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Broom People
TheSunsetTreeFrontCover

Album

 The Sunset Tree

Released

 2005

Artist

the Mountain Goats

Length

2:44

Previous Track

You or Your Memory

Next Track

This Year

Broom People is the second song on the album The Sunset Tree.

Lyrics[]

'36 hudson in the garage,
all sorts of junk in the unattached spare room,
dishes in the kitchen sink,
new straw for the old broom,
friends who dont have a clue,
well meaning teachers,
but down in your arms,
in your arms, I am a wild creature.

floor two foot high with newspapers,
white carpet thick with pet hair,
half eaten gallons of ice cream in the freezer,
fresh fuel for the sodium flares,
I write down good reasons to freeze to death
in my spiral ring notebook,
but in the long tresses of your hair
I am a babbling brook.

Comments by John Darnielle About this Song[]

  • "Okay, so this is a song about how I was fourteen years old, and I had gotten to high school, and I was kind of terrified to be in high school because I was a scrawny little fellow, unlike the gigantic hulking mass you see before you today, and I was pretty terrified because, in junior high, it was bad, there were people gonna kick my ass, but there weren't so many of them, but in the high school in my town, there's nine hundred people there, and I knew there was a fair number who'd be just waiting for me to get there, to kick my ass, right? So I was tiny, I was a little fellow, and I got there, and the first month or two was pretty bad, first semester was pretty bad, and then I met a girl named Marcy Deem. Marcy Deem was the chief of the stage makeup crew. Marcy Deem and I began to date. Shortly thereafter, we began having sex three times a day. {audience cheers} You're fuckin' right! Because, then, when I'd be getting my ass kicked, I'd look up at the guy kicking my ass, and go 'You can kick my ass all day! It'll still be two years before you're where I'm at. Biatch'." -- 2006-08-10 - 40 Watt Club - Athens, GA
  • "This is a song very loosely about why I oppose abstinence-only education." 2017-11-07 -9:30 Club -Washington, DC
  • "The young fellow in this song, who is me, has discovered the secret to not killing yourself in high school. And it's a hell of a secret, because if you're having a certain kind of high school time, that's the challenge you face every morning. You wake up in the morning and other people are saying 'Oh, I hope I pass the pre-calculus exam.' Still other people are going 'Who shall I ask to the junior prom?' And you're waking up and you go 'How to make to 11 o'clock tonight without jumping off that fucking parking garage of that building up on 1st and College.' Someday I'll tell you that story. Thats one of those stories that when I tell it everybody thinks they want to hear but by the end everybody's like 'No, man, save that for your therapist.' Anyway, I had this girlfriend, and she was the head of the stage makeup crew and I was on the stage makeup crew. And we were awesome on the stage makeup crew! All the people on technical theatre thought they were badasses but over in stage makeup we knew how to do it with the rose beige and stuff. But she was the head of the crew and she was three or four years older than me-- actually, to the day, we had the same birthday-- and so I was a freshman and she was a senior, and her being a senior to her the idea of having sex all the time was a fairly natural idea. And so, you know, well I'm the kid walking around get beat up by jocks. You can't stop them from beating you up, you can't stop them from making fun of you and calling you a dirty hippy, but there's one thing you can do if the jocks are just trashing you. You can look up at them and go 'you don't know the secrets that I know about life and what bodies do with each other in cars because you're getting nothing. It'll be two years before you fucks catch up to me. That's what this song is about." -- 2010-03-14 - The Social - Orlando, FL

Things Referenced in this Song[]

Live Shows this Song Was Played at[]

Videos of this Song[]


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