The Late Show host Stephen Colbert couldn’t contain his fandom as The Mountain Goats appeared on the late night show to perform their classic 2005 track “This Year.” Colbert leapt onstage during the rendition to sing along with frontman John Darnielle, giving an impassioned performance of the tune.
The band, who also played new track “Sicilian Crest,” seemed game for the intrusion. “I asked them to play this song for me because it’s one of my favorite songs of theirs,” Colbert explained to the crowd ahead of the performance. Apparently, it’s not the first time they’ve collaborated on the song. “10 years ago we did this song with Stephen on Comedy Central but it never aired,” the band wrote on Twitter. “Tonight we did it again.”
The Mountain Goats’ latest album, In League with Dragons, dropped in April via Merge Records. The 12-track album was recorded with producer Matt Ross-Spang at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios.
“This album began life as a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called Riversend ruled by a benevolent wizard, for which some five to seven songs were written,” Darnielle explained in a statement. “As I worked on the Riversend stuff, weird noir visions started creeping in… I thought these moods helped complicate the wizards and dragons a little, and, as I thought about my wizard, his health failing, the invasion by sea almost certain to wipe out half his people, I thought about what such a person might look like in the real world: watching a country show at a midwestern casino, or tryout pitching for an American League team years after having lit up the marquees.”
He added, “I am earnestly hoping that a new genre called ‘dragon noir’ will spring from the forehead of nearly two years’ work on these songs, but, if not, I am content for this to be the sole example of the style.”