-It-X Fest - Bloomington, IN

Live Shows this Song Was Played at

• 1992-12-17 - Munchie's - Pomona, CA
• 1994-xx-xx - Stache's - Columbus, OH
• 1996-02-25 - Tower Musikclub - Bremen, Germany
• 1996-09-03 - Fletcher's - Baltimore, MD
• 1997-06-21 - Tokyo Rose - Charlottesville, VA
• 2000-10-15 - Go! Rehearsal Studios, Room 4 - Carrboro, NC
• 2002-03-10 - The Green Room - Iowa City, IA
• 2002-11-06 - Knitting Factory - New York, NY
• 2003-04-06 - Go! Rehearsal Studios, Room 4 - Carrboro, NC
• 2005-10-18 - The Buffalo Icon - Buffalo, NY
• 2005-10-31 - Knitting Factory - New York, NY
• 2007-06-16 - Zoop - Farm Sanctuary - Watkins Glen, NY
• 2010-11-12 - Chapman University's Memorial Hall - Orange County, CA
• 2011-06-26 - Rhino's Youth Media Center & All-Ages Club - Plan-It-X Fest - Bloomington, IN
• 2012-06-25 - Mission Theater - Portland, OR
• 2012-06-27 - Swedish American Hall - San Francisco, CA
• 2012-06-28 - Swedish American Hall - San Francisco, CA
• 2022-09-04 - Baltimore Soundstage - Baltimore, MD