The first song about The Alpha Couple shows that the iconic lovers weren’t ever all that great for each other.

Track: “Alpha Incipiens”
Album: Zopilote Machine (1994)

Every song about The Alpha Couple is fascinating. The timeline is fun to try to figure out, but you can’t do it for certain. You can figure out that some have to happen before others based on geography — they start on the west coast and end in Florida — but beyond that it’s all conjecture. In that way The Alpha Couple is less a story to be uncovered and labelled and more the ultimate idea of two people crashing and burning when combined.

When you listen to the spite on “Oceanographer’s Choice” you feel like the hate is so bitter and so real that the love must have been some serious business. Anyone who learns to hate that hard has to have loved even harder, right? Well, the timeline may be up for debate, but The Alpha Series has a definite start and a definite end. Their final song (chronologically) is “Alpha Omega,” and by then they’re down to just one of them. Their first song is “Alpha Incipiens” from Zopilote Machine, and that’s been confirmed. That much, John Darnielle says, he’ll give you.

Are they in love in “Alpha Incipiens?” The fast-paced, screaming song tells the drunken tale of one of them trying to understand the other as the drinks begin to flow. They will get drunk and they will get desperate as their story unfolds, but it starts with simple, ice-cold vodka and “the only thing I know is that I love you // and I’m holding on.”

It really foretells Tallahassee and the oncoming trainwreck very well. Even on one of their first mornings — and in their first tale — the couple gets drunk and has trouble talking to each other. Communication will become the least of their problems.