You and Me and a High Balcony is an unreleased song by the Mountain Goats that was written during 2002 at the same time John Darnielle was writing We Shall All Be Healed. On July 18, 2013, Darnielle found a demo of the song on a CD labelled "New '02" and decided to upload it to his SoundCloud.
Lyrics[]
Clean slate, warm weather They should tie our ankles both together Seagulls calling to one another If a stranger should ask you, you can tell him I'm your brother Lean into me, press real hard I got no good reasons left not to let down my guard I love your kiss, but it's going to come down to this You and me and a high balcony And professional wrestling on pay-per-view Windows in light And the radio blaring all night And the truth slowly dawning on me and then on you Let's pretend we're all alone Let's unplug the telephone Our scale doesn't slide Here comes tonight, hey, open wide Don't blink, don't try too hard not to Just rehearse the alibis your father taught you See the plastic coating on the windows blister Anybody asks you, tell them you're my sister Yeah, you and me and a table set for three Just in case our assassin should finally come through Anhydrous and matches Why don't we cook up two more batches With the time closing in on me and then on you
Comments by John Darnielle About this Song[]
- "ha wow ok NO recollection of this song. office cleaning wins again" -- Twitter
- "song appears to be about two meth cooks about to run out of luck, possibly a brother-sister duo" -- Twitter
- "there's no name on the CD, I have no idea what this song was initially called" -- Twitter, on the title he gave the song
- "I suspect that's right, but thematically it's a more in tMG territory" -- Twitter, on the possibility of it being a lost Extra Glenns song
- "OK so earlier on Twitter I mentioned that I ran across a CD marked “New ‘02” while “cleaning the office.”* It consists, on auditing, of a bunch of songs that were new in 2002. Plenty of them got recorded at Bear Creek for We Shall All Be Healed; some didn’t. This one seemed worth letting out of its lonely cage. It audibly doesn’t really belong with the songs from We Shall All Be Healed: it shares some themes (meth, tawdry motels) but is formally in a pretty different ballpark and it’s also not very personal, whereas the songs that did end up making We Shall All Be Healed marked my first steps toward writing from direct experience." John's Tumblr
Things Referenced in this Song[]
Live Shows this Song Was Played at[]