 There aren't many bands out there with music that feels as human as the mountain goats. Frontman John Donnell has a unique brand of lyricism that really tugs at the heartstrings. His songs hit you in unexpected places, and I think a big reason behind that is his ability to write characters. Donnell's songs are loaded with outcasts and oddballs that tap into the humanity of all of us. But of all his characters too have really stuck out across much of his career. The Alpha Couple. Let's take a closer look at the history of Donnell's dysfunctional lovers. The Alpha Couple are a pair of tumultuous lovers who desperately want to love each other, but are ultimately connected only by mutual hatred and alcoholism. Their bleak saga stretched across the first decade of the mountain goat's career. The couple first appeared in a number of tracks in 1992, but 1994's Alpha and Scipians sets the scene where the couple's decline begins. In a show at the Knitting Factory, Donnell explained this song. It's the one in which the moment is born, where they're going to drink each other into the ground, dissolve their marriage, and burn a house down. Originally Donnell was going to write the couple into a divorce, but he became attached to them and continued to write their misery. Donnell doesn't often describe their relationship in broad narrative strokes, but rather in small, specific moments. Just look at Alpha Omega, which some have placed as the last song chronologically in the couple's story. The entire song takes place in just a few moments after one of the couple realizes that the other has left them. By writing small moments with big revelations, Donnell is able to obscure the characters and create a sense of universality to them. We can relate to these small moments filled with base emotions because we experience them daily. However, these small moments give way to a more complete narrative on 2002's Tallahassee, which is a concept album all about the Alpha couple. This album was the mountain goat's way of sending off the couple, telling a detailed story of their doomed romance. In it, the pair move to a derelict house in Tallahassee and begin to drink themselves to death. In an interview with Transition Video Magazine, Donnell explained the importance of this crumbling house in a bad neighborhood. The house plays a big role in these people's crumble. It sort of is the third person in their marriage because they almost never leave. It's kind of a celebration of how bad things have gotten. Tallahassee features some of the clearest representations of the couple's relationship ever put into song. Just listen to these lines from the game shows Touch Our Lives. Midway through the album we get No Children, a perfect distillation of the couple's bitterness. I love No Children because it's an honest portrayal of a relationship gone bad. The Alpha couple share each other's vitriol for each other and that's what keeps them together in a desperate drive to the bottom. Donnell described this track as a love song. He said, That's how when two people love one another but then they succumb to the urge to want to kill each other, what's love like then? It also talks about how people will often wallow in our misery. When we're sad we don't want to become happy, we want to let these negative feelings surround us. Tallahassee is full of intense descriptions of the couple's love, hatred, and self-destruction. All of this spirals perfectly into the desperate penultimate track, Oceanographer's Choice. That song is filled with ambiguous lyrics that could be the couple having sex or getting into a physical altercation. And then we fell down, we knocked the treacher over as he rolled across the floor. The lyrics end with a final crushing rhetorical question. Finally get what I deserve. The final track on the album is called Alpha Rat's Nest, which harkens back to the earliest songs of the Alpha couple, all of which had Alpha in their name. Darnell said that he always knew this was going to be the last song on Tallahassee. It's one of the couple giving a eulogy for their relationship. As the eulogy is sung, the house burns down, possibly metaphorically but possibly literally, putting an end to the Alpha couple story either way. The saga of the Alpha couple make up some of the best highlights in the mountain goat's career. It features some of John Darnell's strongest writing and shows exactly why there are one of the most compelling bands out there today.