Sweden (album)

Sweden is the second studio album by the Mountain Goats, which was released on Shrimper Records in August 1995. This incarnation of the Mountain Goats consisted of John Darnielle as singer/songwriter/guitarist and Rachel Ware as bassist and backup singer. It was produced by Darnielle himself, and largely recorded with Darnielle's Panasonic RX-FT500, his trademark lo-fi production method during this period. The relationship of the album to the country of Sweden appears to be largely symbolic and esoteric; the album is a song cycle about a couple in a loving but doomed relationship, but according to Darnielle, this couple is not his notorious 'Alpha Couple'. All the songs relate to this relationship, even “Tollund Man", in which the narrator is ostensibly the famed Tollund Man, a Scandinavian man that was prepared for human sacrifice in the fourth century BCE.