In 2003, singer-songwriter John Darnielle, better known by his alias “The Mountain Goats” was in Paris for the MOFO festival, and was told out of nowhere that he was to record a new song, which he had not written, nor prepared for. On the wall of the studio he saw a sign, “Attention Aux Pickpockets!”, a purposeful mistranslation of which would yield the title of the song, “Attention all Pickpockets”, a short and bittersweet ballad about two people parting ways from a relationship fueled by hard drugs and the very heights of passion. It currently holds a place of high honor as my favorite song.

There is a purposeful obscurity to the song, as Darnielle said in 2007 at a concert in New York, that when you are an indie artist sometimes you have to do things that are “contrary to your own purpose”. Even though it is worthy of being an album, or even a single, the song only exists on the B-side of the CD release of a single called “Letter from Belgium” from the album We Shall All Be Healed, and as a result it isn’t available on any streaming service except Youtube, where it was uploaded by a fan. I’ve looked for a copy of the CD online, but the only listing is from a seller in Belgium, for 4 dollars and 98 cents, who cannot ship to the United States. Its obscurity gives the song an undeniable charm, a kind of status as a hidden gem, and leaning into this kind of paradox, of occasionally going against my own instincts as an artist, in the hope that I end up with something I didn’t even know I was capable of.

I can’t really pinpoint what it is I love so much about this song. It just has this kind of rarefied aura of wistfulness that I associate with my own summer nostalgias and departed friendships. There’s a particular line, “And so down the street / you head, in the high summer heat”. Something about Darnielle’s work has always reflected my Los Angeles upbringing, despite gaps in time and distance (he spent most of his childhood and teenage years in Claremont, in the east, while I was all the way west in Calabasas. But I think there is something about that shimmering high summer heat that is so particular to Los Angeles that is like an emotional sinew between people.

Sitting in my Parisian apartment, writing this, the high summer heat is written on the sweat-dripping backs, the open windows and more than anything in the tranquil Sunday lethargy of the late afternoon. I can trace this heat back to so many memories, bathed in golden light, and I can trace it back to this song, “Attention All Pickpockets”. I have my own gallery of rogues with whom I’ve whiled away the summer evenings. This is the same Parisian high summer that inspired the lyric which when I first heard it, brought me visions of our shared valleys back in California.

There is also something about the title which speaks to me in a strange way. I’ve never picked a pocket in my life, but the idea of a sign which calls out to the people who are normally warned against, to outcasts and misfits, has a certain poetic resonance. This kind of message is a recurrent theme in Darnielle’s work. Many of his albums, probably most prominently 2008’s Heretic Pride, contain themes of pariahdom and the psychological burden of the outsider. But strangely, the role of the outsider is one of the most universally shared. I believe almost everyone has been put on the margin at some point, or has at least felt that way. So when the call goes out, “Attention All Pickpockets”, more heads would rise than one might expect.

My apartment in the 16th arrondissement is right near the Eiffel Tower, and so on a casual stroll down the Pont d’Iena I see plenty of “Attention Aux Pickpockets !” signs. Then I look around for a second and think about who might be the one to pick my pocket, then I expand my mind a little bit and think, who might my fellow pickpockets be? Who might be sharing this experience with me? What kindred spirit walks along this bridge over this glass-green river, who I never even had a chance of knowing, and who, as we part might look at the back of my head walking down the street just moments after I turned to look at theirs?