John Darnielle strains his voice in a graveyard in “Crows,” but he also asks us to consider what the scene means to us.

Track: “Crows”
Album: Devil in the Shortwave (2002)

Devil in the Shortwave clocks in at twelve minutes long. Over two-and-a-half decades and likely a thousand songs, it’s very easy to lose track of twelve minutes. “Yoga” and “Genesis 19:1-2” still get a little play live now and they’re both excellent representations of the group’s earlier style. “Dirty Old Town” is a cover and “Comandante” is one of the all-time screamers; it’ll never fall all the way out of any fan’s rotation. Any song that starts with “I’m gonna drink more whiskey than Brendan Behan!” will always have a place in a certain mood.

That leaves the fifth song: “Crows.” Our narrator visits their great-grandmother’s grave in North Carolina only to find that a construction crew is destroying the headstones to raze the site for “graduate-student housing.” The specificity there is wonderful. Whatever you think of higher learning and its purpose, the idea of turning over a site of what may be century-old graves for dorms for twenty-somethings is striking.

For a group so obsessed with location, it’s interesting that “Crows” considers if the central location in the song really matters or not. The narrator says they “stood by a nameless hole in the ground” and that “maybe it was the right grave // maybe not.” We put our own feelings on those statements and realize how sad this tableau is, but our narrator doesn’t actually say it. They may be transcending the experience and considering that whether or not they can find her exact grave or not, they’ve still got this feeling. John Darnielle speeds through the song and while the delivery conveys a real sadness, it’s open-ended enough that you can draw your own conclusion about what the narrator finds in themselves.