https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQF9Gn95zP4

The Alpha Couple enjoys a diversion and some confusion before the inevitable end in “Peacocks.”

Track: “Peacocks”
Album: Tallahassee (2002)

In 2012, John Darnielle tweeted this about “Peacocks” and how the lyrics were originally “way more sexually explicit.” For an album so obsessed with a married couple, there’s very little sexual in the lyrics of Tallahassee. It sounds like we missed an opportunity here, and John Darnielle adding that he’s “totally not joking” is some acknowledgement of how weird it might have been.

What we do have is just a mention of “hands grasping and groping” and the powerful phrase “seizing opportunity right where it lies.” This is after “No Children” and even “See America Right.” We’re well past hope, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain kind of love still between the Alpha Couple. John Darnielle says “Peacocks” is about “encroaching dread” but it’s also about that very specific, very distant, kind of love.

The original website for Tallahassee was a marvelous reflection of the themes of the album, with strange videos about Vicodin and haunting game shows and, yes, peacocks in the front yard. Kyle Barbour of The Annotated Mountain Goats includes the whole text of a pamphlet about peacocks that was on that site here, I will call attention to “peacocks mate for life, but one mate will often attempt to kill the other just prior to migration.” It was always going to end badly, but there are moments where the line ticks above zero before that, even if you can’t explain everything all the time.