“The Admonishing Song” exists largely for one weird line, but it offers a glimpse at a very strange argument.

Track: “The Admonishing Song”
Album: Ghana (1999)

“The Admonishing Song” was originally released on a compilation called Corkscrewed by Theme Park Records in 1995. The company either doesn’t exist anymore or has changed their name to be more Google-friendly, as now they are buried under pages of actual records set at or by theme parks. It exists on Ghana as one of the “funny” songs like “Golden Boy” or “The Anglo-Saxons.”

In the liner notes on Ghana, John Darnielle supplies explanatory notes for many of the songs. For “Flight 717: Going to Denmark” and “The Admonishing Song” he says that he was tricked by a “tongueless horde” of unspeakable beasts and that both songs are actually hiding a delicious salad dressing recipe in their digital code. Darnielle often distances himself from the early “funny” songs, but his sense of humor still shines through more than two decades after “The Admonishing Song.” There is more going on in “Foreign Object,” but John Darnielle still loves a joke.

In 1995 he was willing to go a much longer way for a joke. The chorus of “The Admonishing Song” sees the narrator wailing versions of “tell me why // you lied” again and again. They literally admonish the person they’re speaking to by telling them over and over that it was “not a nice thing to do.” The payoff is the bitter “tell me why you made threats against the life of the Prime Minister of Canada.” It’s a weird song, even in an era with the occasional weird song, but the line is memorable. You can choose to imagine the conversation these characters had before that line or you can just enjoy the strangeness. For me, that line is enough to make me wonder about these characters even though “The Admonishing Song” offers nothing else to go on.