The Mountain Goats began life in a Norwalk employee-housing studio apartment that had awesome deco tiling on the bathroom floor but little more to recommend the place as a living space. Still, you take what you can get, and it was ridiculously cheap.
In this room, equipped with a dual-cassette recorder, John D. started setting some of his poetry to music, using a guitar he'd gotten for a few bucks at a nearby strip mall music store. His idea at the time was that eventually his day job would be "poet." Young men have all kinds of crazy ideas about what they're going to end up doing for a living.