When my older brother was here last month, he mentioned he’d been listening a lot to the Mountain Goats’s set from Zoop, a benefit for Farm Sanctuary, which is a non-profit that rescues animals from factory farms and educates people about how animals are treated in factory farm situations, which are such awesomely important things to do I suggest you just go donate some money to them right now (Oh, are you not convinced? Ok, from their website: “Hilda, a sheep found on a pile of dead animals behind Lancaster Stockyards, was the first animal to be rescued by Farm Sanctuary. She lived with us for more than a decade, and died of old age.”), held in 2007 over two days. (The dudes played Zoop II just a few days ago, at the New York FS farm, even though there is a perfectly good FS farm near Chico they could have played at.)

Download both days’ sets, the quality is dope for being recorded on an iPod. There are covers of “One Fine Day,” (a song I don’t normally care for, but I like this version of course) “Red River Valley,” and some nice versions of songs you don’t hear live a lot (Shit off the tapes and the EPs, for instance, and the unreleased and totally awesome “Standard Bitter Love Song #1”) and some you do. JD seems so psyched to be there and played to the crowd with stuff like “The Monkey Song,” and “Going to Georgia.” There’s also some terrific banter, which is always going to be good at a Mountain Goats show, but here I think is of particularly high caliber. I’ve drawn a tenuous line from David Foster Wallace to John Darnielle before, and here again we find the connoisseurship of the midwestern and the Inland Empiric, the gut-sock ways with words, and the heart as wide open and vulnerable as all central Iowa.

This is hardly the best song of the bunch, but it is a happy closeout singalong of “California Song” and it’s making me feel good today.