John Darnielle, aka the man behind the deceptively plural moniker The Mountain Goats, has shared a previously unreleased and unheard cut initially written for his 2004 album We Shall All Be Healed.

We Shall All Be Healed occupies a notable place in Darnielle’s very large back-catalogue as following 2002′s Tallahassee, the musician’s first full-band record, and preceding possibly the best Mountain Goats album to date, The Sunset Tree.

Darneille was recently cleaning his office and stumbled upon an old CD of lost non-album tracks from around this time, deciding that this number, ‘You & Me & A High Balcony’, “seemed worth letting out of its lonely cage”.

This is what Darnielle had to say about its formation:

“It audibly doesn’t really belong with the songs from We Shall All Be Healed: it shares some themes (meth, tawdry motels) but is formally in a pretty different ballpark and it’s also not very personal, whereas the songs that did end up making We Shall All Be Healed marked my first steps toward writing from direct experience.”

Listen beneath:

[via NPR]