You and Me and a High Balcony

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

Live Shows this Song Was Played at

Internet releases by John Darnielle

Exclusive: "Acceptable Damages Sutra" • "All Devils Here Now" • "Ballad of the Errant Scallop" • "The Big Unit" • "Brandy Let's Go" • "Bride" • "Counting Song for Bitter Children" • "Cut Off Their Thumbs #1" • "Deserters" • "Down Here Where the Bullet Bills Are" • "Extreme South #1" • "Flower Song" • "For the Krishnacore Bands" • "From TG&Y" • "Going Back to California" • "Going Invisible" • "Hye Kye" • "New Mountain Goats Tape Song" • "New World Emerging Blues" • "Pure Crystal" • "Short Song for Justin Bieber and His Paparazzi" • "Shot, Repeatedly, At Close Range, In the Chest, By Your Love" • "Sign of the Crow 2" • "Song for Sasha Banks" • "There Is Power in a Union" • "Thucydides II-58" • "Tyler Lambert's Grave"• "The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedi and Eats Their Bones" • "You and Me and a High Balcony" Released elsewhere: "Alibi • "Daniel 12:8 (first)" • "Exegetic Chains" • "For the Snakes" • "If You See Light" • "Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light" • "Michael Myers Resplendent" • "No Children" • "Ox Baker Triumphant" • "Surrounded" • "Until Olympius Returns" • "Wait for You"