Welcome back to I only listen to the Mountain Goats. I'm Joseph Fink of Welcome to Night Vale and Alice isn't Dead.

This summer I flew down to Durham, North Carolina to talk with one of my artistic heroes, John

Darniel, singer and songwriter of the band The Mountain Goats. Together we

explore art, politics, and the shifting line between artist and fan.

This season we are going song by song through his 2002 album All Hail West Texas.

And today we get to the song that was one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this album in this first year of our show.

We have come to track three, Color in Your Cheeks.

This song is about immigration, about refugees, but most of all about welcoming, about the simple act of saying,

you are not from here, but we are glad you are here now.

America prides itself in retrospect as a nation of immigrants, but it's never been an easy or welcoming

place to arrive, and this seemed like a goddamn good year to talk about that.

Each episode of this show will also have a new cover of the song we are discussing, recorded just for this podcast by a variety of artists.

I'm particularly excited about this cover for reasons we'll get to later.

But first, a brutally hot summer's day in Durham, one of our mites has stopped working, and so we gather around the remaining working one, campfire style, and talk.

Good to see you this morning. It's good to see you, John.

We are no longer in the basement.

There's been a change in the last two episodes.

We're at the offices of Merge Records in Durham, North Carolina, about half a mile

or a third of a mile.

I didn't really measure it from my house,

from the basement where we were last time.

It's somehow even more cramped.

...