“Palmcorder Yajna” may be the most plainly stated Mountain Goats song about the day-to-day of an addict.

Track: “Palmcorder Yajna”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

The term “single” is a strange one. For “the song of the Summer” and whatnot it still makes sense, but for a band like the Mountain Goats it mostly strikes me as an interesting bit of trivia. The people that are going to get consumed by an album of songs about tweakers in the Pacific Northwest aren’t going to do it because they heard the single. Sometimes it’s fascinating to find out what the “single” is from an album. That said for some albums, the single from the anti-meth-but-mostly-just-reflective-about-meth We Shall All Be Healed is “Palmcorder Yajna” and it couldn’t really be anything else.

“Letter from Belgium” rocks enough (and was the second single as a result) and “Pigs That Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of” is fun enough that it was recently played on Late Night with Seth Meyers, but the perfectly sneered vocals and infectious drums of “Palmcorder Yajna” leave no room for dispute. You might call it “fun” the first few times you hear it. The scream of “if anybody comes to see me // tell ’em they just missed me by a minute // if anybody comes into our room while we’re asleep // I hope they incinerate everybody in it” is peak yelling John Darnielle, and it makes this the kind of song even a casual fan can appreciate.

Under the surface, it’s terrifying. The opening lines describe Holt Boulevard, where a younger John Darnielle was told to tell the cops he bought his heroin if he ever got caught, because there were too many dealers for the cops to ever figure out which he meant. The Travelodge of “Palmcorder Yajna” is really the setting for all the terror on the album, and it may be the closest to perspective that Darnielle ever lets his addicts get.