Help me out, internet

One of my favorite things about the internet is how easy it is to find out who sings songs you hear in passing. My trick is I try to remember one catchy line, or a few words, that sound like they could be the chorus or the title. Then I get home, or if I already am home, I go over to my computer, put the fragment in quotes, and google it. I’m not kidding that this has ALWAYS worked. Always that is, except once. And that failure is the point of this post.

I was walking home from work one day and I passed this house a few houses down the street from my own. On nice days, they often leave open their window, and also it frequently sounds like a band is practicing inside. Or at least, a girl is singing and someone is playing electric guitar. So this one day, as I was walking by, I stopped to listen because this song she was singing was seriously AWESOME. So I assumed it must be a cover, so I memorized my key phrase, which in this case was “to keep wintertime at bay.” I scurried on up the block, googled the phrase, and . . . nothing. Nothing even close. Even when I spelled wintertime like winter time or winter-time or winter-thyme. I was so sad.

So then, a few months later, I was at a Mountain Goats concert, and the dude, as many of you know, has like, 478 songs or something. So I only know a very small portion of his song catalogue. But he’s playing, and suddenly, in the middle of this nice song, he sings “to keep wintertime at bay” and I was like, “holy shit! The puzzle is solved! It’s a Mountain Goats’ song!”



So that night when I got home, I did an exhaustive download of Mountain Goats’ songs, and did a massive search of his song lyrics. Because there are many people who are really into this guy, there are a number of websites which set forth every song he’s every written or played, along with all their lyrics. To my chagrin, not only was “to keep wintertime at bay” not among those lyrics, but it was also not among any of the songs I downloaded.

So, if anyone has any information about what this song is, please let me know. Yay internet.