Minnesota

Lyrics

Seeds came in the mail today from Holland
And the language on the package is wonderful and strange
All sorts of flowers that grow up from the earth
In goodly colors gloriously arranged
I circled the house and I scattered them around
Let the water sink down into the soil
Stared a long time at the residue
Blood, milk and oil
God the humidity is something
Our shirts are soaked clean through
The house is throbbing and the heat keeps coming
And I keep looking at you

And then you're singing in Dutch to me
And I recognize the song
It seems so old and so fragile
And I haven't heard it in so long
We may throw the windows open later
But we are not as far west as you suppose we are
Hot wind coming off the water
Sky gone crazy with stars
While we stay here we imagine we're alive
We see shadows on the walls
There's something waiting for us in the hot, wet air
Sweat, water and alcohol
Just the old blood
Rising up through the wooden floor again
Just the old love
Asking for more again

Banter

• This is a song about that point in your relationship - we've all been there - where you’ve been drunk for weeks and you look across the table at the person you used to know and you say, 'I used to know you. Don’t you live here?' (2001-08-03)
• If I can get a little maudlin with you guys for a second here. The summer that that record [Full Force Galesburg] came out, I was so proud of that record, I thought I had done something new. [cheering] Thank you. But, you may not have noticed, it took the world a long time to catch up with the Mountain Goats. [laughing] We did a lot of tours, in, you know, we didn't always make it into towns like Cincinnati, we'd be playing in Covington [?], across the river. Maybe people would say, I wanna see the Mountain Goats, but I'm not going there. Or we wouldn't get there at all, because we'd be - [audience: Covington is awesome!] It is awesome, but there is a club there that is not. I gotta be quite honest with you. But, on that tour, so, that was like, 97, and I'd be playing in Pittsburgh to like, 30 people, and I was proud, and glad to see those 30, better than 29, but. At the same time, I really felt like, this stuff is not coming across, people are not feeling it at all. And so, to play that song, 15 years later, [unintelligible]. Thank you. [audience cheers raucously] (2015-04-16 - Bogart's, Cincinnati)

Live Performances

• 2015-04-08 - 9:30 Club, Washington DC (JD solo)
• 2015-04-16 - Bogart's, Cincinnati (JD solo - recording)
• 2015-04-18 - The Vic, Chicago (JD solo)
• 2022-08-19 Brooklyn Arts Center(recording, no song breaks but song starts at around 00:17:34)
• 2022-09-20 Saturn

Footnotes