May 26 - Home Again Garden Grove

A rolling boil of paranoia, this is a song about scoring. The mania and the on-edge nature of looking desperately for something, caught in the rabid simplicity of needing your fix and nothing else. Everything about the song here, from the lyrics to the instrumentation to the mix, is a set of spiky lines where nothing comfortable can happen.

One of the reasons I started doing this blog, started following John Darnielle's music from its earliest forms through whatever came after, is how utterly uncommitted he was and is to making music that only had the intention of sounding nice. Some of his music, a lot of his music, sounds wonderful, but sounding wonderful isn't the point. The point is to take a concept and work out how that concept would sound musically. Here we have the active seeking part of addiction, rendered into sound. I'm reminded (despite this sounding nothing like it) of some of the songs on The Holy Bible by Manic Street Preachers, which sounded like depression and obsession and morbidity and wasting in a way that went beyond lyrical content and into the sounds inside the musician's heads.

This brittle, urgent song sounds like experiences I've heard from people. Ones I never want to have myself. But also ones I will listen to.