“[Amanda Palmer] is an amazingly honest human being and her songs hold intense emotion, but "Lost" is interesting in its deceptive beginnings. It starts off sounding like a fun jam about a wild night but dissolves into something entirely else. At first listening, "Lost" didn't resonate with me. It just didn't strike a chord. But then there was a death that caught me off guard. I got home from a date and my house was empty when it shouldn't have been. I looked around and went outside and watched as my mother's car shot into the driveway. I could tell on her face something was wrong. Really wrong. There had been an accident. My grandfather fell off the roof of his home doing repairs and was intensive care. She'd be heading down to North Carolina to be with him. She left. I found out the next day that he had died from his injuries in the night, before she got there and before any of us could say goodbye. Because of previous experiences in my life, my grandfather had been the only man I felt safe around or felt truly loved by at that point, and his loss tore into me in a way I still struggle with. I stayed up for a long time when I found out he was gone. I tried to process. I tried to distract myself. I tried listening to music, and, when this song came on, I felt tears wash over my face. "Nothing's ever lost forever; it's just hiding in the recess of your mind and, when you need it, it will come to you at night... No one's ever lost forever; they are caught inside your heart. If you garden them and water them, they make you who you are." Those words are my comfort to this day.” - Anonymous

Suggested by Jesse Stanton from The Mountain Goats Discussion Group

"This song was a focus of an episode of the Song Exploder podcast several years ago. It's written in response to the 2003 Space Shuttle disaster, from the perspective of the astronauts aboard the Columbia. The whole podcast episode is well worth a listen (http://songexploder.net/the-long-winters) but the key bit which gets me is the 8-time repetition of ""The crew compartment's breaking up"". In the songwriter's own words, the repetition makes you start internalizing the horror and seeming unrealness of those words by the 6th and 7th takes. It's a sad song which, to me, is about the wonders of floating above the only home we've ever known, and the risks that act of forced perspective requires." - Danny Ben-David

Suggested by Eric Brown from The Mountain Goats Discussion Group

"Eugene hits hard because it's grounded in childhood vulnerability and just drips with regret - "what's the point of singing songs / if they'll never even hear you" i interpret that line differently depending on the day, but when "they" refers to people who have passed, the song is just ... yeah it echoes a lot of the sentiment in 'should have known better' which makes it thematically more impactful especially how the childhood vulnerability turns into the vulnerability of an adult - "now i'm drunk and afraid" - Caitlin Fischer