Someone gets arrested in “Beat the Devil,” but their mind is back in Memphis with someone we’ll never see.

Track: “Beat the Devil”
Album: Hope Isn’t a Word, a compilation from Comes With A Smile released in 2004

John Darnielle played “Beat the Devil” as part of the solo set in a show in Chicago in 2022. I went to one of the other nights, so I didn’t see it. That’s a shame, but the studio performance of this one really is good enough that I don’t feel too bad about it. Darnielle has said several times that one of his pet peeves is people insisting the outtakes are better than the songs that make the album, so I won’t say I think “Beat the Devil” is better than anything on We Shall All Be Healed, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it.

Picture yourself as this narrator. You engage, to some small degree, with the results of running meth in your lumber truck in Arizona when you make a joke about keeping “glowstick babies fat and happy.” You’re tired, as we see from the effort you expend as you try to keep the truck straight so as to not attract attention. You’re doing the menial work of something most people never even think about. What do the logistics of peanut-butter flavored meth look like?

But that’s the surface. What makes this one so great is the person back in Memphis. What happened here, we wonder? So often in stories like this the focus is on the events that led someone to deal drugs, especially now in our post-Breaking Bad world. But it’s just as fascinating to wonder what happened between these two people. Maybe it was the drugs, but just as likely it was the standard-fare personal challenges of knowing someone and being known. The surface is a felony, but the sub-surface is the stuff that really, truly keeps you up at night.