The Fire of Love in "Sept 19 Triple X Love! Love!" by the Mountain Goats

This post is part of the Mountain Goats Book Club series. 

Here is a song about destruction, devotion, fire, and household chores: "Sept 19 Triple X Love! Love!" by the Mountain Goats.

In his commentary in This Year, John Darnielle tells us that the effect of the song comes from the way the first stanza keeps building up the image with phrase after phrase extending the life of the sentence.

I used to think this kind of thing—layering categories onto a sentence—built intensity, because I'd misunderstood something Keats wrote about intensity in a letter, and I didn't think Keats could be wrong. But I hear what Darnielle is saying: it's actually languid, the way the syntax piles up like the winding path of a soft-serve ice cream: "there's a desire in the first stanza to linger, to repeat while we can, because it's going to get so active in the second one that the just-gone time of sought-after repetition will seem like a lost era of safety and known outcomes." 

At the same time, he also describes this sentence structure as continuously "tightening the knot": a more sinister image for the song's development. That all makes it sound like something terrible is going to happen in the second verse. And in a sense, it does, although not in a cataclysm of consequences, but in a loving touch:

your footprint on the snow was fresh and new
when you touched me I felt fire come through

We could take this fire as just a figure of speech for romantic excitement, but given the presence of real fire, maybe we can feel this "fire come through" a little harder than that. Fire is painful—purifying—purgatorial. Fire destroys. Fire is holy danger.

If the danger comes through in the form of the lover's touch, the "safety" of the first verse comes from the distance between them. They can see each other through the window, but not touch. But in the second verse, everything heralds the lover's arrival. The glow of the fire and the scent of the peach wood create a sense of the holy, like incense burning in a church, evoking a treasured memory and transforming the space, making it ready.

Then the lover approaches. Their footprint is "fresh and new," something surprising and unprecedented. There are no "known outcomes" here. This is how love comes into our lives, not with promises and assurances, but with an almost menacing unpredictability. As it draws close, we feel its heat, the heat of the ungovernable, terrible fire of love.

Framed by this encounter, the refrain takes on a religious depth:

I will do as I am told.
I will keep away the cold.
I will do as I am told.
I will keep away the cold.

This refrain is in what Darnielle calls the "incantatory mode," achieved through anaphora (repeating the first couple words in each line). It has the weight of a vow, uttered in fear and trembling. When the fire comes through, you can run away, or you can stand and let it take you. And you can't know whether this fire will destroy you or burn away everything small and petty in you.

As usual, I have some questions:

1. The title seems like something written on a marquee, but not the way it would be written. "Triple X" is written out as a phrase instead of as just "XXX." The "Love! Love!" might be a play on "Live!" But why? What is this title doing for the song?
2. Sometimes Darnielle belittles his older songs as being over-dramatic. And maybe that's all we have to say about the "killing floor." Is this literally happening outside of a slaughterhouse? Or is this just how the hero feels about the home they share with their lover? Why?
3. Does anyone know how a peach tree smells when it's burned?