“Satanic Messiah” isn’t about Obama, but the fact that anyone thinks it is prompts a larger discussion of song meanings.

Track: “Satanic Messiah”
Album: Satanic Messiah (2008)

It can seem impossible to get a straight answer for a lot of these. There are hundreds of songs, and even though John Darnielle has commented on most of them, he’s not always consistent. As all artists do, Darnielle has evolved over time and doesn’t feel the same way about some songs now. A song like “Going to Georgia” has to include both the fan obsession and the artist’s feelings to be completely understood, even though those aren’t always the same thing. It’s important to consider all sides of something, though that can get complicated.

The title track from Satanic Messiah, the four-song EP from 2008, requires an interesting inversion of that. It’s only a song about politics if you demand that it is, and Darnielle has said over and over that it’s not. He said in an interview that people are free to read his songs however they like, but that he hopes his view comes with “an extra bit of authority.” Lines like that get at the real difficulty of the process: you can’t be “right” or “wrong” if any reading is possible, can you? Fortunately, the catalog is more of a journey than a destination.

“Satanic Messiah” talks about the “pale-blue and washed out red” posters of a leader that makes the crowd feel young. That’s pretty much where the Obama comparisons stop, but that’s enough for a huge chunk of the fanbase to demand they’ve figured out the deeper meaning. From Darnielle’s lines about meaning in his work we can determine that you’re free to think that, but he’d like you to know that you’re deriving that meaning from a source that doesn’t have it. If you do want to get political, they’ve already done that.