No. 139 - The Mountain Goats’ “Love Love Love” changed my life

The Pandora Radio song Dan Neilan felt in his chest and guts

May 01, 2026

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 4 min read •

Content warning - this post briefly mentions suicidal ideation

There was no greater scam at my high school than being a TA.

For seniors with a free period and no interest in beefing up their college applications with extracurriculars, the school offered the chance to be a teacher’s assistant. The thing is, while public school teachers are wildly overworked and in desperate need of assistance, they’re not looking to get it from the school’s least ambitious 17-year-olds. So a TA’s main job was to sit alone at a computer connected to the internet and not cause trouble.

That’s how I spent every second period of my senior year — sitting in the back of Mr. Neville’s biology class, surrounded by boxes of teaching materials, listening to Pandora Radio on his desktop computer.

Dan (left) and his best friend Sam during their senior year

At the time, my musical taste was emerging from several years of classic rock — perfunctory to all young white men — and veering hard into the indie rock and indie pop of the day. Arcade Fire. Death Cab for Cutie. Band of Horses. The damn Garden State soundtrack.

Though I wouldn’t say I loved any of it, I certainly liked a lot of it. I was a sensitive kid with inclinations toward hipsterdom. For the moment, I was happily following the herd, trying on new identities, waiting for one to fit.

Then, I heard “Love Love Love” by The Mountain Goats playing from the mediocre computer speakers at the back of Mr. Neville’s classroom.

My first thought was a slightly incredulous, “What is this?” Maybe it was the metallic clicking of the strummed guitar, louder than the chords themselves. Maybe it was John Darnielle’s reedy voice, trailing off at the end of each verse, like he’s singing to himself in his kitchen. Maybe it was the unabashedly earnest lyrics, riddled with literary references that I felt smarter for understanding — references to Crime and Punishment, which I had read in English class, and the phrase “a mirror dimly,” an oblique reference to a Bible verse that I only knew because of A Scanner Darkly.

Or maybe it was the tone of self-aware self-destruction that I would soon learn pervades so much of The Mountain Goats canon.

It would still be a few years before I contemplated suicide for the first time. A few years before I learned that those extended periods of spiritual numbness I felt had a clinical name. But even at 17, I was subconsciously drawn to whatever it is that John Darnielle taps into with his music. That sense of knowing yourself and feeling betrayed by that knowing. That urge to steer into the skid in the hopes that someone else will grab the wheel, while admitting you’d never let them if they tried. And isn’t the world too good anyway? Too bright and too good.

I felt this song in my chest and in my guts. I wanted more.

In the nascent days of algorithm-driven media curation, Pandora was king. All you had to do was enter the name of a song or artist into its beautifully clunky, mid-2000s interface and in an instant you were delivered a “radio station” populated by similar artists. But unlike the feedback-heavy algorithms of today that let users scroll through long playlists or infinitely swipe their way to a desired output, Pandora users lived behind a veil of ignorance.

All you were given was the name, artist, and album of the song you were currently listening to. Your only manipulative tools were a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button, and the more powerful “skip,” which you could use three times before it was grayed out. You didn’t know what song was coming next. You weren’t even allowed to go back and relisten to a song you particularly liked.

But in this case, I was determined.

I started a new “Mountain Goats Radio” station and began giving a thumbs down to anything that wasn’t The Mountain Goats. I aggressively used my skips and even tried deleting the cookies off of the web browser to get more skips. Slowly but surely, I bent the simple algorithm to my will, until nearly every song that came up was from John Darnielle’s vast oeuvre, of which I had barely scratched the surface.

The Sunset Tree. Tallahassee. We Shall All Be Healed. All Hail West Texas and a handful of early, lo-fi tapes that had made their way into Pandora’s library. I scrounged, coveted, and devoured it all.

And really, it’s how I found the song that changed me.

In the years that followed, discovering music became my obsession. First through Pandora, later Spotify and other tunable recommendation algorithms. Through blogs and review sites. Through dusty record crates in brick-and-mortar shops. The hunt became the thing.

Not only to indulge that early hipster superiority complex that comes with finding something before your friends. But to uncover those songs that stop me in my tracks. Songs that surprise me and make me ask, “What is this?” Songs that I can feel in my chest and in my guts.

Songs that last forever, and flare out with love, love, love. ◆

About Dan

Dan Neilan is a writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and unbelievably cute daughter — who has single-handedly destroyed his Spotify algorithm.

Website danneilan.com

Instagram @DanfordAndSon

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Eric Drobny (No. 087)

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