You can find the sweet longing of “Any Available Surface” everywhere now, but it really only happened that one time, in that one place.

Track: “Any Available Surface”
Album: Unreleased

I’ve said this before here and I think I may be putting too much faith in this comment, but John Darnielle has said that he likes to open a show with a song that no one in the crowd will know. On February 25, 2009, he opened a show you can watch entirely on YouTube with “Any Available Surface,” which surely fits the bill. A few weeks later he played it again and also opened with it. That’s the whole history of “Any Available Surface,” at least as far as the usual sources are concerned. I’m a historian, by education, and that part of me wants to couch every comment like that in open-ended language. 2009 is a long time ago, now, but it’s also an era where I trust, to some degree, that answer has a chance to be complete. Those might be the only two times anyone heard this one.

I’m sure the other version is recorded and there’s this nagging part of me that feels like I’ve seen it live, too, at some show in Chicago. I think it’s more likely that I just came back to this one over and over again, released at the end of the era where I had hundreds of live MP3 files in a folder and just before YouTube and streaming made everything more immediate and open. I think it’s just this quiet, surprising moment where a crowd of devotees heard something they’d never heard and, it turns out, might never hear again.

The song itself is sweet and good, but it’s brief and it speaks for itself. People love the intense ones and the grim narrators, but those are extra powerful in contrast to someone watching someone sail away and then finding them again in the scent they left.