Within a few weeks, I’d memorized every song on Tallahassee. John Darnielle, the band’s front man, is, as music critic Sasha Frere-Jones put it, “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist.” On Tallahassee, he presents love as I was then experiencing it: “Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania,” he sings in “International Small Arms Traffic Blues.” In another song, he sings of a relationship “like a Louisiana graveyard / Where nothing stays buried.”

As I got older, the Mountain Goats grew with me. Their songs were with me when my kids were born (“I saw his little face contract as his eyes met light”), and they were with me as I spiraled out of control with grief (“I am an airplane tumbling wing over wing / Try to listen to my instruments / They don’t say anything”). Sometimes, I need art to encourage me, as the Mountain Goats famously do in the chorus of “This Year,” with Darnielle shouting, “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.” Other times, I only need art to accompany me.

The Mountain Goats have shaped the way I think and listen so profoundly that I don’t know who I would be without them, only that I wouldn’t be me. I don’t want to overstate it, but there are moments in Mountain Goats songs that are almost scriptural to me, in the sense that they give me a guide to the life I want to live and the person I wish to be when I grow up. Consider, for instance, this couplet: “You were a presence full of light upon this Earth / And I am a witness to your life and to its worth. “ That’s a calling to me—to present more light, and to better witness the light in others.

I give the Mountain Goats five stars.

THE QWERTY KEYBOARD

ON MOST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE KEYBOARDS, the three rows of letter keys are not arranged alphabetically or by frequency of use. Indeed, the two most common letters in English—e and t—aren’t among the so-called “home keys,” where your fingers rest when typing. You’ve got to reach for them up on the top row, where the letters, from left to right, begin Q W E R T Y. The reasons for this involve typewriter mechanics, a militant vegetarian, and a Wisconsin politician who belonged to three different political parties in the span of eight years.

I love a straightforward story of inventors and their inventions. In fifth grade, I wrote my first-ever work of nonfiction on the life of Thomas Edison. It begins, “Thomas Alva Edison was a very interesting person who created many interesting inventions, like the light bulb and the very interesting motion picture camera.” I liked the word interesting because my biography had to be written by hand in cursive, and it had to be five pages long, and in my shaky penmanship, interesting took up an entire line on its own.

Of course, among the interesting things about Edison is that he did not invent either the light bulb or the motion picture camera. In both cases, Edison worked with collaborators to build upon existing inventions, which is one of the human superpowers. What’s most interesting to me about humanity is not what our individual members do, but the kinds of systems we build and maintain together. The light bulb is cool and everything, but what’s really cool is the electrical grid used to power it.