You may know American band The Mountain Goats from their upbeat, folksy songs about dysfunction and failure, growing up in the middle of Nowheresville, Texas, or that intoxicating feeling of teenage wanderlust and escape. Maybe you even know The Mountain Goats because they sang an alternate version of The Last Jedi called “The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedi and Eats Their Bones“.
But at least one person in this world knows John Darnielle, the founder, lead singer, and former sole member of The Mountain Goats as simply “Dad”.
And what a lucky kid that one person is. The Mountain Goats Twitter is usually a place to find Darnielle engaging in nerdy hobbies, promoting other musicians, and generally being a pretty rad guy, but on Sunday, he posted a video of his child playing Breath of the Wild while he jammed along on piano with improvised lyrics.
“Well, we arrived at Hyrule Castle just before night
Gotta do something about all this Blight
There’s Guardians everywhere
They used to bother us, but now we don’t care”
– The lyrics to Darnielle’s Zelda song
There’s a fantastic Springsteen-esque quality to the offbeat singing and the poetic, talk-sung lyrics, heedless of metrical rhythm. We can’t decide if we want a full album of Zelda music by The Mountain Goats, or if we just want John Darnielle to be our dad.