“Brisbane Hotel Sutra” is a look backwards during a period of loneliness far from home.

Track: “Brisbane Hotel Sutra”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

I place arguably too much importance on a single comment John Darnielle made once many years ago about the process of how the import-only or B-side tracks become what they become. In speaking of “Attention All Pickpockets” he said that he loves to put great songs on hard-to-find releases, somewhat out of self-sabotage but also as a nod to diligent collectors. As digital media has grown in significance over the years that answer needs some updating, but I really do love it. “Brisbane Hotel Sutra” is titled that because John Darnielle wrote it in a hotel in Brisbane, but it is not on All Eternals Deck proper because it doesn’t fit with the rest of the album. Darnielle said once it’s a matter of sequencing, but you can also just assume that the song with an Australian city in the title is on the Australia release because of course it is.

It’s a song about Darnielle’s childhood that he says he wrote during a period of depression on tour. The farthest I have ever been from home was a trip to India for a week for work and I remember feeling a lighter version of what Darnielle describes, where I became acutely focused on the distance and that became existential to me. Darnielle’s childhood was more complicated than mine and leaves him with scars he describes in detail, which is why he’s writing the songs and I’m writing about the songs. The biblical formatting of the verses is an interesting device here, but it’s really about the rawness of the descriptions. A lot of times you come at these things sideways, but this one stares directly at the trauma.