In a panic hidden in plain sight, two people refuse to face their fear in “We Were Patriots.”

Track: “We Were Patriots”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

The best live version of “We Were Patriots” is this one, which Jon Nall himself taped in Tallahassee, Florida in 1998. The studio version is good, but that live one really unlocked this song for me. I can’t quite pin down what it is about the studio version, but John Darnielle sometimes introduces it as “a quiet song” when he plays it live and those versions feel the same to me. That one night in Florida in 1998 is different. The song explodes the way the characters in it seem to be exploding. After finishing it, John Darnielle mentions that these are the Alpha Couple, more or less, though that is up for debate and isn’t really the point, anyway.

You can experience “We Were Patriots” without paying too much attention. If you do that, it may not really click. Much of this song is a sing-song “la la la” repetition that could be read as filler to be replaced later. It’s deliberate here, or at least I choose to read it as a deliberate space for the listener to imagine what is intended to take its place. These people are in danger. They are not really contending with that danger. La, la, la.

What makes that live performance work for me is the passion, but you may not need that for it to work for you. Probably you can engage with it as intended and find that same creeping dread and that same staving off of the inevitable. I am going to admit that I couldn’t, but now I hear it there in the source material. I suggest you try both, but, as always, don’t stay too long in this space.