PicoBlog

In August 2001, Darnielle was driving from Ames, Iowa, to the airport in Des Moines and Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” came on the radio. “I was listening,” he said at a show in 2006,

and I thought, “God, this is horrifying! This is a terrible, terrible song, teaching people awful lies!” And I was sort of singing along at the same time because it had a catchy melody. And the song goes “I hope you dance, I hope you dance,” and I just sort of vamped on it, I went like, “I hope you die, I hope you die!” And I thought, “Well, that’s an idea, isn’t it?” So I scribbled it down on a receipt and I tucked it into my pocket.

Instead of backing away from what he’d just sung, he used it as a starting point, a means of getting somewhere. He wrote the rest of the lyrics after landing in Athens, Georgia, came up with some rough-and-ready chords, and put it in a 6/8 time signature. Two months later, he recorded it with Hughes, who played more of a melodic, up-the-neck accompaniment than a beat-keeping line; a couple of days after that, Franklin Bruno overdubbed a piano part. When you can write lyrics like these—when you can rivet people to what you’re saying—you don’t always need a rhythm section behind you. 

The hook, initially, is the way that Darnielle turns the language of hopefulness against hopefulness. Lee Ann Womack sings, “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean/Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens”; Darnielle sings, “I hope that our few remaining friends/Give up on trying to save us/I hope we come up with a failsafe plot/To piss off the dumb few that forgave us.” Womack sings, “I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance/Never settle for the path of least resistance”; Darnielle sings,

And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here
Someday burns down
And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away
And I never come back to this town

Again
In my life

Alpha Couple One is hoping for hopelessness, hoping that hatred and entropy will take their course (I hope the worst isn’t over). Alpha Couple Two is pretty clearly hoping for the same things. “This is a song about letting the positive energy flow,” Darnielle said in 2011. “This is a song about letting the rich, positive, loving energy between two people flow . . . right down the drain.”

But then something unexpected happens. The song, which is in C# major, mostly cycles through a I-V-IV-I progression—C#, G#, F#, C#—and a I-VI-IV-V progression: C#, A#m, F#, G# (Darnielle plays the song in A, capoed up four frets, so the fingered chords are A, E, D, A and A, F#m, D, E). Right after singing, over an F#-G#, “I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away/And I never come back to this town,” Darnielle drops back to the F# for the beginning of the prechorus:

Again (F#)
In my life (G#)
I hope I lie (C#/F)
And tell everyone (F#) you were a good wife

You can be feeling and expressing nothing but hatred and then, because you’re expressing yourself honestly, you can suddenly find yourself feeling something else. When Darnielle sings “I hope I lie/And tell everyone you were a good wife,” everything feels new, partly because of the sadness and strangeness of the future he’s imagining and partly because of the way that the F in the bass changes the voicing of the C# chord on “lie.” The chord progression simultaneously resolves and doesn’t resolve on the word “lie”; the C#/F is, in part, the song’s feeling-of-home chord, but because it rests on the very uncertain third note in the scale, it has a non-home feeling too. “And I hope you die (C#/F),” Darnielle sings, returning to that in-between chord, “I hope we both die (G#).” And then the oddly rollicking intro returns and there’s time for everything to begin to sink in.

“When I’m writing about [the Alpha Couple], I write about how we all react to failure,” Darnielle told an interviewer in 2002. “They’re failing really hard at something that means a lot to them. That gives me a chill, and it’s the chill that makes me want to write.” The chill, the shiver of grief, makes its way into Darnielle’s voice when Hughes’s bass dips down to the F in the prechorus and then takes that tiny step upward. You hear something, or at least I hear something, like the voice of someone you can’t see. Right on the other side of your most intense hatred of another person, there is, maybe, a not-thought-out feeling of having failed, of having given less than you had in you, of wanting to cover your shame and the other person’s shame along with it.

This is how the song ends:

And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can’t find one good thing to say
And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out
You’d stay the hell out of my way

I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand

And I hope you die
I hope we both die

There’s no better example of Darnielle’s ability to perceive whatever has just been said as an opportunity, a sudden opening of a space in which something more may be said. I hope it’s all destroyed, AC One sings, I hope that the memory of the good things will be erased, I wish that I were strong enough to take action and kill the whole thing quickly—“I am drowning.” A door is pounded, the door breaks, and we fall into a far-out-to-sea scenario. “There is no sight of land/You are coming down with me”—Hughes drops back down to the F—“Hand in unlovable hand.” And then, in the wake of that horrifically sad line, we get the song’s one-two punch. “I hope you die/I hope we both die.”

“This is a song about a couple of people who really probably shouldn’t have hung around after the first or second date,” Darnielle said at a concert in Austin, Texas, in 2010.

It probably would have been better for them if they’d have just said, “Hey, you and I are bad for each other, and as much as I enjoy your company, as a mature person who wants to take good care of himself I think it would be better if you and I parted ways and went on to take better care of ourselves, both you and I, not just for me but for you, because I like you,” and then if the other had said, “I agree, I agree, we should be good to ourselves during our short walk across this lovely planet, we should be good to ourselves.”

He paused briefly, and then said, “The likelihood of these people ever saying that to one another is slighter than the likelihood of the moon crashing into the earth.” He had first imagined them, in a poem, slow-dancing in a hardware store after midnight, right before a horse crashes through the wall. Part of him was always on their side. “I feel for them,” he said in a 2002 interview. “These people are staring each other down and every bit of artifice is dropping off. They’re naked, and there's something so sweet about that nakedness. There’s a sweetness in the worst things.” They sensed that there was something beyond “we should be good to ourselves” and they wanted to find out what it was, and once they did, they wanted to find out what it felt like when you took it to the limit, and then, as they approached the limit, all the stories that they had been telling themselves flew off them as they told them and they found out one last thing. “This, despite what anybody may tell you, and you will know when the time comes, is a love song,” Darnielle said at a concert in April 2011. “One-two-three, one-two-three.”

ncG1vNJzZmiZnKG1orXLZ6qumqOprqS3jZympmegZIBuus5mmqGhnJm%2Fpro%3D