“Bring Our Curses Home” finds John Darnielle singing in deeply sad tones about what happens around, and after, a hurricane.

Track: “Bring Our Curses Home”
Album: Black Pear Tree EP (2008)

You want to avoid the obvious when you listen to the Mountain Goats. “Golden Jackal Song” is not about a jackal, and so on. When you hear a song about raining and hiding out in the Superdome, you want to push back on the Hurricane Katrina suggestion, but I don’t think you can do that with “Bring Our Curses Home.” This seems to, indeed, be about the crushing, impossible to truly fathom, hurricane that demolished so much of the coastal Southern United States. I searched it just to check the timeline here and Google’s predicted question is “why was Hurricane Katrina so bad?” I think that’s a pretty fair question and one that has a complicated answer.

In some ways, though, it’s really not that complicated. The government failed to respond to a disaster with true disaster relief, which disillusioned a lot of people who saw things differently after they saw a base expectation not met. If this is about Katrina (and I don’t see how it couldn’t be, though I’d love to have totally misunderstood something this badly) then we see people swimming through a pharmacy first and then getting arrested later. This is the ridiculousness of it all, to arrest someone at the end of the world. John Darnielle describes a “mad scramble” for shoes from two cities he lived in (Los Angeles and/or Portland) and, like everything else, they got wet. It’s not what you’d immediately call a political song, but explore the nooks and crannies. Picture not just what’s happening, but what the aftermath entails.