John Darnielle asks us to consider what we’d risk and what we’ll do no matter what in “Snakeheads.”

Track: “Snakeheads”
Album: Palmcorder Yajna (2003)

We Shall All Be Healed is anxious. It’s an album all about drug use and drug users, and it’s not pretty. John Darnielle spent time among the real versions of these characters and he’s not interested in romanticizing any of them. Some of them are colorful and almost funny, but you can’t walk away from the album with anything less than a deep fear and concern for this world.

We’re off the beaten path of addiction fear with “Snakeheads.” It’s one of the three songs on the Palmcorder Yajna single and it’s an odd duck in the catalog. It’s definitely still a Mountain Goats song, with named but unexplained characters and a destination but no way of knowing what that destination actually will mean. It’s just musically dissimilar to everything else. It shuffles around with a slow tempo and light percussion. It makes you feel the trudging pace of the characters as they head to unnamed islands through the northern part of the United States.

Snakeheads are smugglers who transport Chinese people wherever they want to go but cannot go legally. It’s a curious thing to talk about, since it seems to be something done willingly and for pay, but within a legal space where autonomy and results seem questionable. These characters are real Snakeheads, with cargo that’s hungry and stuck in the dark in Minnesota, but John Darnielle considers the addict’s life in comparison. They’re obviously different, but they’re all stuck outside the law and they are going to do what they’re going to do. A theme across We Shall All Be Healed is an unwillingness to change, consequences and reasoning be damned, and John Darnielle wants us to think about what we’d risk the back of that van for in our lives.