The not-all-that-lost “I’ve Got the Sex” is absolutely sexual, but it’s brutal at the same time.

Track: “I’ve Got the Sex”
Album: Unreleased (but written for Sweden and not released)

There’s a lot to talk about with “I’ve Got the Sex,” and I’m going to start with the obsessive part. You can still use the Wayback Machine to read an old forum post where someone found a set of nine songs labeled as outtakes. Eight of them don’t fit my ruleset for this series as John Darnielle expressly asked people not to post them or request them at shows, but “I’ve Got the Sex” has been played dozens of times and seems to be the outlier. It was supposed to be on Sweden but John Darnielle says he left the tape at home and thus it didn’t make it. The other collection suggests it also almost made Nothing for Juice, but who can say?

I love the version I’ve posted above, from one of the best live shows the band ever played. Darnielle says he doesn’t usual play four songs in the solo section but he’ll entertain a “phantom fourth” and is cut off before he can say what it shouldn’t be (“Going to Georgia” is a safe bet) and the lone cry is for “I’ve Got the Sex.” Every version is great, but the sweaty, horror-infused version here helps walk the line between the inherent sexual nature of the song and the circumstances that surround it. This is a song about sex, sure, but it’s about animal instincts more than romance. You can imagine smearing strawberries over someone being something done out of passion, but there’s something else beneath all this that neither of you want to contend with directly.